On the surface, Netflix’s hit new series Eric doesn’t possess many direct similarities to a fairy tale, but star Gaby Hoffman has nonetheless revealed those qualities were part of what won her over during her initial readthrough of the scripts.
The two-time Primetime Emmy nominee plays Cassie Anderson, the wife of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Vincent and mother of Ivan Morris Howe’s Edgar, with the story putting her through the emotional wringer on multiple fronts.
Like many of the other characters, Cassie becomes intertwined in the majority of Eric’s multiple plot threads, whether it’s her increasing desperation as the search for her missing son continues to turn up empty, her fracturing marriage to an increasingly-erratic husband, her repeated encounters with determined detective Michael Ledroit, or finding a kindred spirit to have experienced the exact same unfortunate scenario in Cecile Rochelle.
As Eric progresses, each of these threads repeatedly brush past each other – and several of them end up becoming entangled completely – with Cassie doing everything in her power to both prevent Vincent from continuing the self-destructive path that tore their family apart in the first place, and do anything and everything she can to ensure Edgar returns home safely.
The disappearance of a young boy and the subsequent investigation makes for a tough watch, something that affected Hoffman when she initially perused the teleplay, with the star admitting to Deadline that she was “actually a little bit hesitant when I started reading it.” However, she was swiftly won over by the material.
That being said, Hoffman shared that having two young children of her own made her very reluctant to “make a story about a dead kid” in her own words, creating “an immediate, almost anxious reaction.” As she carried on reading, though, she found a way into the story that she could relate to on a foundational level.
“It was really a fairy tale that we were telling about what happens when we fail to take care of each other and our children, when our government at large, and also when family and marriage fail,” she said. “We all end up lost, figuratively and literally.”
Hoffman used the fairy tale analogy again when describing Eric as a story “that was taking us deep into the darkness, almost like Demeter having to go underground to rescue Persephone and emerging back out into the light.” Once that realisation struck, it was no longer “a sad, hard, scary thriller about a dead kid,” but “a call to arms for our children.”
