Richard Gadd set tongues wagging with the sometimes excruciatingly autobiographical Baby Reindeer, an only somewhat fictionalized account of how Gadd was stalked by a lonely woman in his local bar in London. The show was a massive hit, and a lawsuit duly followed. Fortunately, viewers are taking his return to the small screen in Half Man with much less scrutiny; bulked up and scarily ripped, his performance as the violent, reckless Ruben — locked in a destructive spiral with his equally damaged step-brother Niall (Jamie Bell) — is far removed from Baby Reindeer’s amiable loser Donny Dunn.
Flashing back to 1980s Glasgow, Half Man spans 30 years in the two men’s lives, initially with newcomers Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robertson as the young Ruben and Niall respectively.Here, the standup-turned-actor-turned–showrunner discusses his long haul to the top after spending many, many lean years in the grassroots wilderness of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
GADD: Well, I wrote the initial pilot script back in 2019, and then Baby Reindeer was commissioned and I put it on the shelf for four years. And then when Baby Reindeer was coming to an end — even throughout Baby Reindeer — I kept thinking about it, how I wanted to return to it. So, when Baby Reindeer finished, I thought, “Well, that’s what I’m going to move on to next, because I haven’t forgotten about it in four years.” Part of me thought when I put it on the shelf that I might never take it back off, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wanted to do it. So, I went back to it, and two years later— two very, very intense years later — here we are.
DEADLINE: Did you have any reservations about doing something so dark straight after Baby Reindeer?
GADD: Not really. I like to keep working, and I thought that one of the things that I shouldn’t do in the aftermath of Baby Reindeer was bask in the sun too long. I just felt like I wanted to keep the momentum going, and I thought that the best thing I could do to, I guess, was just to try and just get better, because I’m very interested in just trying to get better and keep improving. Sitting back and just sort of enjoying the wave for a while just didn’t seem the right thing to do. I wanted to test myself, I wanted almost to gamble my stock, and, ultimately, I just wanted to throw myself into another project. I had another story to tell, and I think that has to come before any other opportunity that might arise. I almost didn’t think about it in a way. It’s an interesting question. I just thought, “This is what I’m doing, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
DEADLINE: Which came first? Was it the scenario or the two characters? It’s a kind of John Steinbeck kind of melodrama.
GADD: That’s a nice reference, John Steinbeck. I think, really, I thought the idea was that basically you take two broken men in their later life and you could contextualize how they got to that point — to contextualize broken masculinity, to a certain degree. But I thought I’d be doing a disservice to broken masculinity if all I did was explore the broken masculinity, or the male repression, or the male rage. I feel like some shows explore that stuff, but they’re kind of lacking the context — like, why are men so drawn to each other in varying toxic ways? Well, to begin with, it has to be intoxicating. I think most things that are toxic are intoxicating to begin with. Drugs are extremely toxic, but for a lot of people they’re intoxicating to begin with. And I felt the same about male camaraderie — the kind that leaks into a kind of codependency in the way that it does with Niall and Ruben.
So, I thought in order to buy the toxicity of their relationship, you would need to actually see why they’re so drawn to each other in the first place. And that’s how I suppose I came up with the kind of multi… [Pauses.] How do I put it? The kind of atypical structure of each episode — years apart, you meet them at an intersection and a vital point in their relationship in each episode.
DEADLINE: The framing device is Niall’s wedding. Was that always there? In drama, nothing good ever happens at a wedding.
GADD: Yeah, if there’s a wedding on TV, you know there’s trouble brewing. But, yeah, it felt right to me. I remember when I came up with the idea for the first scene. I always think an idea is good if it stays with you in the days after when you first started thinking about it. I was on the Tube, and I was like, “I can’t stop thinking about this idea,” and so I got the notes app out my phone. I’ve probably still got it on this phone. I just started to write the opening scene, and the opening scene probably remained roughly the exact same from when it was on the notes on my phone: Punch, flashback, flashback to school, now they’re in the bar…
I know we open the show with sort of a ceilidh montage, but then you’ve got these two men opposite each other. How did they get there? One’s sort of an example of stereotypical alpha maleness, the other a kind of stereotypical beta maleness, although I don’t agree with those words, in a way. Everything’s subjective, but you take those archetypes, you put them in a two-shot, face-to-face, and you tell the story of how they got there. And that’s kind of remained consistent all the way through the show. That first scene never changed, really.
