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On the day his life changed, Eric Lampaert woke up and saw his hands. What amazed him was that they were moving in front of him, and he appeared to be the person in control of them. We’re drinking coffee in the Groucho Club in London, and at this point he lets go of his cup and wriggles his fingers. Lampaert is an actor and standup whose work has a strong clowning dimension. His hands always seemed to have minds of their own – and, sometimes, strong differences of opinion. But as he got out of bed that fateful morning, marvelling at the magical things on the ends of his arms, he felt only wonder. What he didn’t yet know was that he had lost his memory, and his life would no longer feel like his own.

That was seven years ago, on 17 March 2019, Lampaert says, a date not so much stamped in his memory as retrieved from his journal and recommitted. It was a knock on the door that told him “there were other things out there” beyond his bedroom: the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles, housemates in the home he’d once shared with his estranged wife, and the downstairs neighbour who’d knocked to collect a bottle of bleach. Lampaert had borrowed it to clean coffee stains from the sink, but now he didn’t know the person at the door or the housemate wandering by. “Eric?” his neighbour said. “And I went: ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know …”

The story of how Lampaert, 40, lost his memory – what he calls “the event” – and regained it 18 months later is the subject of his new show, Zero Minus One, which opens at the Edinburgh festival next month. Set in a padded cell, it’s a two-hander between patient and doctor, both played by Lampaert, with bit parts for other voices in his head: Lampaert as himself, lover, child, monster and even as Hugh Grant, all pitching in to make sense of the seven years since that morning when his neighbour drove him to hospital, where he was diagnosed with “confusion delirium” and symptoms of amnesia.

The severance that amnesia brought was so complete that Lampaert didn’t recognise his parents. “I get that you’re this guy’s mum,” he told his mother. “But as far as I’m concerned, Eric died.” Regaining his memory has often felt like bringing himself back to life. “I’m not afraid of dying any more,” he says. “I’ve already done it.”

It sounds a bit Frankensteinian – and writhing around as though some inner monster were searching for the exit is a recurring feature of his routines. But when his memories began to return, he says, they felt like souvenirs from someone else’s life, and he was remaking himself, a sort of visitor in his own body.

“I’m always aware that I’m wearing Eric’s skin,” he says. Speaking of himself in the third person isn’t an affectation so much as a result of his dissociative experience; you feel there could be fourth and fifth and sixth persons and he still wouldn’t have enough perspectives.

Professionally, he had always been known as Eric Lampaert. But when the amnesia struck, he deleted his website and stopped posting to his 100,000 Facebook followers. He adopted new social media identities – “artist formerly known as Eric”, “surfing chaos” – and made ends meet with occasional TV work and one-off gigs heavy on improv. The new show is an attempt to heal, to reunite himself with his name. “I want to shed this story. I need it out of me,” he says.

As much as anything, Zero Minus One is his professional rebirth. “I’m starting again. I want to show people that I am back.”

Lampaert’s amnesia happened in an instant, but it was a lifetime in the making. Raised all over the world before settling in the UK, in 2016 Lampaert arrived in Los Angeles while “riding a wave of success”, as he puts it. In the previous three years, he had got married (to content creator and model Jordan Dwayne), won a Royal Television Society award and an international comedy award at ComediHa in Quebec, and supported Eddie Izzard. He appeared in Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) and “thought it would translate to work [in LA]”, he says. “And it just did not. At all.”

Before his amnesia, Lampaert wanted to change his life. He’d often had anxiety. “Constant thoughts, classic anxiety. You know, the narrator that just won’t stop talking,” he says. His marriage broke down, and in late 2018 he filed for divorce. “It was a very lonely time. It was clear that I was repeating behaviours I’d had in previous relationships.”

What sort of behaviours?

“I cheated because whenever there was an argument, I would feel abandoned, and I would take control of that. It was from abandonment issues when I was a kid.” When his marriage failed, he felt “deep sadness, rejection, shame … But also an acknowledgment that if I am to fall in love again one day, I can’t repeat those habits.”

