Obsidian/00.03 News/Richard Gadd on life after Baby Reindeer.md

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Date: 2024-11-13
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# Richard Gadd on life after Baby Reindeer

**Picture the [Emmy](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/tags/emmys)**: a statuette of a winged woman in gold, her back arched as she holds a colossal atom aloft. She is a symbol of the muse, of [art](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/tags/art), of the science of [television](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/tags/tv). The man who designed her in 1948 used his wife as a model; she is majestic. Viewed in another way, she is two sharp prongs eye-width apart, and a lethally heavy base. How the hell do you get *three* of them through security at LAX? “With great difficulty,” laughs a jetlagged Richard Gadd. He returned to [London](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/tags/london) a couple of days ago having won everything he was nominated for: Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series, Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, and – the big one – Outstanding Limited Series, for which he crept onto the stage from the back because he hadn’t had time to return to his seat (he made his presenter Jean Smart jump).

“Here, I’ll show you a photo,” Gadd says, scrolling through his camera roll to find the person least impressed with his awards: the lady at [airport](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/airport-outfit-men) security. The bagged symbol of excellence is gripped in her gloved hand; her face says she could be holding a fridge sandwich from a motorway service station. Gadd snapped the picture through the security screen while he watched, hysterical, as his third trophy was siphoned off into the place your bag goes if you’re about to have to explain something. He can’t believe it happened. He can’t believe *any* of this happened. “I wake up every morning and I am just… I think the phrase is kind of – I feel *windswept*?” he says. “I almost don't know. I just feel knocked off my feet.”

Shirt by Dunhill. Blazer by Ami. Cardigan by Mfpen. Tie by NN07.

The phenomenon that is [*Baby Reindeer*](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/baby-reindeer-netflix-richard-gadd-interview) began with Gadd’s critically lauded one-man [theatre](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/tags/theatre) show, a pandemic, and a mass cancellation. The show’s West End run was supposed to begin in the doomed days of early April 2020; Gadd was on the stage, rehearsing, when he heard that everything was shutting down. He lay on the stage’s revolving floor as it spun, looking up at the ceiling: over 10 years of gigging and Edinburgh shows had led to this moment.

During lockdown, Gadd took his autobiographical play about having a stalker and turned it into a TV series – one that combined it with elements of a previous show, *Monkey See, Monkey Do*, also autobiographical, about sexual abuse. Sitting in his new “fixer-upper” of a flat in London, he wrote what he says were “thousands” of drafts of the show that would go on to be No 1 on [Netflix](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/gallery/best-netflix-movies) around the world: just him and a plastic garden chair, because all the shops that sold furniture were closed. “I remember thinking, This is the fast track to madness,” he says. “I'm writing this really dark show, and I've got no soft furnishings. Nothing on the walls. I didn’t have a TV. My [mattress](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/gallery/best-mattress) was on the floor. There was no bed frame.”

Four years later, all anyone was talking about was *Baby Reindeer*, or at least it seemed that way. “I couldn't escape from it,” says Gadd, whose Instagram follower count shot up from 3,000 to over 400,000 in less than a month (it’s now well over 600k). “Turn on the TV, there'd be something on the TV. Turn on the radio, they'd be talking about it. I'd go to Sainsbury's – I'd be in the newspapers.” Even his parents started to get doorstepped by journalists; he had to send them on an extended [holiday](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/travel). “I was getting really upset at that point,” he says. “I was really worried for them.” He began taking Lime bikes everywhere instead of the Tube; people would corner him and the tenor of their fandom was unpredictable – unnerving in a small, inescapable space. Sometimes they just wanted help or advice, which he felt unqualified to give.

In the beginning, the frenzy was about the show: this nuanced, messy, human story with no clear victim and no clear perpetrator, which explored the complexities and far-reaching radiation zone that is the aftermath of abuse. It was progressive, deeply personal and vulnerable – the kind of show that might have changed things for you, too, if you had experienced something similar. But the attention soon changed tone. Internet sleuths tracked down a theatre director they believed the show’s sexually abusive TV executive was based on. (Gadd issued a statement saying they had got it wrong; the police investigated the online abuse.) Fans then turned their attention to finding the real-life Martha, the woman who becomes the stalker of Gadd’s character Donny. They pinpointed 59-year-old Fiona Harvey, who then went on [*Piers Morgan Uncensored*](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/piers-morgan-interview-2024) to talk about it, before filing a £130m lawsuit against Netflix for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, gross negligence and violations of her right of publicity.

