Lucy Forbes (‘Eric’ director) on the ‘absolutely enormous mountain to climb’ to depict 1980s New York and the title puppet [Exclusive Video Interview]

David Buchanan
·5 min read

This article contains minor spoilers about the Netflix limited series “Eric.”

“1980s New York was wildly exciting to me, building that world from the ground up,” shares Lucy Forbes about what facet of the limited series “Eric” most appealed to her as a director. The Netflix show centers on a troubled puppeteer Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the events that follow when his son Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe) disappears one morning while walking to school. As a child of the 80s herself, the director says it was a “complete dream come true” to immerse herself in that world through this project and that she “absolutely loved all of it.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.

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Cumberbatch’s character Vincent is the creator of a children’s television puppet show called “Good Day Sunshine,” which is a setting that Forbes calls “the complete heart of the show.” She and her creative team “really, really poured over every single, tiny detail” of those sets to get the look and feel of it exactly right. “Good Day Sunshine” might seem “reminiscent of ‘Sesame Street,’” but the director approached the fictional show in a way that avoids covering the same ground that involved dreaming up “puppets that hadn’t already been created.” “I don’t think anything brought me more joy than those dancing hotdogs,” reflects the helmer with a smile.

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Beyond the stage doors of “Good Day Sunshine” lies the tumultuous environment of 1980s New York, which “Eric” explores in all its complexity. In order to create that world as specifically as possible, Forbes studied the photography of Bruce Davidson and Martha Cooper, so much so that she says, “I felt like I looked at every single photograph that was ever taken of the streets of New York in the 1980s.” “Eric” takes audiences from the Upper East Side to the city’s nightclubs and down into the subway tunnels and underground where the city’s unhoused live. “It felt like an absolutely enormous mountain to climb,” describes the director of all the different locales to create and shoot, and “it felt at times kind of relentless because there was just so much.” Even so, she declares, “I really loved and… cherish and treasure the creative time spent working it all out.”

Of course, there’s also the show’s title character, Eric, a puppet Edgar designs that Vincent wants to bring to live as a way to bring his son home. Vincent also begins hallucinating Eric as a real-life monster as he descends into madness and into his addictions to drugs and alcohol. As Forbes explains, “As Vincent’s mental state spirals, then we see more and more of Eric.” The puppet had to work in both the context of “Good Day Sunshine” as well as “walking around with Vincent on the streets of New York,” so the design team “spent a lot of time thinking about color and how he would fit in his environment.” The director praises the puppeteer for bringing the character to life, especially because the performer “couldn’t actually see physically out, he wears a pair of goggles and within the goggles there are four cameras.”

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As Edgar’s father, who is haunted by both his behavior toward his son and by Eric, Cumberbatch gives a riveting performance. Forbes praises the Emmy-winning actor for his work on the show, sharing, “Benedict really, really, really threw himself into this in a way that I haven’t seen most actors do… He gives such a nuanced, heartfelt, beautiful performance.” Some of the most harrowing scenes are those set in the family apartment as Vincent and Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann) fight while Edgar overhears. “The big thing for me is to set the right tone on set and make them feel safe,” notes the director about how she approached those claustrophobic scenes. She also gives kudos to her cinematographer Benedict Spence, who is an “incredibly talented camera operator” and who would follow “the action and the emotion” of the scenes as they unfolded. All of those apartment scenes across the six episodes were shot within the first two weeks of production.

Forbes singles out two scenes from “Eric” as her favorites. The first occurs in the third episode, in which Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III) interrogates Vincent. As she describes, “You just see Eric swoop in and stand over him and he just looks to Eric and then Eric just disappears,” adding, “I definitely did a little jump behind the monitors when we managed to get that.” The other comes in the fourth episode, in which Vincent and Cassie have a momentous fight. The director calls it “beautifully written by Abi Morgan,” and it showcases “Benedict and Gaby just acting their socks off.”

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