How 1980s NYC Was Created in “Eric” on Netflix: Filming Locations

The crime drama series Eric on Netflix, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, so accurately recreates 1980s New York City that even we seasoned film locations columnists here at Untapped New York wondered at times where exactly they shot to be able to capture the grit of a bygone New York City. The story in Eric focuses on the disappearance of an eight-year-old boy, Edgar Anderson, the son of Benedict Cumberbatch’s troubled puppeteering genius Vincent Anderson. The story touches all segments of New York City’s socioeconomic life, from the homeless to the rarified corridors of city government, with the apartments of the middle class and the wealthy in between. As such, the totality of the sets and scenes needed is vast—from street scenes to seedy nightclubs, to the subway, to underground tunnels similar to those inhabited in real life by “the mole people,” offices, police stations, and even the set of the puppet show that Vincent Anderson created, “Good Morning Sunshine,” whose puppets—real and imaginary—serve as a central, propulsive element of the show.

For both aesthetic and cost reasons, it’s almost impossible to film entirely in New York City these days when looking to emulate a past era of the city. Many productions in recent memory, including Joker, were filmed in Jersey City. West Side Story, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, High Fidelity, and Wonderstruck headed to Crown Heights in Brooklyn. The Deuce recreated 42nd Street in upper Manhattan. The Alienist found its 19th-century New York City in Prague, whereas Atlantic Crossing set mid-century New York City there. Eric filmed both in New York City and Budapest, with additional VFX (visual effects) to augment the sets. However, the scenes filmed on-site here in New York City truly lend the touch of real authenticity necessary for this series which aims for a true-to-life viewing experience. In fact, at the beginning, I wondered if the show was the true story of the disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz, who disappeared on his way to his school bus stop in Soho.

As Eric‘s director Lucy Forbes explained, “There was never going to be an option to shoot the whole thing in New York because it’s so expensive. So it was about choosing the right place to go, and Budapest has lots of very good studio space that is cost-effective and has an amazing crew. It has a New York backlot which is basically two streets which were built for Hellboy 2. It was pretty tired and falling apart so we did a lot of work to it and we built a
lot. We built loads of interior sets in Budapest. Vincent and Cassie’s apartment, Good Day Sunshine. Then everything exterior-wise is pretty much 80% New York. It’s set in 1980s New York but we wanted to subtly intertwine it.” The set which shows the exterior of The Lux was originally part of the Hellboy 2 set.

As the show’s executive producer Lucy Dyke explains “We landed on Budapest because it had so many of those things. It has brilliant crews and it has brilliant studios. There are some standing backlots of New York in Budapest already, which we were able to adapt and build on. It also has seven kilometers of underground tunnels. It was a long journey to find it and put it together.”

Visual inspiration came from many places, including street photography in the 1980s, the documentary Dark Days from the year 2000, and 1970s films. As Forbes describes, “New York is probably one of the most photographed cities ever and I spent weeks going through reportage and photography of the streets and the culture to get my head around how I wanted this to feel. There’s this photograph I found of the subway inside the carriages and there’s this man just holding these brightly colored balloons. You pull out and it’s just rusty, gritty, and shitty on the outside. It looks like it’s falling apart and it feels dangerous. That summed up the show. Good Day Sunshine is this pure, joyful and colourful bubble encased in what New York is really like.”

The scenes shot in New York City include a protest at City Hall Park, with the Municipal Building in the backdrop, Eric running across Park Avenue, Vincent in Central Park with his father who gives him an unexpected lecture on Seneca Village, and one on a basketball court, when detective Ledroit, played by McKinley Belcher III, confronts a man who is involved in underhanded criminal activity inside The Lux nightclub. Forbes says it was a bright sunny day when they shot there and because it was New York, notable people kept dropping by the set: “Claire Danes came on set because she’s friends with Gaby Hoffmann [who played Cassie Anderson, Edgar’s mom]. She just popped by to say hello! This wildly famous cinematographer who had worked with Steven Spielberg walked past and popped his head in at the monitors to say hi. It was this big community thing!”

The subway scenes were also filmed in New York City. Permission to film in the New York City subway through the MTA is always challenging and filming is only allowed in two subway stations. The primary station that was used in Eric, which you can see in shows like Mr. Robot and the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, is the abandoned level of the Bowery station in Manhattan (the other is Church Street in Brooklyn). Actual vintage subway cars (old C trains) were used. The Bowery station is used to film multiple subway stations in the show, with signage switched out on the columns and elsewhere in the station for each scene.

The underground scenes were some of the most vivid in Eric. While the movie Topside recreated New York City’s “Freedom Tunnel” in an abandoned tunnel in Rochester, New York, the scenes in Eric were shot in Budapest’s 20-mile network of underground tunnels formerly used to store beer. The production team built a large portion of the tunnel set in there. Using Dark Days as a jumping off point, Forbes says, “It’s incredibly heartbreaking as it follows a group of people living and surviving under the streets. You see clotheslines hanging out, one of the characters has dogs that he’s feeding and has built a kennel for them…They’re all trying to live their lives with dignity. There are drug addicts and there are people that are escaping from society, and I’m so glad we had that reference. There are so many photographs available online and quite a few photographic books about the people that live underground, so again, I wanted everything to be grounded in naturalism because ultimately, the show on paper is really ‘out there’. In order to believe that, I felt our environments had to be as naturalistic as possible, for us to take the audience on the ride..”

Actress Gaby Hoffman, a native New Yorker, was moved by the sets. As she recounts, “I did grow up in New York in the ‘80s but, oddly, I grew up with tons of Hungarians. Down the street from where I grew up in the Chelsea Hotel, there was a building which housed a theatre troupe called the Squat Theater and had come from Budapest to New York in the late ‘70s. They became a second family to my sister and me – my best friend Cora was a member of the troupe and her father began it – so weirdly, being in a constructed New York of the ‘80s surrounded by Hungarians felt totally right to me. There’s a quality to Budapest that felt very reminiscent of New York in the ‘80s, especially in the winter. When I first walked onto the set on day one, which was our apartment, it looked nothing like the apartment I grew up in – it was much, much fancier – but I started crying. It felt so familiar to me. Every set I walked on, I had this big emotional response. I’m not nostalgic for my childhood at all, but I am nostalgic for New York City in the ‘80s before it was kidnapped by the wealthy and corporations of the world. I was stunned by the feeling that the spaces evoked. It was more than the sum of its parts. It wasn’t just the mug that was chosen or the couch, it was everything, including the light. So that was massively helpful in creating a space for us to inhabit this experience. I was blown away by the production design. My costumes were brilliant. It makes the job so much easier when you’ve been offered this world that just supports the experience that you’re meant to have.”

Next, check out photos of gritty New York City and more film locations in NYC!