For a new Netf lix series, a g iant of the screen teams up with… B enedict Cumberbatch
Benedict Cumberbatch remembers very clearly the day he f irst met Eric, his co-star in the new Netf lix series in which they are both about to appear. “When he f irst came to set, it was, it just… it was very fucking funny. Because he couldn’t see; he banged into walls. There was this huge lumbering thing going, ‘Oh fuck,’ and ping-ponging around the set.”
Abi Morgan, the British play wright and screenwriter who wrote the six-part series, also called Eric, was there that day, too. “You know, there’s something that happens: ever ybody becomes childlike. I remember him standing among the crew and everybody, from the gaffer through to the costume designer, crowded round to see him. It was a really good moment.”
Eric is a big, white-and-blue, very hairy monster-puppet — controlled from within by a puppeteer named Olly — though consider yourself disabused of any notion he’s a cuddly fuzz-heap in the Barney or Big Bird mode. In fact, he only appears for the f irst time at the end of the opening episode of Morgan’s atmospheric drama, when Cumberbatch’s character, a puppeteer named Vincent who works on a Sesame Street- esque TV puppet show called Good Day Sunshine, starts to lose his mind and summons Eric into being.
Not that things are too sunny for Vincent, even at the start. Set in New York in 1985, early scenes in Eric depict his unhappy marriage to Cassie (Gaby Hoffman), in which the couple’s nine-year- old son Edgar (Ivan Howe) has become the neglected collateral. Vincent is coming under f ire at work, too, as Good Day Sunshine is falling out of favour with the kids (or as Cumberbatch puts it: “the hip crowd who understand what a beatbox is”). But then comes the day that Vincent, harried and chaotic, sends Edgar off to school on his own and Edgar doesn’t come back.
“Every parent has this nightmare,” says Morgan, who also wrote the recent divorcelawyer drama The Split and the 2011 Steve McQueen-directed film Shame. “I think, statistically, no more children disappear now than did 30 or 40 years ago, but it’s parental anxiety versus knowledge. My kids are 20 and first to be publicised on milk cartons — Morgan says it was not based on any one real event, but rather on the cases that she remembers hearing about when she was growing up in the UK. “I remember that being haunting, as a child who really enjoyed her freedom,” she says.
In a desperate hunt for clues about Edgar’s disappearance, Vincent searches his son’s room and finds a drawing of a big white-and-blue monster; he convinces himself that if he can only turn the
