Eric: Everything to Know About Benedict Cumberbatch’s New Series
“This is a story about people finding their home.”
Benedict Cumberbatch has a new mystery on his hands.
The Oscar nominee stars in the six-episode limited series Eric available to stream on Netflix now. Created by BAFTA and Emmy Award winner Abi Morgan (The Hour, The Iron Lady, The Split), the thriller follows a desperate father as he battles his demons on the vibrant, dangerous, and intoxicating streets of ’80s New York in a race to bring home his missing son.
“This is a story about people finding their home,” said Cumberbatch. “Whether it’s a child, a homeless person, a gay Black cop, a wife in an unhappy marriage, or even Eric on the show, it’s all about finding a place.”
What is Eric about?
Vincent (Cumberbatch) is one of New York’s leading puppeteers and creator of the hugely popular children’s television show Good Day Sunshine. But his life unravels when his 9-year-old son goes missing on the way to school. “Eric is a dark and crazy journey into the heart of ’80s New York — and the good, bad, and ugly world of Vincent,” Morgan told Netflix.
Struggling to cope with the loss of his son, Edgar, Vincent becomes increasingly distressed and volatile. Full of self-loathing and guilt over Edgar’s disappearance, he clings to his son’s drawings of a blue monster puppet, Eric, convinced that if he can get Eric on TV, then Edgar will come home. As Vincent’s progressively destructive behavior alienates his family, his work colleagues, and the detectives trying to help him, it’s Eric, a delusion of necessity, who becomes his only ally in the pursuit to bring his son home.
“When I pitched the idea of a New York puppeteer on a quest to find his missing son, with a seven-foot-tall blue monster in tow, it’s to Netflix’s eternal credit that they jumped on board,” Morgan tells Tudum. “Eric is a deep dive into the ’80s Big Apple, grappling with rising crime rates, internal corruption, endemic racism, a forgotten underclass, and the AIDS epidemic, exposing the divisions rife between parents searching for their child, a detective battling with a system that is broken, and a lost boy who may never come home — and asks where the real monsters lie. With puppets … lots of puppets.”
Who is in the Eric cast?
Benedict Cumberbatch
One of New York’s leading puppet makers and puppeteers, Vincent is the creator of the wildly popular children’s television show, Good Day Sunshine. Highly intelligent, charismatic yet narcissistic, Vincent is professionally volatile and privately neglectful of his wife, Cassie, and young son, Edgar. As we find Vincent at a tipping point in the beginning of the series, Benedict Cumberbatch viewed Vincent’s journey as a “huge odyssey to go on in six episodes.”
Also an executive producer on the project, Cumberbatch saw Vincent as someone who turned to his work on Good Day Sunshine to find salvation for an unhappy childhood and “pretty loveless” upbringing. “He starts to bring home his vanity, his idiosyncrasies, his ego, and all kinds of toxic behavior, which affects how he overlooks his kid and how abrasive he is in a marriage which has [already] had 10 years of pretty tumultuous moments of infidelity, arguing, and disconnection,” said Cumberbatch.
When Vincent’s child goes missing, “there’s this split between reality and Vincent’s reality,” he said. “He’s trying to hold on to both things to steer him back towards his son.” As he hallucinates Edgar’s drawings of Eric into existence to help him find his son, Vincent’s mental health deteriorates.
Morgan said the character is “aggressive. He’s rude. He’s funny, he’s very irreverent, and Benedict’s performance gives you that.” Before Morgan met Cumberbatch, she felt like she knew him from watching him as Sherlock and Patrick Melrose. “He has this incredible material talent,” she said.
But it was important for director Lucy Forbes that Cumberbatch didn’t look like himself or feel reminiscent of his past roles. “That’s why his hair is grown out, he’s got a beard, and we put glasses on him,” said Forbes. “Not only for the time period, but also to make him feel like Vincent as much as possible.”
McKinley Belcher III
Gaby Hoffmann
Ivan Howe
as Edgar
Clarke Peters
as George Lovett