Gaby Hoffmann and Benedict Cumberbatch are opening up about the intense argument scenes in Netflix’s Eric.
Speaking with ComingSoon in an exclusive interview, Cumberbatch and Hoffmann were asked how they approached filming the argument scenes that show their characters’ marriage falling apart in 2024’s Eric.
“It was shockingly easy to start fighting with Benedict right off the bat [laughs],” Hoffman said. “No, really so much of it is there in the brilliant writing of Abi Morgan and then to have Lucy Forbes, the most capable director of all, to help guide us through it. But we talked a little bit about it leading in. We found a lot of it on our feet, of course, but it wasn’t too hard. The sort of nuts and bolts of where they were and why they were there made a lot of sense to us. I think we implicitly understood who they were to each other in this moment. So it was really just navigating the sort of details of the minutia, but it was a world that felt available pretty immediately.”
Cumberbatch added, “ guess because there’s a sort of gradation of state and mental health and the developing crisis outside of the marriage that’s helping to implode it. It was really important to sort of navigate that and not be too shouty all the time or to the other where, where the elements of real danger, physicality, the staging of it was difficult. It was our first few weeks. I mean, it wasn’t difficult in the sense that, as Gaby’s saying, there was something very fluid about it, but in a TV schedule to sort of land a 10-year history falling apart in the first weeks, it’s the name of the game. It’s one of those things you just have to get on and do.
“So questions were asked, and there were a couple of moments of going, ‘Hold on. The TV schedule. Hold on, hold on.’ We just need to talk about the nuts and bolts of this ’cause I don’t know what I’m doing. You’d have to just pick certain bits apart. But like Gaby was saying, Abi and Lucy were there and amenable and provided the space and the safety, encouragement, and the elimination of ideas or the investigation of them to make it work. So it wasn’t a hardship in the end. Working with this one is an absolute dream, dream, dream, dream come true. She’s a game-raiser.”
What is Eric about?
“Set in 1980s New York, the limited drama follows the desperate search of a father when his nine year old son disappears one morning on the way to school,” reads the synopsis. “Vincent, one of New York’s leading puppeteers and creator of the hugely popular children’s television show, ‘Good Day Sunshine,’ struggles to cope with the loss of his son, Edgar, becoming increasingly distressed and volatile. Full of self-loathing and guilt around 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.”
All six episodes of Eric are now streaming on Netflix.
