Who is the real monster in Eric? Is it really the big, blue creature trudging around the streets of ’80s New York? Or is it something more insidious bubbling up inside the man who makes him?

In Eric, the limited series created by BAFTA and Emmy Award winner Abi Morgan (The Hour, The Iron Lady, The Split), monsters are manifestations of fear. For Vincent, Benedict Cumberbatch’s floundering father, husband, and puppeteer, his demons — nurtured by his childhood neglect and exacerbated by his deteriorating mental health and addiction — manifest as a 7-foot-tall, furry hallucination. His name? Simply, Eric. 

First sketched by his 9-year-old son, Edgar (Ivan Howe), Vincent conjures Eric, both in his mind and later in his workshop, to help bring Edgar home after he goes missing on the way to school. In writing the series, Eric was born from Morgan’s love of “magical realism and the imaginative idea of someone’s psychosis finding form.”

Cumberbatch sees Eric as “a protector, a shadow-self, [and] a friend” to Vincent. “He can be everything from [his] foul-mouthed buddy to the thing that can say the things we can’t,” the actor said. During the citywide search for Edgar, Vincent also constructs Eric as a puppet to appear on the children’s show he created, Good Day Sunshine, in the hope that Edgar will see him on TV and come home.

While Vincent’s genius brings his imaginary friend, of sorts, to life during his downward spiral, it took a village of artisans off-screen to build the creature for the thriller series. Learn how Eric became far more than just a monster you’d find under your bed below.

Illustrations by Poppy Kay

Designing Eric

When producer Holly Pullinger (This Is Going to Hurt) first called Stitches and Glue’s Becky Johnson and Paul Vincett — creature supervisors who have previously worked on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and Stranger Things: The First Shadow — she described only the gist of the series and its puppet show within a show. But Johnson immediately thought, “It sounds like our day-to-day!” 

Johnson and Vincett both credit director Lucy Forbes (This Is Going to Hurt) with having a crystal clear idea of how she wanted Eric to look and feel. 

“By the time that we had come aboard, she had so much in her head that she just needed to get out, and we were quite grateful that she was that meticulous,” Vincett tells Tudum. Production brought in illustrator Poppy Kay to take charge of translating Forbes’ vision into a bible of designs and digital images for Johnson and Vincett to work from. 

From left: Illustrations by Poppy Kay, Photo by LUDOVIC ROBERT/NETFLIX

Forbes had studied television of the era closely and spent a lot of time at the Stitches and Glue workshop, picking Eric’s furs, running through Pantone color references, and even citing a photograph of an ’80s game show host as inspiration for Eric’s cornflower-blue coloring. 

“When you walk around New York [on the show], you see burgundy and browns and cornflower blue and buttery yellow everywhere,” said Forbes. 

But Eric’s fur couldn’t just be off-the-shelf fur, especially given his size. “You have to have a certain stretchy [material] so that your performer can move,” says Johnson. So they had 40 square feet of 7-inch white hair specially made for Eric, and were able to use it as a blank canvas and hand-dye it the puppet’s coloring. 

But they weren’t able to order the entire amount needed from that specific company: “There was actually a worldwide shortage of the stretchy fur!” said producer Jane Featherstone (This Is Going to Hurt). So they disguised the gaps by hand-knotting much of the long hair in Eric’s mane and using a lot of real sheepskin around his ankles. 

Lead puppeteer in Eric, Olly Taylor.

LUDOVIC ROBERT/NETFLIX

“The limitations on the furs actually gave it a deeper look in the end, because there were all these different textures that we [ended up using because they were] available to us at the time,” says Johnson. Vincett compares Eric’s layered look to what you would see on a dog or a bear. 

Eric’s appearance is a physical manifestation of Vincent and things Edgar’s seen in the street and then drawn. The stripes on Eric’s back follow the mink pattern of Edgar’s grandmother’s fur coat, and his tail is modeled after their pet cat, Trixie. 

Despite the specific inspirations, Eric’s design still went through many incarnations before the team landed on the finished version. In the beginning, Eric was going to be more of a high-end animatronic with sculpted silicone skin. And at different points, he had loads of eyes, teeth, and horns. But through the collaborative process, “Abi was reminding everyone that he was still a puppet,” says Johnson. “He’s not a real creature.” 

Illustrations by Poppy Kay

Photo courtesy of Netflix/Eric

Building Eric

The Stitches and Glue team (12 makers in the workshop and two additional off-site sculptors) spent about 10 weeks building Eric from November 2022 through January 2023, producing three suits in total — two versions of “Imaginary” Eric and one of the puppet Vincent builds for the Good Day Sunshine TV show. 

“At one point, I had three Eric heads staring at me on the last few nights before he got shipped off to Budapest” for filming, recalls Vincett. “I remember sending Lucy [Forbes] a text saying, ‘What color do you want the ears?!’ That was the level of minute detail and nonstop work. At the time, it seemed mad, but it paid off in the end.”

On location, the team even worked on dirtying down Eric’s fur to reflect the grime of the city streets and make him feel lived-in as the story goes on. “When we got him really grubby, Abi was like, ‘Oh, I love it. He looks like he’s been pissed on!’ And I was like, ‘That’s what you’re aiming for?’ ” jokes Johnson. 

It might sound surprising, but Eric and the Good Day Sunshine Eric have the exact same sculpt, or internal structure. “So they have the same skull, but they were just fabricated with different skins externally,” says Vincett. 