Gadd cannot talk about any of this, not while the case against Netflix is pending. He cringes and apologises. He has the vibe of a man who would once freely talk about anything you asked him, as deep or as personal as you wanted to go – my God, just look at his work. But if you’ve been following his interviews, you’ll notice the scope becoming smaller. Less gets said. While he gave [John Cena](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/john-cena-oscars-2024-rolex)’s name to *The Hollywood Reporter* in May as an example of someone who sent him early encouragement during the mayhem, he now tries to keep everyone anonymous, and says he’ll tell me names when the voice recorder is turned off. He converses like a man who has had bumper bars pulled up around him so he doesn’t veer off course, so it’s now easier to just apply them to everything than pick them up and drag them around a specific topic. Almost everything is off limits, detail-wise – places, names – a habit from having been stalked, maybe, but now also legal instruction. But as for the emotional truth of it? Well, that’s what he’s all about.

T-shirt by Sunspel. Cardigan by Paul Smith. Jacket by NN07. Trousers by The Frankie Shop.

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**As Gadd said in one of his Emmy acceptance speeches**, 10 years ago he could not have predicted this. Not just the raging volume of success, but simply that he survived the hell he was in. When “Martha” walked into the pub where he worked in Camden, sparking the events that would go on to become *Baby Reindeer*, Gadd was already dealing with the psychological aftermath of a sexual assault. In order to play the on-screen version of himself at that time, he lost a drastic amount of weight, dropping from 96kg to 68kg. The result is not just gaunt but emotionally fragile. Haunted.

“When I moved to London, I’d run so much just to come to terms with what happened to me. And I’d listen to The Pogues,” he says. (He loves The Pogues with such an intensity that he has followed them around the UK on tours.) “There’s a song called ‘The Dark Streets of London’. I really felt like the city was oppressing me, and it goes, ‘I’m buggered to damnation, and I haven’t got a penny to wander the dark streets of London’*.* I was just like, Well, that is kind of what I’m going through.”

Gadd had found comedy as a student, but in the beginning he wasn’t using it as a way of processing his life. His first five-minute set went well enough to propel him through the next 100 (mostly bombs); for his fifth gig, he boldly took an hour-long show to [Edinburgh](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/gallery/edinburgh-guide-best-hotels-bars-restaurants). (He tells me that if there is a handbook of cardinal sins in comedy, he committed all of them within the first six months.) “The early shows were quite debauched and punky and anti-comedy and in-your-face,” he says. It was the kind of prop [comedy](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/best-comedy-films) he performs in *Baby Reindeer* to pin-drop silence.

Shirt and jumper by Connolly. Tie by Gant.

He is famous on the circuit for pissing off other comedians with his nervous energy backstage, to the point where some would refuse to be in the same room as him. It didn’t matter if it was a theatre with an audience of a thousand, or a room above a pub with just five people – he would be equally nervous for both. “There’s almost nothing worse than dying on stage – it takes a bit of you every single time,” he says. Why and how, then, do comedians keep going?

Gadd looks briefly energised in the midst of his jetlag: “You have those moments where it's almost healing you as it's happening. It's like a drug, I guess, isn't it? I've had gigs where they've gone so well I've cried after them because I just didn't really know what to do with my emotions. And then I've had gigs that were so bad I've cried after them as well. There's nothing like the feeling of dying on your arse, and there's nothing like the feeling of smashing the place.” Performing his brand of early comedy meant the deaths had an extra edge to them. “When you go out in wigs and teeth and prance around it’s like, Oh this guy is having a breakdown,” he laughs. “It’s like there’s a deeper level to the death. It’s like, Oh, there’s something wrong with him.”

In a way, they were right. “I wouldn't call \[those early shows\] autobiographical, but they would often lean into stuff I was going through,” he says. “Those shows still had traces of sexual abuse, but they were never done from like a deep, meaningful place.” Reviewers would pick up on it, on his “obsession with gay sex” and the relentless degradation and depravity. “They were like, Why does he always go into this territory? And why does he always go to these squalid extremes?” Gadd would read the reviews and be offended. “I was like, I have been through those things and they’re acting like I haven’t,” he says. “But I realised I just wasn’t doing it in the right way. It was almost like I was trying to admit to it without admitting to it.”

By 2016, the juxtaposition of a man doing prop gags while his personal life fell apart was too extreme. “I couldn’t keep it up any longer,” Gadd says. “I remember having a choice where either I join them up and do a comedy show but actually admit what’s happened to me, or I step away \[from the industry\] and try to deal with it on my own time.” He had heard of “art as catharsis” but never really understood it until he hit bottom. “I thought, well, that's my only recourse left. I've tried all the [therapies](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/therapy-explained). Let's try this.”

Shirt by Gant. T-shirt by Sunspel.