DEADLINE: I was very interested in the music choices you made, but you’re too young to have lived through that time. Why did you choose that particular period for this story?
GADD: Well, I’m obsessive with music. I don’t listen to much past the ’80s, to be honest. If you saw my vinyl collection, it’s ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. So, I don’t know whether I was born in the wrong musical time, although there’s amazing music, modern music and music in the ’90s, don’t get me wrong, but music is just something I obsess over religiously. Everything in Baby Reindeer, every song, some of those songs existed in the live show of Baby Reindeer, and then all of them, well, kind of almost most of them, if not all of them, were on a kind of playlist that I’d put together before for the writing process. And the same with Half Man. There’s some songs that just spoke to me about the era, whether it was a sort of swagger that Ruben had. It didn’t make it into the show, but The Stranglers’ “Peaches” is a good example; that song was in it because it reminded me of the swagger of certain men, mixed with their insensitive objectivity. It just felt very Ruben. You can almost imagine Ruben singing that song in the height of his youth.
Music just means a lot to me, but I studied things religiously because I always wanted it to be like a soft thing. Like in the opening episode, we softly hinted what’s going on in the era. For example, you see Alby and Niall in Episode 2 discussing Live Aid, and that was to me just a nice little nod. I never wanted it to be so era-defined, but there are these little hints of things that were going on. We had Echo & the Bunnymen in that episode too.
DEADLINE: Why the ’80s? Was there a particular reason for that?
GADD: Well, I mean, the ‘80s is that phrase, isn’t it, in the U.K., it’s like if somebody says something intolerant or unacceptable, you go, “I didn’t realize it was still the ’80s.” So, it just felt right to go back to that time. It’s become famously the most unaccepting time in U.K. Television and radio, everything was expanding, but I suppose the attitudes hadn’t caught up with that expansion. So, the stuff you got on television and films, and even in society, there was just casual ignorance everywhere, and I thought it was a way to repress our two central characters, by flashing back to the time when, as a U.K. society, we were the most intolerant.
DEADLINE: Were you thinking of playing a part while you were writing it? You could play both parts easily. When did you decide what you wanted to do?
GADD: I should have done a Tom Hardy come to think of it. [Laughs.] No, I’m joking. I wanted Jamie for Niall. But it’s funny; initially, I didn’t really want to be in it, and I thought if I was going to be in it I was going to do a cameo appearance. I actually had my eye on one of the policemen. But as more and more went on, Baby Reindeer was such a hit, and there was a bit of a clamoring — well, quite a big bit of clamoring — from the channels to get me involved in a meaningful way. It would help sell the show, and I think they thought I’d add a layer of authorship to the piece. Jamie also really wanted me to do it.
You see, we ended up with dream casting. I never write parts for actors. That’s not what inspires me. I try to come up with a character, and then once you’re happy with the character, you think of what actors can do this, or you hold auditions and see who comes. For example, I finished writing the episodes that I was ready to share, we were ready to start the casting process, and we sat down and we talked about dream casting, which casting directors usually do, to get a sense of what you’re thinking. I remember going through all the main characters, and for Niall, I said, “Someone like Jamie Bell, maybe.” And as soon as I said it, I was just immediately like, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
There’s a lot of reasons I like Jamie Bell. He’s a very established actor, very revered actor, but there’s still a sense of mystique around him. He’s not celebrity in that respect. I think sometimes celebrity can get in the way of storytelling, but there’s a mystique around him, even though he’s very respected and celebrated, I’ve always thought he was underrated. And I’ve always loved his vulnerability as an actor, and I thought Niall takes you to some places where he pushes and tests your buttons, but you need to still feel some sort of love and sympathy for him. I thought Jamie would do that in spades.