Getting the eyes right was actually the hardest part to nail for both versions of Eric. Main Eric’s eyes were actually modeled using Cumberbatch’s irises. Before Cumberbatch had been cast, Johnson and Vincett were sent photos of an unidentified person and told, “ ‘We’d like Eric’s eyes to be the actor’s eyes, and it might be these,’ ” says Johnson. They took one look and knew: “That is Benedict Cumberbatch!”

The Good Day Sunshine Eric, the one Vincent wears himself in the finale, is very stripped back and has a cheaper, more period-accurate finish. “Back in the day, everything was limited, whereas nowadays, we’re importing fabrics from all over the world,” says Vincett. The Good Day Sunshine puppet’s face is also just generally happier looking. That jolly look is all in the eyes — Good Day Sunshine’s Eric has bigger pupils and its eyebrows don’t move. Over the course of the series, the puppet develops as its construction progresses, evolving from flat, felt pupils to inset black pupils.

Both Vincett and Johnson were impressed with how quickly Vincent makes Eric in the series. “Vincent created the Good Day Sunshine puppet in a couple of nights, didn’t he?” says Vincett. “It took us weeks!” 

For Morgan, Vincent’s advanced abilities made sense, though, as the series takes a look at “those very creative, fucked-up men who were often creative geniuses, but in their personal lives, just chaos.”

LUDOVIC ROBERT/NETFLIX

Operating Eric

Eric’s low, gravelly voice is all Cumberbatch. “That was one of the things I was most excited about when Benedict came on board, because he’s such a talented voice actor,” said Forbes. “We always knew that he should be gruff and really New York. And Benedict found it pretty quickly.”

On set, though, it was actually puppeteer Olly Taylor who often said the lines opposite Cumberbatch’s Vincent. Taylor, Laurence Moran, and Phill Woodfine all donned the Eric suit during production, with Vincett popping in on occasion as “Eric’s stunt double” in the Good Day Sunshine suit if there was an overlap in Cumberbatch’s shooting schedule and he wasn’t available to wear it. “It’s always good to experience it, so you know what it feels like to wear a suit,” says Vincett. “And it was very comfortable, so I was very pleased with that.”

In most scenes, Taylor is inside the Eric suit performing the body, face, and left arm. Outside, Woodfine would remotely control the animatronic eyes and mouth of Eric’s head while Moran would work next to him, handling the right arm of Eric’s suit when needed. “It was a real team effort,” says Vincett. “And they’re always in conversation.” 

Lead puppeteer in Eric, Olly Taylor.

LUDOVIC ROBERT/NETFLIX

When Taylor was in the suit, he wore a set of goggles which played him footage from multiple camera feeds. That meant he could see what the main camera was capturing for the scene, as well as footage of what was physically in front of him so he wouldn’t bump into things. Vincett doesn’t know how Taylor managed with such limited vision. “He’s only got two eyes!” 

Cumberbatch tried on Taylor’s headset for a scene and “I literally teared up, I cried,” says Cumberbatch. “I thought, ‘My God, this man has done this for five months. How on Earth has he remained sane?’ ”

Taylor used mechanical hands with finger pulls to move Eric’s extended, sloth-like arms. But moving around Eric’s animatronic head took great finesse. Taylor could bring his hand forward to control the mouth, but the blinks, eyebrows, and ears were all Woodfine and Moran with remote controls. “If I’m in the suit and I’m performing the scenes with the actors, there needs to be an intuition,” Taylor said. “Phill and I have done characters where I’ve led the performance and he’s done the animatronics of the eyes, and Laurence has also assisted me a lot of times. It’s a collaborative performance.”

Added Woodfine, “You’ve got that connection between us, and it’s very much about watching the body language of the character that Olly is portraying and layering it up.” When the cameras rolled, Moran and Woodfine would watch the performance on the monitor and react in the moment with the animatronics. “There is no time to plan anything because every take is different. Every time, the movements are different,” said Moran. “So we have to be very fluid and intuitive.”

Clockwise from top left: Paul Vincett (puppet supervisor), Zosia Stella-Sawicka (puppet wrangler), Olly Taylor (lead puppeteer in Eric), Becky Johnson (puppet supervisor), Laurence Moran (operator/dresser), and Phill Woodfine (lead operator).

LUDOVIC ROBERT/NETFLIX

That fluidity extends to getting inside the Eric suit — a procedure similar to how an astronaut puts on their suit. “Think NASA,” says Johnson. The order had to be right every time, otherwise it’d be nightmarish. Taylor, Woodfine, and Moran got their suit assembly down to a 15-minute exact science. Cumberbatch also came to see the Stitches and Glue team to learn how the suit worked. “We were quite nervous about it, weren’t we?” says Vincett. Adds Johnson, “Absolutely terrified.”

But much like his character, Cumberbatch revered the work the real-life Vincents put into creating this monster and treated the suit with care. “The end of the day is a real interesting moment because everyone is tired,” says Vincett. “They’ve been shooting all day, and [some performers] choose to get out of the suit themselves. So the suit gets a lot more wear and tear.” 

Cumberbatch, however, was always respectful and patient about the process of hanging up Eric for the night. “He’d say, ‘Thank you, and good night,’ ” says Johnson. And for that reason, Vincett says, “I’d happily put him in a creature suit any time.”

Stream Eric now, only on Netflix.