Young Eric Olson

In the dramatized flashbacks that thread through Wormwood, young Eric Olson is a small boy in a comfortable 1950s household, orbiting his father Frank with the uncomplicated devotion of a child who has no reason yet to look closely at anything. He is glimpsed at the dinner table, at play, folded into ordinary domestic warmth.

Errol Morris builds his re-enactments like memory itself — soft-focus, fragmentary, repeated from different angles — and Jack Doke's stillness as the boy gives those scenes their ache. He barely has lines; his presence alone supplies the innocence the rest of the series will spend hours picking apart, a fixed point of ordinary childhood the adult Eric keeps circling back to.