Benedict Cumberbatch is currently in talks to take a role in Abi Morgan’s Netflix limited series Eric. The six-episode show had originally been announced back in November 2021, and it appears now that the Sherlock actor will likely join the cast.
Eric is set in 1980s New York, and Cumberbatch would play a character named Vincent Sullivan. Sullivan is the head puppet maker and puppeteer of a wildly-popular children’s TV show in America.
However, Sullivan’s life takes a turn for the worse when his son, Edgar, disappears off the face of the earth. Sullivan turns to drugs and ends up homeless and suffering from the consequences of substance abuse. His only friend ends up being the titular Eric, a seven-foot-tall puppet who helps Sullivan to find his son.
In other Benedict Cumberbatch news, the actor is under scrutiny at the moment as Barbados seeks reparations from the families who benefitted from slavery in the country. Cumberbatch’s ancestors originally owned the Cleland plantation in the Caribbean country in 1728.
The family gave up the site when slavery was abolished in Barbados in 1834, but the government there claim that the Cumberbatch family greatly benefitted from the injustice for many years, significantly contributing to their overall wealth.
The Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration general secretary, David Denny, recently said, “Any descendants of white plantation owners who have benefitted from the slave trade should be asked to pay reparations, including the Cumberbatch family.”
He continued, “The money should be used to turn the local clinic into a hospital, support local schools, and improve infrastructure and housing.” This is not the first time that attention has been drawn to Cumberbatch’s ancestral history, and it has been said before that he took a role as a plantation owner in 12 Years a Slave in order to make personal atonement for his family’s past.