So, Jamie came on board and then I suppose he was really keen to work with me in an acting capacity, and then so was HBO and BBC. And all signs pointed to fact that there was only one character remaining of male significance that I could play, that would have a meaningful impact on the show, and that was Ruben. It sort of terrified me and I thought, “Oh god, how do I get people to buy Donny Dunn as Ruben Pallister?” I mean, it’s quite a leap. Baby Reindeer was so ubiquitous in a way, and also people obviously think it’s a sort of hybrid version of me. So how do you get people out of that mindset and seeing me in a biker jacket? I thought, “I’m going to have to change everything about myself in order to do this.” And I went about it with a complete commitment, I suppose.
GADD: Well, I mean, I knew I needed to change everything. Fear is a big driver, because I kept thinking, “Oh my god, this whole show kind of hinges on this.” You’ve got the young Ruben, he’s kind of charismatic and he’s young. I think when it gets to the older Ruben when he’s starting to… [Pauses.] I mean, I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but his mind is starting to unravel, and it’s like he can’t keep his demons in anymore. He needs to be kind of terrifying. He needs to go to some quite extreme places, and I kept thinking, “Hmm… Donny Dunn doing all that?”
I knew I needed to disappear. So, I changed my body, my hair, my beard, my voice. I did pretty much everything I could to kind of move away from the character in Baby Reindeer, because not only did I think it was important to transform so that people would buy the character more, but also just because I think it worked for the character: You’ve got a big, burly, scary guy at the heart of the piece. But it helped me. I wanted to feel what it would be like to feel powerful in my body. I liked that physical transformation. I hate going to set and they put a bit of gel in your hair and put you in a shirt and then you’re suddenly some guy from accounts.
So, I’m very big in that kind of detail, having some facial hair or a different hairstyle that’s different to yours in order to get into a character. But the body thing was really different. Like Jamie, There were times when I was in the scene with him and I was absolutely towering over him and I felt it — I felt that I was much, much bigger than him. And not only do I think it helped us perform, I think it looked interesting on screen as well.
DEADLINE: Did any of Ruben rub off on you afterwards?
GADD: No, I sort of shook him off quite soon afterwards. The thing is, I always said, “Oh, I’m never going to stop going to the gym.” But it’s funny how much your motivation — like being topless on camera — is very good for those times when you’re in the house, and you’re like, “I can’t work out today.” You think, “No, I’m topless on camera. Let’s move.” But the edit was all-consuming, and so I just gave it up. I still go to the gym, but just not as much. So, I’ve lost a bit of weight, but Ruben was very beefy and there was a lot of fat on the muscle and stuff like that. So, yeah, I wanted to take a bit of it back off.
DEADLINE: In this show, you’ve got two actors and two younger actors playing the same people, but younger. How did you get that going? You didn’t direct the show, did you?
GADD: Well, I did direct the show, but I’m a showrunner in the classic sense of being across all the creative decisions. So, I was always meaningfully feeding into every aspect of production. And those boys I took a shine to right at the very, very start. Funny enough, Mitchell and Stuart were two of the earliest people to audition for the project, and I was pretty set on them very, very early on. We went through the same thing on Baby Reindeer with Jess [Gunning] and Martha, where somebody comes in very early on, absolutely smashes it, but it almost feels like too good to be true so early on. So, you almost have to go through the motions of meeting everyone just to make sure you’ve got it right.
But it’s funny, I think about out the five people who auditioned first, they were in that batch of five, and I was pretty convinced. But we did all the rounds and we saw I would say about 200 people in the end for the parts, only to circle back to my initial feelings on these two magnificent young lads, and, yeah, it had to be them. Everyone has so much say in the casting process, the channels ultimately feed in meaningfully and stuff like that, but they saw my passion around them and they were happy to go with me.