When hypnotherapy ads popped up on his computer screen, they “felt like a lifeline”. After a few sessions of an online course, he was “visibly different”. Friends thought he’d got taller, and he realised he’d stopped hunching.

“Like maybe everyone else, I didn’t necessarily like so much about me,” he says. But during hypnotherapy, “I’d wake up happy. I’d go to bed grateful.” It was almost frightening, he says, “to feel happy every day” – like Icarus flying too close to the sun.

Alongside anxiety, Lampaert has also intermittently experienced depression. In 2016, he blogged about how cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) helped him to manage suicidal thoughts. Hypnotherapy went deeper than CBT, and offered a new way to understand his mental health.

He “learned the tools of going within”. But, he says: “There was no one there to keep an eye on me.” Just him and his laptop, borderless, careening around his past “in this giddy, perceptive state”.

***

Three specific memories “altered” him when he resurfaced. As a child, Lampaert was “always the outsider”. His father was a British jockey. By the age of 12, Lampaert had lived in France (where his mother came from, and where Lampaert was born), Belgium, Germany, Italy, South Africa and Dubai before the family settled in the English horse-racing town of Newmarket, Suffolk.

At school in England, “I used to get beaten up,” Lampaert says. “For being French.” He switches to an immaculate accent. “I used to speak like zis, I ’ad a very strong accent.” He perfected a southern English voice for protection. “One could argue, is that why I became an actor?”

One day, he was beaten so badly his dental braces cut his lips, but he refuses to make a fuss about that or seem like a victim. “It wasn’t that brutal,” he says. And besides, this wasn’t one of the memories that re-routed him during his hypnotherapy. Instead, he met his 16-year-old self on a Newmarket street, surrounded by a gang of teenagers wielding snooker cues.

“They made me count down from 10 in French,” Lampaert says. On zero, he knew he was for it. What was signficant in hypnotherapy was not the snooker cues, the boys or the countdown, but the “adults walking past – none of them doing anything”. At the last second, someone stepped in, but for Lampaert, the memory encapsulates “the complete abandonment of the adult world” during his youth.

When he was 15 – his second key memory – his parents separated. By then, he’d finally made friends and didn’t want to return to France with his mum. His dad was working away. “So I decided to stay, thinking [my parents] would help. But they didn’t. It was like: ‘Oh, bye then.’ I ended up living out of a bag. I stayed with friends’ families.”

It was only when he got to university in London, to study theatre arts, that other students asked him where he lived, and suggested a word for his situation. “I was like: ‘Oh, was that homelessness?’ That was a huge shock. Because for me, it was a constant, to be living from one place to another.”

At university, he tried standup. He wanted to be an actor, and this route had led Robin Williams, Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy to Hollywood. But even Lampaert’s work made him feel like an outsider, picked upon.

And this was the third memory: in 2009, when he was 21, he made a TV commercial for the Viva TV channel, which was launching in the UK. From the ad’s slogan, he immediately became known as “the Up Your Viva guy”. There were lots of closeups of Lampaert leering into the camera. Granted, he says, it was “a very annoying advert” but he was unprepared for the vitriol that followed, including death threats and “Facebook groups dedicated to how ugly I was”, with comments like: “Hes SOOOO UGLY!!!:eek:”, “That guy looks like a dog” and “Paralysed horse going through an electric fence”.

“I never felt attractive,” Lampaert says. “When I smile, I’ve got big old gums. I was, you know, a little gangly.” Being a comedian, of course, he joked about it. He took Two Tickets to the Gum Show to Edinburgh fringe in 2013. “I used it as comedy, not realising that I was pushing all that pain down.”

When he met Dwayne, “I didn’t believe she found me attractive. There were a lot of insecurities.” He cried heavily after one particular hypnotherapy session. “I went: ‘When’s the last time I actually looked in the mirror?’ And I realised I brushed my teeth looking down.”

