Rebecca Gayheart told Drew Barrymore that the first thing she noticed about Eric Dane was not his hands. It was his head. She spoke on “Personal Space” on Wednesday, November 4, 2026. According to Page Six, the actress said Dane started complaining about headaches a few months before the hand weakness that eventually led to his ALS diagnosis.
Dane passed away of the disease in February 2026. He was diagnosed in 2024.
What Rebecca Gayheart Told Drew Barrymore
Gayheart, 55, is a former model and was still legally married to Dane when he passed away. The couple had filed for divorce, then filed to dismiss it in April 2025. Page Six reported that was the same month Dane went public with his diagnosis.
Her interview landed the same week as his posthumous memoir, “My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments,” which came out on Tuesday. Two accounts of the same illness arrived days apart, hers told from the outside and his from the inside.
The Headaches Eric Dane Never Used to Get
Gayheart said the complaints made no sense to her at the time. “He never once had a headache,” she told Barrymore, describing all the years they dated and were married. She recalled pushing back on him directly, telling him he never took painkillers and questioning whether he really had a headache at all.
Dane had an explanation ready. He figured he had slept on his neck funny.
The headaches kept coming. Gayheart said there were definitely signs, but nothing big enough that anyone would really stop and pay attention to it.
A doctor sees a man with a headache. A wife sees a man who has never once reached for an Advil suddenly reaching for one. Gayheart caught the change because she knew the before. What she could not have known was what it meant, and her own account makes that plain. She argued with him about it. She did not panic. Almost nobody would.
The Chopsticks in Eric Dane’s Memoir
Dane remembered it differently. In the memoir, he pins his first symptom to a sushi dinner. “Suddenly I can’t work the chopsticks with my right hand,” he wrote. His hand tingled and his fingers went numb.
Three weeks later, according to the book, he could not grip the chopsticks at all. Months of appointments followed. Dane wrote that he was shuttled from doctor to doctor and put through a battery of tests.
Doctors first diagnosed him with multifocal motor neuropathy, a rare autoimmune disorder that causes extreme muscle weakness. Page Six reported the treatment for it was described to him as 90 percent effective. When Dane did not respond, his medical team got scared. Nine months later, after a lumbar puncture, spinal fluid extraction and brain scans, he got the ALS diagnosis.
Neither account is wrong. Dane marked the moment his body failed a simple task. Gayheart marked the moment he started behaving unlike himself. The person living inside an illness and the person living beside it often start the clock at different places.
Separated, But Still a Family
Gayheart was clear that she and Eric Dane were not together romantically. She was just as clear about what they did hold onto. According to Page Six, she said they kept their family intact for their two daughters.
Estranged is the word Page Six used. It does not quite cover a couple who called off their divorce the same month he told the world he was sick, and who stayed a unit for their kids until the end. Plenty of marriages end on paper and keep going in every way that matters to the children in the house. Theirs did the opposite. It stayed on paper and changed shape underneath.
Gayheart is now the one telling the story of the early signs, in an interview timed alongside the book he left behind. She noticed the headaches first. He wrote about the chopsticks. Both versions are now on the record.
Sources: Page Six