GADD: Well, I thought it was very important that I didn’t show them the later scripts, because the characters kind of change. I’m not the same person I was when I was 15. I’m not the same person I was when I was 25. Maybe I’m not even the same person I was when I was 30. And I wanted the characters to change as they get older, and I wanted that shift to be surprising, and I hope it kind of was in a way. Have you seen all six?
GADD: I wanted the characters to change. So, when the boys would ask, “Oh, can I read Episodes 4, 5, and 6?” I would be like, “No, I don’t think that’s quite right, because in your character’s timeline you don’t know where you’re going at that age. I want you to be the embodiment of youth and the confusing nature of youth. If you know, for example, that Ruben starts having a decline in later life, are you going to try to maybe sew those seeds in your performance?” I said, “Go exactly off episodes 1, 2, and 3, and don’t worry about what’s to come. The characters as adults are very different to the characters as children. That’s just life.” I write these lines and I’m obsessed with cadence and rhythm of speech and timing and comedy and all these kinds of things. I said, “Just drill deep into the text, get off book.”
And they brought so much soul to the piece. Actors come to you, and they do an amazing audition, and then they’re like, “Well, what more do I have to do?” I always say, “Hey, you brought so much to the audition, you don’t have to do much more. Let’s just add a few more brushstrokes and do a few more tweaks.” I just wanted to give them the freedom to roam within the context of the script. Yeah, they were young professionals, always off book. It’s amazing how many actors aren’t, but they were always off book, always professional, always adaptable. I think the world of them.
DEADLINE: How did it work with Jamie? Did you spend time together? It would be very hard to go method with those two roles.
GADD: Yeah, I’d have been chasing him around the set while he was trying to get in the makeup chair. Me and Jamie hit it off instantly. We sometimes got on too well, because we had quite a laugh together actually, which I think helped. I think it helped a lot of scenes. I’ve never been so sure of anything as my ability to make Jamie Bell laugh. So, we got on really well. It’s funny how in the way that Niall and Ruben bind through an intense situation where they’re forced together, it felt quite similar with me and Jamie, because I think the second scene we ever shot was the final scene, without giving away too many spoilers, the very final scene in the barn, and that was the second thing we did. If I remember correctly, the opening was the first, the actual opening where you see us opposite each other, and then the scene at the end where we have the grand finale, shall we say. I’m trying to not give any spoilers here.
GADD: And I suppose that by doing that scene second, we had to get very used to each other’s personal space very, very quickly, and you have to do things and scream and shout and be vulnerable and go to some extreme psychological places together. And once you’d done that, I felt like we were kind of symbiotic. We’d gone through the worst of it together, almost like Ruben and Niall did when they first came into each other’s lives.
DEADLINE: You went through the wringer with Baby Reindeer, because a lot of people have an obsession with decoding fiction: Everything that you put on screen had to be real, in some way. Do you worry that you might be laying yourself open to more of the same with Half Man?
GADD: Well, I suppose I can never predict the audience’s reaction to anything. But Half Man is a work of fiction. I think it’s that whole Roland Barthes thing, isn’t it, about the death of the author. I can’t remember what he said, but it’s something like, “For art to thrive, that you need to have the death of the author” — that kind of thing. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but Half Man is a work of fiction, really, at the end of the day. There’s certainly themes of struggle and identity crisis and trauma that I can relate to. I think, in a way, every piece of writing is autobiographical, to a certain extent. Even horror shows are written from a place of what scares the author the most, and most sci-fi shows are grounded in human truth. If you look at Interstellar, what is it without a father’s need, desire, to save his daughter? And I think everything is a kind of expression of how somebody sees characters or sees human beings or sees the world. So, I suppose every piece is autobiographical to a certain extent, but this is a work of fiction and it’s not based on anyone at all, and I do believe — and hope — that people will receive it that way.
