The Big Picture

In the Netflix series ‘Eric,’ Vincent, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, becomes obsessed with bringing a puppet to life on his children’s show, after his son goes missing because he believes it will bring him home.
Detective Ledroit, played by McKinley Belcher III, must navigate his hidden sexuality while solving missing children cases, putting him in the direct path of Vincent and his search for his son.
Creator Abi Morgan emphasizes the importance of hope and truth in telling this story.

[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for Eric.]

From creator and writer Abi Morgan, the Netflix series Eric follows the downward spiral of a father struggling to cope with the loss of his son. Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch) is the creator of the highly popular children’s television show Good Day Sunshine, where he focuses all his attention. When his nine-year-old son disappears on his way to school, Vincent’s guilt convinces him that if he can just get his son’s drawing of a blue monster puppet named Eric onto TV, then his son will come home. But the longer that takes, the more desperate his self-loathing makes him and the more difficult he is for everyone in his life, including his wife (Gaby Hoffmann), friends, and co-workers, to be around.

As Vincent becomes more and more desperate to find his son, Detective Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III), whose interest in finding missing persons places him in the path of the distraught father. Hiding his own sexuality daily at work at a time when being a Black gay man in the ‘80s in New York was not something that was widely and openly embraced forces Ledriot to realize that, in order to hold the NYPD to a higher standard, he just might have to risk everything, personally and professionally, so that he can solve the cases that are keeping him up at night.

During this interview with Collider, Morgan talked about how lucky they felt to have Benedict Cumberbatch sign on as a collaborator, why she likes to share her story ideas early on in the process, exploring the parallel journeys of Vincent and Ledroit, and the importance of leaving the story in a place of hope and truth. Belcher discussed how Ledroit’s personal life affected his work life, getting to the heart of the man and his trauma, and where his character’s courage comes from.

Eric (2024) A compelling drama that follows Vincent, a father tormented by the disappearance of his young son, Edgar, in 1980s New York City. As Vincent delves into the chaotic urban landscape to find his boy, he becomes increasingly dependent on Eric, a puppet he created, to cope with his despair. Eric transforms from a mere puppet into a significant presence in Vincent’s life, helping him navigate the complexities of his emotions and the challenges he faces.Cast Benedict Cumberbatch , Gaby Hoffman , Jeff Hephner , McKinley Belcher III , Amy Louise Pemberton , Donald Sage Mackay , Erika Soto , John Doman Main Genre Drama Seasons 1 Creator(s) Abi Morgan Release Date May 30, 2024 Streaming Service(s) Netflix Expand

For ‘Eric’s Creator, Benedict Cumberbatch Was a Brilliant Collaborator
Image via Netflix

Collider: Abi, did you have any hesitation about including a scene with a giant puppet snorting coke with Benedict Cumberbatch in a bathroom stall?

ABI MORGAN: What’s not to love? Come on! One of the most exciting things for a writer is imagining that scene, and then you’re on the set. Every writer is slightly dreamy about that moment. It’s not even watching it in the movie. It’s actually being present. We got so lucky with Benedict playing that role. I just knew that he would be able to bring to life the voice and creation of Eric, built from Edgar’s mind. For me, one of the most exciting moments in any TV show is when you see the credits roll at the end and you see how many people have made this show. The manifestation of Eric is such an accumulation of everybody’s brilliance and the work and the commitment to that and the relationship with Eric. In a way, he becomes quite talismanic at the heart of the show. The thing we spoke about most, actually, as a creative team, at the beginning, was, “What was he going to look like?” (Director) Lucy Forbes was so driven by that. It’s a great kick, to this day. It was a wonderful experience to watch Benedict play with Eric in that way.

Related ‘Eric’ Review: Benedict Cumberbatch Is Brilliant in Jumbled Netflix Mystery Cumberbatch plays a puppeteer searching for his missing son in an ambitious but heavily flawed series.

Did you write that before you knew who would be in the series?

MORGAN: Yeah, one hundred percent. I pitched it as one line to Netflix and they loved it. I pitched several other ideas, probably way more complex in other ways, and they hadn’t been interested. But that one pricked their ears up. That’s what you look for in an idea and you look for people who go, “Okay, I get it. There’s something there.” I say to new writers that every friend, parent, and stranger is another person to share ideas with. I never keep my ideas quiet. I share them because I believe there are lots of good ideas, but very few good executions of ideas. For me, it was great to have people start the collaborative process that early on.

McKinley Belcher III Says His ‘Eric’ Character’s Journey is One of Self-Acceptance

McKinley, there’s so much going on with your character, which makes him so interesting to follow. He’s been on the police force a long time, which has shaped him a particular way. But then, he has this whole life at home where he’s hiding that and keeping it separate from his work life. What was it like to figure out how one informed the other?

