GQ Magazine UK

Benedict Cumberbatch breaks down Eric's twists and turns: “It's about the mess of being human”

2 June, 2024 | Written by Jack King

GQ spoke to the actor about Netflix’s cerebral new crime thriller, in which he plays another broken genius

The following article contains major spoilers for Netflix’s Eric.

It’s 1985, and New York City is awash with dirt and grime. In Eric, it’s The Big Apple by way of Travis Bickle: crime and corruption are rife, staggering luxury condos tower over ramshackle homeless camps, and steam pours out of the manholes like a bloated corpse exhaling gas.

Nevertheless, there’s a light in the darkness. The morning show Good Day Sunshine, essentially Sesame Street without Elmo, offers hope for the city’s kids — a rare pop of colour in a desaturated landscape, on TV at cereal-time sharp. Its creator is Vincent Anderson, a broken man who gave something good to the world, played by Benedict Cumberbatch with hints of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. But now, after its peak in the ’70s, the show is on the ropes. Viewership has dwindled and the television studio executives standby ready to pick it off like a mafioso hit squad.

So, all of this is going on, and then personal tragedy strikes, when Vincent’s son Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe) goes missing. At first he’s wrongfully thought to have been snatched up by the downstairs neighbour (Clarke Peters) with a mirky past — he is Black, and there is more than an edge of pernicious racism in how quickly the cops jump to him being the perp — but the truth that unfolds is more complicated, unravelling a conspiracy that goes right to the top of city hall. Vincent was already losing his marbles before the series begins, but Edgar’s disappearance is the straw that breaks the camel’s back; he soon hallucinates the monstrous (and, actually, fluffy and cute) puppet that Edgar drew before he vanished, Eric.

“It’s just the perfect, most extraordinarily devastating final push into insanity,” Cumberbatch tells GQ of Vincent’s mental break. The show is about a lot of things, but Cumberbatch offers a compelling thematic summary: “[it’s about] how parents fail their children, how societies fail the children in all of us, but also the actual children of the time… This whole drama is a fable about institutions that fail us.”

Here, in a thoughtful conversation with GQ, the actor breaks down the series’ twists and turns.

How did you settle on the voice?

He had to be differentiated from Vincent, he had to be… well, first of all, it’s kind of directed by Edgar, he wants it to be deeper and bigger, because he’s a big unit. So that immediately — [on the fly, Cumberbatch drops thirty octaves into Eric’s gravelly tones] — forces thing into that kind of register, and then he’s got the underbite, like that, because the teeth are here so that’ll effect the sound. And then I kinda veered towards a workin’ class, white collah, no bullshit New Yawkah. He says New Yawk, rather than New York.

He is, in reality, in the show, something that is struggling to have a place, and a value, as this big lumbering monster, trying to be in something pure, and not understanding that the light could be so beautiful, because he’s been afraid of it. He thought his place was in the dark. That made him a mawnster. But actually he’s this friendly entity that needs acceptance. And so that was important.

Vincent’s voice was of the era, but also the class. I had Rick Lipton, this fantastic dialect coach, who I’d encountered working with Tom Holland on Spider-Man and the Avengers films. At one point I wanted [Eric’s voice] to be vocoded, and they were right to say ‘no no no, we’re not going to augment it at all. It’s got to come from your body.

What steps did you take towards embodying Vincent’s psychosis?

I had to reach an understanding that this is a real thing for people who have a psychotic split. There is someone else in the room, and that person — or thing, or entity — is utterly real to the person to experiencing it. And yet the outward presentation to the person witnessing [it] is that there is nothing, and that person can seem incredibly sane, apart from this presence. But added to which you have alcohol, drug addiction, you have this rudderless, really chaotic mind, who’s so lost in his own creativity to try and reach back to his son that it is a very particular form of that.

He’s created an entire world, that is basically an idealisation of a very non-ideal childhood, and it’s under threat. When you’ve invested that much in something, it does make you extreme in your behaviour. His toxicity at work I think is driven by that, and people see it as angry, egotistical [and] narcissistic, but as the series evolves, you see [that this was] a harbour for a ship in a storm, this thing, and any kind of change to it is really destabilising for a mind that was never healed, or loved, but literally just shoved full of pills, shut away and dismissed as an embarrassment, and an obstacle to not be listened to. It doesn’t matter what echelon of society you come from, that is damaging.

Eric is really the thing that bursts him open. It’s this internal thing made real, and takes him on this very dark, right-to-the-soul odyssey, literally through from the highest skyscraper, or posh apartment, in the Upper East Side, right into the subway reality of the mole people in ’85 New York.

I think it changes throughout the series, but I’m curious about your interpretation of what Eric represents symbolically.

It does change, and I feel at the beginning, it’s an eruption; it’s just a breaking out of something, born out of the fevered creative need to try and reestablish the bond with his child. He’s already apologised to Edgar, and from that drunken desperation, he sees the drawings, and he sees what he didn’t see in the first instance before his son goes missing, and he recognises the brilliance of the idea, and it triggers an idea to create that as a lure to bring his son back. So there’s a function of hope with that. [Eric] is an act of creation that brings about salvation and redemption, in a very real way.

But also it is this id, this shadow self, that speaks truths, that carries primal drives, that is both Mary Poppins and an enabler, that is a devil and an angel. It is all the contradictions that we carry in all of us. We all have these voices managing how we speak, how we interact, the self-critique, the goading ego, the defensiveness. All these things have played out. As an actor, to read all of the internal character becoming externalised, and it was a lure to me as a performer to go, I’ve never had that experience before, I need to work out how this evolves.

At the very end he’s still there. And I think that speaks to the fact that once you’ve gone through that, it’s about acceptance; it’s about accepting that there is that shadow self, that is part of the mess of being human, you contain all of those multitudes, it’s just how your manage them. And he’s up in the dress circle, he’s not interrupting the conversation. That’s a fluid, beautiful, unique and new bit of meeting between a father and son where there’s a real line of communication, the real hearing, listening, and present-tense “fathering.”

And then, at the end, Edgar is wearing the Eric costume. I wondered if that suggested — coupled with Vincent’s reaction, as something seems to click for him — that Eric has more literally stood in for Edgar in Vincent’s subconscious this whole time.

That’s lovely. And it is Edgar’s creation, first and foremost. It’s his drawings. It’s his imagination that this creature comes from… I also think there’s a two-way thing which is beautiful: as Vincent stands back, he lets the child own the creation, as fully-realised. He lets him speak as him. And it’s painful, because children offer an amazing ability to give you salvation and redemption. When we fail to listen to them, we’re not only doing disservice to them, but also to ourselves. They carry something spiritually dynamic, well beyond the kind of causal shit that we try to layer on — how to be, how to behave, what the truth is, who’s good, who’s bad, who’s right, who’s wrong.

Just listening and leaning into them, and really to their needs, is the real magic of parenting. They will give you what you need back. That’s why he’s so moved at the end, because he sees it. He sees the beauty of his child. It’s the relief that his child is literally a living, breathing entity, but also the pain, I guess, that there is still this distance to cross. He’s coming to him as a character, not as himself. It’s the slow stepping back into what had been a very damaging relationship.

Eric is now on Netflix.

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