DEADLINE: What’s fascinating is that you started out with standup comedy, and that was a very big part of Baby Reindeer. Half Man has nothing to do with standup comedy, but you do seem to use some of the dynamics of comedy and apply them to serious drama.
GADD: Yeah. Well, I always try and keep an eye on the comedy, just because I think all the best comedies ever have dramatic elements and the best comedy characters have great tragedy in them, and I think all the best dramas have comedy in them. The Sopranos was hilarious. It was really super-funny, brilliant dialogue, brilliant characters. The humor was prevalent all the way throughout that. You look at characters like David Brent or Basil Fawlty, they’re seeped in tragedy and repression, especially David Brent — his desire to be loved and liked is so humanly relatable and that’s why I think it works so well
And so, I think I just think it’s true to life, even in the darkest of moments that you get in Half Man, and I suppose Baby Reindeer, that comedy emerges. I mean, I think if we think back to all the saddest times in our lives, there’s maybe ironic pockets of laughter we can remember during all those times as well. It is not that I set out to make sure there’s comedy in it, it’s just a natural byproduct, I think, of writing life; sometimes funny things happen, wild things happen, and it just comes out that way. I almost think that you almost can’t have one without the other.
DEADLINE: You mentioned the “grand finale.” Did you have any arguments about the ending?
GADD: That’s an interesting question. What did you think of it?
DEADLINE: I liked it, in an abstract way. I just wondered if there was any pushback from HBO or the BBC.
GADD: No, I wouldn’t say there was pushback. I think everyone was quite excited about the ending. I never really want to explain too much the meaning because I always think that if I outline my full intentions behind it, it might ruin the debate. I mean, the ending’s come up a lot in people who’ve seen it, conversations with people who’ve seen it, press people, and everyone has a wildly different opinion on the ending on what’s happened. I think that’s maybe more interesting than me saying what it exactly is.
Ultimately, Half Man is a show about filling out gaps. We ask the audience at so many points during the show to fill in the gaps of what’s happened in between the episodes, to almost put together a jigsaw structure of these two men’s lives, and it felt then only natural that there would be an ending where the audience would have to fill in a bit for themselves as well. I mean, there are myriad things that could have happened in that barn. There are myriad ways you can take Ruben’s reaction at the end. There’s so many ways that we can interpret it, and I think that that, hopefully, is what speaks to its power. But there weren’t any arguments. I think everyone’s appreciated — well, I hope — how daring, hopefully, it is.
DEADLINE: What’s next for you? You’ve had a pretty full-on about five years or so.
GADD: Well, it’s been pretty intense for ages, because I used to take a show to the Edinburgh Fringe every single year. So, really, it was 10 years to Edinburgh every single year, and then six years of television shows pretty constantly. So, I think it’s time for a break. We’ll see. I bet you I go for a break and I’m like, “I can’t do this. Let’s get back to work.” I’ve got some projects up my sleeve I can’t really talk about. I just did a part in Husbands, which is an Apple TV show with Juno Temple playing the lead. She’s wonderful, and that was a joy, but I guess that’s all I’m really allowed to say at this point. But I’ve always got ideas and stuff up my sleeve and stuff I want to move on to next. So, after a little break, I’ll get back to work.
GADD: Never say never. Never say never. I mean, my standup was so… [Pauses.] I mean, to go back to the kind of comedy-tragedy thing that we were talking about earlier, my standup was very tragic in a lot of ways. It was kind of theatrical in a lot of ways, so my face never fitted on that circuit anyway, on a Saturday night at the Glee Club in Nottingham. It wasn’t what people were paying for, I don’t think. But to do a comedy show? Maybe. Maybe. Comedy is a brilliant art form, and, yeah, I’d never turn my back on it completely.
Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy.
Comments On Deadline Hollywood are monitored. So don't go off topic, don't impersonate anyone, and don't get your facts wrong.
Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() );