McKINLEY BELCHER III: All those things being in the pot is delicious, as an actor, to get to juggle. Because there’s so much information in there about who you’re playing and what it is that they’re wrestling with, and because this is all set in the eighties, he must compartmentalize his life in some ways, both for self-preservation and to be safe. I don’t think he would have his job in the same way if that was an open thing. And you see over the course of the show ways in which it is weaponized and leveraged to create even more of a problem for him. As a Black queer man, I really love that we get to see his whole life and him as a whole human, over the course of the show. For me, his journey through is very much one of someone stepping fully into themselves and accepting himself first and learning that he can operate at full capacity after he’s done that. In many ways, as we put some of the pieces together about finding these two missing children, we find that he is the perfect person to be at the helm of trying to find them.

He really seems like a character that could only exist within this being a TV series because if this were a movie, he would be the first character that you would lose all of that personal information about.

BELCHER: It was really important to me that whatever I took on next not be that thing because it can start to feel very much like you’re playing a function or a part of an equation. It’s deeply satisfying that we get all the procedural elements of trying to solve the thing through a thriller, but we also get the heart of the man and all the baggage and trauma, and beautiful and hard things about what it is that he’s holding as a human, and that’s a gift.

Related ‘Eric’: What You Should Know About Benedict Cumberbatch’s Return to TV Cumberbatch stars as a grieving father alongside a talking puppet…?

How hard do you think it really is for him to follow through on this case and to see it through to the end? What do you think it is that gives him the courage to keep pushing forward and following his instincts when he’s really up against everything, all the time?

BELCHER: It’s this fundamental thing of stepping into the reality that if you do nothing, the thing won’t get done. And then, you are responsible for witnessing a mother trying to grieve, but not knowing where her child is. And also, just understanding and seeing, in a very personal way, the systemic problems within the NYPD, and if he doesn’t do anything, then it’s just going to get worse and it’s gonna hurt more people. One of the first mandates of the job as a detective is to protect and keep people safe, and in order for him to do that, he must act. I don’t think there is an option, in the end. It’s something that he must do.

Vincent and Ledroit are on parallel journeys that don’t actually cross paths very often. Did it feel very challenging to tell two such complete stories, in that way?

MORGAN: The mechanics of a thriller has its own engine, and these were two key players in that thriller. It always became about six degrees of separation, so even if they weren’t together physically, they were often psychically together in their journeys, or they were connected by a key character. Cassie was an incredibly important role, played by the brilliant Gaby Hoffmann, who was this amazing brokerage between the disappeared Vincent that you see in the later episodes and Ledroit. He becomes even more relevant in that triptych relationship between the three of them in the latter half of the series. It’s about a man who’s deeply invested in the disappearance of his son, but it’s about another man who’s deeply invested, not only in the disappearance of this man’s son, but in the disappearance of young men, in general. It’s playing with this generation of lost boys who fall between the cracks because they’re not newsworthy, or their skin is not the right color, or they’re not of the right economic class. They are ignored and they’re not considered newsworthy. What I’m playing with is that you think you’re going to follow the journey of one kid, but actually we’re looking at the journey of another, and that’s equally important.

‘Eric’s Creator Wanted to Leave the Characters with a Sense of Hope and an Element of Truth

Abi, with a story like this, was it important to you to find some sense of closure for both Vincent and Ledroit? Did you want to leave them both in a place where it felt like they could move forward? Was that something that you had thought about?

MORGAN: In these really dark times, you want to leave an audience with a sense of hope. But also, because I believe in hope, I lean into hope rather than despair, even at the worst of times. I was also exploring the trope of a missing child within a TV drama, and the fact is, you think you’re looking for one child and you start to discover, in fact, there’s another child that’s been left behind that we’re looking for. We’re playing with this game and looking at this. It was really important to try to find a shape and an ensemble of actors who could really take us into the darkest of places, but I was very driven by the notion of heart. It was really important to me that we started to see that these two men were on these parallel journeys and that both of them were circling these lost children within themselves, be it the lost child who couldn’t stand up in front of his schoolmates to say, “I’m gay,” which was as prevalent as Vincent, who was trying to suppress this lost young boy who couldn’t stand up to his father. For me, it was about those things on a very personal level, but it was also about those lost souls within a city who get lost and fall between the cracks because of corruption, because of politics, because of race, and because of economics. That’s what I wanted to explore. It was really important to me that it did have an element of hope, but also an element of something that was true. I don’t think we get a happy ending in the way that it may have been if we had tried to spin it in a more saccharine way.

Related 10 Movies You Didn’t Know Benedict Cumberbatch Starred In Welcome to the Benedict Cumberbatch cinematic multiverse.

Eric is available to stream on Netflix. Check out the trailer:

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