“Eric” replicated Benedict Cumberbatch's eyes for the puppet

Cumberbatch now knows what it's like to look into his own eyes.

If you've ever wanted a life-size puppet with Benedict Cumberbatch's eyes, well, you're in luck!

In the new Netflix series Eric, Cumberbatch stars as a puppeteer and a father who loses himself in addiction when his young son goes missing on his way to school one day. Vincent (Cumberbatch) then starts to hallucinate a life-size version of Eric, the puppet his son had drawn prior to his disappearance.

“We’ve always tried to see Eric as a manifestation of the inner workings of Vincent’s psychosis,” creator Abi Morgan previously told Entertainment Weekly. “When I pitched it, I said it’s kind of a buddy movie of an obsessive puppeteer and his puppet who go looking for his son.”

Related: Eric review: Benedict Cumberbatch's missing-kid thriller can't find the point

But the show knew that they couldn't just make Eric a generic blue monster. "There's a lot of quite well-known big blue monsters in the world," Morgan says. "So we worked a lot on the subtle changes."

One of those subtle changes? Giving Eric Vincent's eyes. "Eric's irises are based on Benedict's," Morgan says. "They're literally photographic copies of Benedict. So when you're looking at Eric's eyes, you're looking at Vincent's eyes. That was a beautiful detail."

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The show made two puppets — the kid-friendly one used on Vincent's show, Good Day Sunshine, and the larger one that was a figment of Vincent's imagination. And there's a good reason the latter was far more menacing. "Eric is the embodiment of Vincent's psychosis and actually becomes the kind of toxic part of Vincent," Morgan says. "We really [leaned] into all of that detail. The puppet makers were fantastic and were really good at finding the identity of the character and making sure that was embodied in the making of that puppet. I've never had so many conversations about fur."

Related: The 25 best Netflix mystery movies

Eric is out now on Netflix.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.