In this state of hypersensitivity to himself, his past and his pain, he became a sort of memory “gremlin”, he says. “I don’t need this memory, I don’t need that memory.” He mimes plucking them out of his hand and discarding them. Lampaert was already having a memory clear-out before the amnesia kicked in.

“What I am about to share will sound psychotic – because it was,” he says. He started to see “synchronicities” between his internal and external worlds.

Out for a walk the week before his amnesia happened, he was overtaken by a migration of butterflies, which he took personally. “They were everywhere, on the floor, in the sky, all around. If this was a movie,” he says, “this would be the scene where the character is going through a metamorphosis. Allegories of chaos theory. I mean, for me [the connection] was undeniable.” Or, as he puts it in an email later: “I went crazy.”

He’d thought hypnotherapy was healing him. Instead, he believes now, it triggered amnesia. “The brain was like: ‘Oh I’m done with this stress. Tsssshhhh. Reset.’”

After his neighbour took him to hospital, he escaped. When the authorities found him, he was “5150’d”, or sectioned – “strapped to a stretcher and taken to a more secure location”. He’s not sure how long he spent there, but he remembers raising his hand during a circle discussion to say: “People forget that we can grieve the death of ourselves.” A fellow patient was suitably reassured, he says. “I was in this hospital as the crazy guy, and I helped a fellow crazy.”

Lampaert’s experience of psychosis intensified with Covid-19. In 2018, before the amnesia, he’d written a script he hoped to sell, about a global outbreak of disease. “When the pandemic happened, I thought I wrote the pandemic. I mean, I really lost it,” he says. “That changes a person. Because I thought I was to blame for millions of deaths.”

People are “confused, scared, amazed” when Lampaert tells them what he’s been through. He tried Jungian therapy, an NHS course for people with PTSD, “antidepressants and mood stabilisers”. He read widely, and quotes from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and the philosopher Cornel West.

He kept auditioning for roles and, in 2023, landed the part of Crow (the body, not the voice) alongside Benedict Cumberbatch in The Thing With Feathers. “And that paycheck finally got me a place by myself. I paid it upfront. A year in an apartment in Wembley,” he says.

So how is he feeling now?

“There’s a part of me that wants to forget and move on and be back to, you know, normal. Whatever that means. And then there’s a part of me that’s like: ‘No. Don’t you dare forget.’”

Insight into his own traumatic memories has given him a better understanding of himself – and of others. He’s lived with his dad in Newmarket for the past 18 months, the first time since childhood. “We talk a lot more comfortably,” he says. “I understand us in a different way.” He told his dad he felt abandoned. “He said: ‘Well, yeah, you know, Nan left the house when I was seven.’ And I didn’t know that.” He says he is on “great terms” with his mum.

As for the voices in his head: “Now,” Lampaert says, there is only, ‘Shhh.’”

White noise?

“Silence. It’s really quite nice.”

I can’t help wondering if life for Lampaert is better now, with his new, rearranged “relationship with the universe”, or whether it was better before the amnesia.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m lonely, and at the same time I feel connected to something much larger than myself. Technically, life is much better, but I feel very alien.”

Relationships might be easier if he hadn’t been through what he’s been through, he says. “I look at people in pubs laughing, and I’m like: ‘Oh, I don’t have that.’”

When he finally came back to himself, 18 months after the amnesia, he did it by making himself laugh. Reflecting on the pandemic, his perceived role in it and “the burden I was carrying”, he whispered to himself:“A death is sad. A dozen is a tragedy. But millions? Well, that’s pretty impressive.”

It wasn’t a joke for anyone else in the world. “A ridiculous thing to say. And honestly, I hadn’t laughed in such a long time.” He laughed so hard, tears streamed down his face. “And I held on to myself and I went: ‘Oh, there you are.’” He puts his hand on his heart. “What I am – the essence, maybe – is just laughter, good humour. When the pain becomes a joke,” he says, “it’s soothing.”

• Eric Lampaert: Zero Minus One is at Just The Tonic at the Edinburgh festival fringe, 6-30 August. For tickets visit www.edfringe.com