Gaby Hoffmann (‘Eric’) discusses ‘getting to swim in those big, big emotional waves’ as grieving mother Cassie [Exclusive Video Interview]
“To be honest, I have never known how to prepare before,” reflects Gaby Hoffmann about how she has approached and readied herself to take on roles in the past. Her process changed when she accepted the part of Cassie on the Netflix limited series “Eric,” though, because the character “felt like a really good one to have a new relationship” to her approach. To delve into the emotional state of the character, a grief-stricken mother whose son Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe) disappears one morning while walking to school, the performer sat with an acting teacher and “mused about this character and psychoanalyzed her.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
“Eric” is set in 1980s New York City, a time and place with which Hoffmann is deeply familiar. “All of my childhood memories are New York in the 80s and early 90s,” shares the actress. Even though the show shot all of the interiors in Budapest, that setting actually resonated with her youth, too, because she says, “I oddly grew with a huge amount of Hungarians around me” as the theatre group Squat Theatre lived on the same block in New York as the young Hoffmann. When the Emmy nominee walked onto the New York apartment set of “Eric” for the first time, she says she “started to weep” because “it was very evocative, it was very emotional, it was shocking.”
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Hoffmann and her co-star Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Cassie’s husband Vincent, shot all of the scenes set in their New York City apartment in the first two weeks of production. She says this was a terrific way to begin work because she could dive into “the source, the center of this world for her emotionally, which is this apartment, this family, this dynamic.” The performer observes that “there was so much there immediately” with Cumberbatch, who she praises for his ability to “grab your hand and dive into the deep end and start drowning and emerge for air and go back down and figure it out together.” Though these scenes are very harrowing ones, the actress says that “getting to swim in those big, big emotional waves, those are the best days at work.”
Hoffmann has one scene in the apartment in which the audience gets to see how Cassie is feeling as she listens and dances to Joan Armatrading’s song “Love and Affection.” The actress calls that scene of physical expression without dialogue “very cathartic, it was very beautiful, it was really an incredible creative experience.” It was purely coincidental, too, that the song from 1976 features backing vocals by actor and singer Clarke Peters, who costars on “Eric.” She calls this surprising serendipity “magical and mysterious and wonderful,” adding, “These moments of coincidence, which feel much bigger than coincidence, are kind of the stuff I live for.”
WATCH our exclusive video interview with Lucy Forbes, ‘Eric’ director
One of Hoffmann’s best scenes in the limited series is in episode four, in which Cassie admits to husband Vincent that she is pregnant by another man and kicks him out of the apartment. The scene is unique because the emotional dynamics change so seamlessly and never stay at just one register. “When I read the scene, I remember feeling so pleased to find that in there was all of it,” remembers the actress, explaining that the material captured “the loss, the love, the dreams that have been abandoned and are now being left behind, the failure, the rage, the disappointment, the courage, the friendship.” She adds, “I really felt like Benedict and I each got to feel all of that in there.”
Outside of her relationship with Vincent, Cassie also forms a connection with Cecile, a mother whose young son Marlon also went missing, though he has been lost for 11 months. “Just thinking about her makes me want to cry,” says Hoffmann about Adepero Oduye, who plays Cecile. She explains that though Cecile has had “a much more difficult life” due to her “class and race and circumstance,” which is demonstrated especially in how these two missing children are treated differently by the NYPD, the character helps Cassie learn “what she needs to propel her into the next phase of her journey.” As for her favorite memory from the set of “Eric,” the Emmy nominee mentions “the first day I saw Eric,” the seven-foot puppet at the heart of the show. “I really felt the kind of awe that you feel less and less as an adult in certain circumstances,” she says, continuing, “I just started crying like a kid… It was such a wondrous moment.”
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