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Benedict’s MONSTROUS whodunnit
A missing child. His distraught dad. And an imaginary creature who might hold the key to solving the case. Benedict Cumberbatch on his dark new thriller Eric
Benedict Cumberbatch is about to film one of the most important and emotionally challenging scenes in his dark and powerful new Netflix thriller Eric, but as the seconds tick away he’s laughing, joking and playing football with a security guard on set a few yards from where the action is due to take place. The show’s director, Lucy Forbes, fears her leading man won’t be able to find the intensity required for the scene, in which Benedict’s character Vincent Anderson is visiting the school his nine-year-old son Edgar, who has just gone missing, attended.
But he does. As the cameras roll on a quiet street in New York, a single tear falls down the cheek of the Oscar-nominated actor, his face a picture of pain and anxiety. Once she’s called ‘Cut!’, Lucy congratulates Benedict on his performance and asks him how he managed to transform himself so rapidly from relaxed and playful to a parent racked with distress. ‘Sons,’ replies Benedict, who’s married to playwright and theatre director Sophie Hunter and father to Christopher, nine, Hal, seven, and Finn, five. ‘I’ve got three boys of my own and I’ve been thinking a lot about them during filming.’
Lucy says it happened more than once. ‘There were plenty of moments during the making of the show when you could see how much Benedict was drawing on his relationship with his own children,’ she says. ‘It’s a powerful, highly personal performance.’
The six-part psychological thriller set in 1985 follows an increasingly frantic
Vincent, who works as a puppeteer on fictional US children’s TV show Good Day Sunshine, as he tries to find Edgar, who disappeared on his way to school the first time his father let him walk in alone.
Vincent, who was already worried about falling ratings on Good Day Sunshine and his troubled marriage to wife Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann), is a man on the edge, and Edgar’s disappearance sends him spiralling into a vortex of heavy drinking and hallucinations. These take the form of an imaginary blue furry monster called Eric that his son dreamed up and would draw pictures of – and in keeping with the show’s unsettling themes, Vincent believes that if he can somehow get Eric onto his TV show, it might prompt Edgar’s return.
‘Only Vincent can see the 7ft creature, who sprang from the imagination of his son,’ explains Benedict, star of the Doctor Strange movies and TV hits such as Sherlock. ‘Edgar drew pictures of the blue monster on his sketch pad in the weeks before he disappeared and he was encouraging his father to incorporate him into his TV show. Vincent remembers the sketches and gets it into his head that his son will return if he can put Eric in the show. He urges his bosses to make it happen, especially as he thinks Good Day Sunshine needs new characters as the ratings drop.’
The drama was created by Abi Morgan, who wrote the Meryl Streep movie The Iron Lady and TV hit The Split. She was keen to explore the world of flawed creative geniuses with troubled private lives, a perfect description of Vincent. Imaginary Eric soon becomes Vincent’s regular companion, popping up alongside him on the New York subway, in meetings with his bosses and even at home with Cassie.
When Vincent talks to Eric, people see him talking to empty space. Some of these scenes are designed to be funny but most of the series is dark and disturbing, focusing on the hunt for Edgar and Vincent’s mental collapse as his wife, colleagues and the general public start to shift the blame onto him.
‘The series also works as a whodunnit,’ explains Lucy Forbes. ‘The police, led by missing persons specialist Detective Michael Ledroit, believe somebody has taken Edgar and are desperate to identify that person. Ledroit is also trying to find a black teenager who went missing before Edgar but whose case has received much less media attention, to the anger of his mother Cecile.’
Thereareanumber of suspects, including a graffiti artist living
in the subterranean world of the homeless beneath the New York streets, the caretaker in the building where the Andersons live, and also Vincent himself because of an unexplained cut on his face from the morning his son vanished. Yet another under scrutiny is shady ex-con Gator, owner of the Lux nightclub which sits on the route Edgar would have taken to school.
To prepare for the role Benedict had to learn how to operate puppets and synch his mouth to theirs when Vincent is doing his job on Good Day Sunshine, and how to move in harmony with the other puppeteers working in cramped conditions
below the camera’s sightline in the studio where the show is filmed.
‘Benedict went to puppeteering boot camp and stayed there for quite some time under the tutelage of puppeteer master Raymond Carr, who’s worked on shows like Sesame Street,’ says Lucy. ‘He took his responsibilities very seriously. He
had people coming to his home to give him lessons and he had puppets dotted around his caravan on set that he would work with when he wasn’t filming. You won’t be surprised to learn he became rather good at it.’
And it gave Benedict an appreciation of the art of puppeteering. ‘I literally cried the day I realised what puppeteer Olly Taylor was doing to control Eric,’ he says. ‘It required the most breathtaking amount of technology and dexterity to bring this monster to life and I was utterly amazed by the level of skill required, to the point of tears.’
A team of 18 puppet-makers from London-based company Stitches And Glue spent 12 weeks creating the Eric puppet, which weighed in at just over 3st. ‘We wanted there to be similarities between Eric and
Vincent as the creature comes from his imagination, so Eric’s eyes are direct copies of Benedict’s,’ says Lucy. ‘He sent in photos of his eyes, which were then copied and used in the design.’
Benedict also had input into Vincent’s slightly crazed 80s look, leaving his hair to grow long before having it dyed a gingery red, growing his facial hair and wearing oversized 80s glasses. And because Eric is a product of Vincent’s imagination, it was Benedict who provided his voice. ‘He started doing it during rehearsals,’ recalls Lucy. ‘We always knew we wanted a deepness, a gruffness, a real New York accent, and all of that came quite naturally to Benedict.’
What also came quite naturally was the theme song for the Good Day Sunshine TV show. Australian musician Tim Minchin, who wrote the music and lyrics for the blockbuster film and stage show Matilda The Musical, came up with it instantaneously while on a Zoom call. ‘We had a Zoom meeting and Tim came up with the song while walking through a building and taking a taxi journey,’ says Lucy. ‘He literally sang it to us from scratch and
five days later we received a written version that we use in the show.’
Although set in New York, Eric was largely shot in the Hungarian capital Budapest. It was there that Lucy and her team found the 20 miles of subterranean tunnels that play a huge part in the show, as well as a studio backlot that had already been created to look like Newyorkinthe1980s.
‘The tunnels were originally created to ferry beer around Budapest and the studio backlot was created for the movie Hellboy II in 2007,’ reveals Lucy. ‘We also found a theatre in the city that we took over and turned into the TV studio where Good Day Sunshine is filmed. Creating a TV show that looks authentic, that could be bedded into the story in an entirely believable way, was very important.’
Hundreds of supporting artists were required for scenes on the busy streets of New York, as police officers and Vincent go in search of clues to Edgar’s disappearance. An EX-NYPD detective was brought in to watch scenes set in the police station where the investigation takes place.
‘This guy had seen it, done it, got the T-shirt and he told us whether we were doing things in a procedurally correct manner or not,’ explains Abi.
Lucy adds, ‘When we finished filming he gave us a card with the word “friend” on it and told us that if we ever got arrested in America we could show this card and we’d be all right. We haven’t needed it yet but you never know, it might come in handy one day.’
Although the series is dark, for Benedict some of the best scenes were the fun ones filmed on the packed dance floor inside the Lux nightclub. ‘They were incredible,’ he recalls. ‘We had 250 people moving in time with the music, all looking very 80s from the hair to the sequinned dresses and the bangles. It was magic!’
I’ve got three boys ofmyown and I’ve been thinking about them a lot during filming