Benedict Cumberbatch in Netflix show Eric: Dressing as monster is 'one of the most ludicrous things I've done'
Being versatile should be part of any actor’s repertoire, but Benedict Cumberbatch was taken to new limits when he jogged around New York dressed as a 7ft monster.
“It was one of the most ludicrous things I’ve ever done – and I’ve done a few,” he tells BBC News. “It was fun though – and painfully funny.”
He stars in thriller TV series Eric, as Vincent, the troubled father of a nine-year-old boy who goes missing on the way to school.
Set in New York City during the 1980s, the show introduces Vincent as a somewhat charmless puppeteer. He’s the co-creator of Good Day Sunshine, a popular children’s TV show that celebrates being “different”.
Vincent and his wife Cassie are sent frantic with worry after the disappearance of their son, which splinters their unhappy marriage as Vincent spirals downwards.
Wracked with guilt, he becomes even more caustic and destructive.
Vincent also becomes fixated with the idea that if he can create a real-life version of Eric, a monster his son imagined and drew at home, he will find Edgar.
The puppeteer even hallucinates seeing Eric standing next to him, wisecracking and poking holes in his ego – because “puppets say the things we can’t”.
It’s very much a psychological exploration, written for Netflix by Abi Morgan. Her other work includes 2011’s Oscar-winning film The Iron Lady, plus Bafta-nominated film Shame and BBC legal drama series The Split.
Cumberbatch says the monster represents Vincent’s “shadow self” – a term developed by psychiatrist Carl Jung, describing “parts of the psyche people often keep hidden, such as trauma and resentment”.
“He’s this chaotic guy on the edge,” the actor explains.
Vincent had a pretty bad start in life, emotionally speaking, he says. His “loveless upbringing, where his mental health issues were dealt with by prescriptions and a cold, Victorian dismissal of ‘not seen, not heard'”, result in “that trauma smashing into the family dynamic and his work life”.
The actor, Oscar-nominated for 2022’s for The Power of the Dog and 2015’s The Imitation Game, also starred as Dr Strange in the Marvel films, and clearly enjoys playing complex characters.
“I don’t want to play people who get the green thumbs up or red thumbs down. I think we all live in a grey area,” he says.
“There’s good and bad in all of us. That’s what makes us human. And this is an extreme, admittedly, but there’s a huge deal of pain behind the pain Vincent causes.”
Gaby Hoffman, who plays Edgar’s mother Cassie, adds: “The way that I see it is when you’re not properly loved as a child, and not given the space and the opportunity to discover yourself, you struggle with that as life goes on.
“If you are given that space as a child, there’s less of that work to be done later on.”
Meanwhile, on set, Cumberbatch was in awe of Olly Taylor, who played Eric for much of the series.
“It was beautiful to act opposite Olly, who’s inside the suit – he gave him so much life and character,” the actor smiles.
But it was quite a revelation when he had to climb inside the suit himself. As well as finding it “ludicrous” to run in it, he was also quite humbled.
“People say, ‘What moved you most about this drama?’ Actually it was putting on Olly’s visor and seeing what he saw, and how he’d been doing it for about five months at that point,” he says.
“It just made me be so sad for my collaborator, who’d been so brilliant, but had suffered so much.”
He reveals how to navigate safely while wearing the 20kg suit.
He had to wear goggles inside it, which allowed him to see the camera feed on Eric, so he could work out where he was standing.
“You have four fixed cameras inside it. You can’t see at all, as we would, with periphery – nothing – just reported sight of what he looks like within the scene… with three screens to look at.
“I mean, Olly gave a beautiful, grounded, believable performance that had us all like kids again, just in awe, and tearing up and smiling and laughing. It was a joy.”
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