While filming his major new Netflix show Eric, Benedict Cumberbatch had to spend a day running through the streets of New York, dressed in a huge blue and white furry monster suit.
It was a hot day, and as he sprinted through Sixth Avenue and across Central Park past extras and “random punters”, face fully showing, he though, “Yep it’s me, I’m dressed as a puppet. This will be one of the most wonderfully embarrassing moments of my life.”
But then… it was fine.
“It’s New York,” he reasons. “They’re like ‘Oh my God… anyway as I was saying.’ It was a momentary distraction.” Did people wonder what Doctor Strange was doing dressed like that? “Yep there was a bit of that.”
Eric is a six-part series arriving on the streaming giant this week. Written by Abi Morgan, whose shows include The Hour and The Split, it is about puppeteer Vincent (Cumberbatch) working on a Sesame Street-style show in New York in the Eighties.
When his nine-year-old son Edgar goes missing after walking to school on his own, Vincent spirals out of control, and his inner demons are manifested in a giant monster puppet called Eric – inspired by his son’s drawings – who follows him around, often berating him. It’s a show with clear influences and nods to other work, but ultimately it is unlike anything else.
Cumberbatch was drawn to the project because of Morgan – and “her exotic imagination” – and threw himself into the character of Vincent, a genius puppeteer but abrasive to all those close to him, who turns to drink and drugs as his mind starts to fracture in the wake of his son’s disappearance.
“I like to do things that are seemingly hard on the page and that require a fearlessness and a level of invention,” he says as I sit down with him and Morgan in a room at the Rosewood Hotel in Holborn, adding that with Morgan and director Lucy Forbes he felt like he was in safe hands.
“It felt like a safe place to fail and fail better, but you can’t underestimate what it is to read your character’s internal psychological collapse being made manifest by a seven-foot tall blue and white furry puppet monster,” he says.
“That novelty was the first hook, but the pain he’s in and the pain he causes, and how that evolves, really hooked me.”
It is an extraordinary performance. Cumberbatch is irresistibly watchable, even though for large swathes of the show Vincent is not a sympathetic character. Much of the viewers’ sympathy will instead go to his long-suffering wife Cassie, played by Gabby Hoffman, and Ledroit (Mckinley Belcher III), a black gay New York cop who is investigating the case and who is working in a racist, homophobic, corrupt department.
Cumberbatch was at a screening of the show the night before we meet, and says that he felt “fearful” watching it. Not just because he finds it weird to see himself on screen. “There’s a warmth towards Cassie and Ledroit and an ‘eeurgh’ kind of thing with Vincent. And it hit my ego in way it didn’t playing…” he tails off before changing tack. “As a parent I could barely watch certain scenes in this. But weirdly as a parent playing it, as an actor, I can go there. It’s my job to go there, as long as it’s not titillation or some form of voyeurism.”
The show explores every parent’s worst nightmare, their child going missing. To play the role Cumberbatch didn’t have to imagine it happening to his family to get into character. Just being a parent was crucial, he says.
“It has to come from some connected tissue and when you become a parent it opens your sensitivity as an actor to the profoundest and deepest emotions in a really extraordinary and accessible way.”
He continues, “You feel more sensitive to the world, like touchpaper, because of the treasured value and the vulnerability of this lifeforce that arrives in your presence. Something that’s bigger and more important than you. And I don’t need to position my actual children in that tragedy to feel an imagined love for the child when acting in that tragedy. I separate the two.”
The actor said he had no problem leaving the character behind at work, but at the end of the shoot, given such an intense plot, “you do need to do a bit of backing away. A nice holiday helps”.
Eric (the show rather than the monster it’s named after, who follows Vincent around) is an amazing evocation of New York in the Eighties. The idea has sat with Morgan for years, and she wanted to write something in set in the period – when she was young, over from the UK, she worked there as a nanny and in a bakery delivering bagels.
“There’s something about the Eighties which is really evocative. I’m in my mid-50s now and you really do reflect on that time. It felt alive, vivid and exciting and I knew it had a dark underbelly… It felt like something exciting was happening and I didn’t understand it, so this show for me was a way to go back to that time.” Cumberbatch too talks of the nostalgia of being a child in the Eighties and idealising New York.
As well as the thriller aspect of the missing child storyline, the show looks at issues of racism, homophobia, homelessness and more. It may be set in the Eighties but it clearly speaks to the present day.
Morgan says, referencing the tagline of the show: “This isn’t just about the monsters who live under the bed, but it’s also about monsters who creep into the fears of the parents and children. It’s about the people who become monsters and the monsters in City Hall or in the police.”
“It’s a 40-year history to now,” Cumberbatch adds. “It’s the point of Gordon Gecko’s ‘greed is good’ ethos kicking in, killing the idealism of the Sixties and Seventies and the growth capitalist story taking over and all the casualties along the way with profit over people.
“That’s the worst of the American export globally. The military industrial complex, free market economics. The people who fall through the cracks – when those institutions that are supposed to hold us, fail us – are everywhere. It’s in the family, in city hall in the police department and it still is.”
He continues, brow furrowed, on a topic he has clearly thought hard about. “We had a Covid pandemic instead of an AIDS epidemic, we have homelessness, gentrification is a problem. We have societal differences. Racism and homophobia are rife. And everything is polarising now through digital media, this echo chamber of what we want to hear rather than anything broader or effective for change.”
One thing actors often talk about on great acting jobs is learning a new skill. And during his time shooting, Cumberbatch apparently became a good puppeteer – “fair to middling” he says self-deprecatingly – with the hand puppets on the Sesame Street-style show Good Day Sunshine, and less with the ‘walk around’ puppet Eric – that was limited to his exploits on the streets of New York. But training as a puppeteer was a joy, he says. “It’s wonderful. What a gift, to take that home in life, just to have shits and giggles with it”.
It’s not his first encounter with puppets, though: when he was promoting Marvel blockbuster Doctor Strange, he did some publicity with The Count on Sesame Street. “It was,” he says, “one of the highlights of my life.”