In *Baby Reindeer*, a viral video of Donny Dunn having a breakdown on stage and recounting the story of his sexual abuse fills the role of the Edinburgh show *Monkey See, Monkey Do* in Gadd’s real life. As in the television series, people responded to his vulnerability in a way he found healing. It got him his first ever standing ovation. “I was so ashamed of what had happened to me: the extent of it, the fact that I was a bit older. I punished myself for being naive. It was so bad,” he says. “And then I felt this acceptance from the industry, and my friends. I played on a football team; I was really worried what they were going to think, and they were almost the nicest people about it. Then I realised that a lot of the judgments that I’d thrown on myself about how people would react were my own judgments. It really was the start of me getting better.” In a reference to an earlier coping mechanism, the show was all performed while [running on a treadmill](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/an-expert-approved-treadmill-workout-running), sweating in pink Lycra shorts. (He returned to intense running after filming the rape scenes in *Baby Reindeer*, but says he tries not to rely on exercise too much now.)

Unlike his previous shows, where he had his eye on reviews and awards, Gadd says *Monkey See, Monkey Do* was the first one he had written exclusively for himself; ironically, it won Best Comedy Show at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards in 2016. Its success led to “the *Monkey See, Monkey Do* effect”: other monkeys saw it and did it, digging up their trauma and putting it on stage too (some darkly mourned the fact that nothing bad had ever happened to them, leaving them without a plot for a smash-hit Edinburgh show). *Baby Reindeer* has only intensified that phenomenon. “People like to blame me, usually jokingly, for it all – but it was happening way before me,” says Gadd, pointing out that it was not unusual to make a serious point at the end of a show before saying goodnight. While he definitely wasn’t the first to serve up his trauma as entertainment, he was possibly one of the first to go to such extremes. But the new zeitgeist worried him. “I was worried people were doing it because they felt pressured or forced, and I think that can lead to people re-traumatising themselves. I feel like it always has to be for you.”

When Gadd describes why turning trauma into art is cathartic, it sounds like the surgical removal of a malignant tumour. “When you start to process it into a piece of work, you almost manage to – at least in my experience – take it out of your body, and out of your pores. You start to see it as something a little bit distant from you,” he says. “I’m not saying everyone should write [film](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/tags/film) scripts or do plays. But I think everyone in their life has at some point felt so wretched that they go, ‘Dear diary…*’* and they just get all out on the paper, and by the end of it there's always a feeling of relief. I think writing and processing it into the word really helps. It helps get you out of your head.”

Suit and shirt by Paul Smith. Tie by Prada.

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**What makes *Baby Reindeer* remarkable** is the fact that it’s not just reckoning with what happened, it’s a man reckoning with himself. When Gadd transformed the stage show into a television series in lockdown, it was his own moral grey area that he found most difficult to write – like the flirting that might be seen to have provoked or encouraged the stalking. These are parts that people argue about on the internet: about whether he invited it, about whether or not he was the bad guy. When he was writing the show in lockdown on his plastic garden chair, Gadd found that the work got better the more honest he was with himself and the audience about his part in it. It was therapeutic, but also calculated. It was what gave the show its messy human heart.

“I miss television characters like Tony Soprano or Don Draper – you loved them and you hated them at the same time,” he says, then quickly assures me that he is not putting his own show on the same level as *The Sopranos* or *Mad Men*, two shows he loves, but that he’s getting at something: “*I think that is life*. I think that every person has flaws and every person has positives. It's a bit morally challenging, and I wanted to get that kind of nuance back. Admitting to your mistakes in an age of moral enlightenment – it's tricky, and it's kind of exhausting. But how often do humans make the right decision in life, you know? And when you've been sexually abused, at least in my experience, it takes an amount of your core strength away from you for a very long time. It’s very hard to lean on your own inner strength to make bold and strong decisions.”

The strength it took to be brutally honest about all of this is what audiences felt all over the world. “I feel like *Baby Reindeer* stood out because a lot of work has become a little bit fearful and a little bit morally forward,” says Gadd, “and I think people are so scared of ruffling feathers and saying anything bad or presenting themselves in negative ways. And I think as a result, some humanity has been lost in some television shows.”

Suit and shirt by Paul Smith. Tie by Prada. Socks by Pantherella. Shoes by Paul Smith.

He hopes that the Emmy wins will draw the attention back to what the show was doing artistically, away from the legal fallout currently pending in California. But he hopes its lasting legacy is something else entirely. “A lot of referral rates for abuse charities and stalking charities are up considerably because of *Baby Reindeer*,” he says, listing the statistics: referrals to We Are Survivors, the male sexual abuse charity of which Gadd is an ambassador, are up 200% in website hits, 80% in referrals – and 53% of that 80% cite *Baby Reindeer* as the reason why they’re there. Referrals to stalking charities, he says, are up 47% on the whole. “It's done a phenomenal amount of good in the world. I hope that people remember that as well, you know, in amongst everything.”

Right now – as in this afternoon – Gadd is focusing on his new show, currently called [*Lions*](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/lions-richard-gadd-bbc-series). A BBC lanyard pokes out from the collar of his [jumper](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/fashion/gallery/cashmere-jumpers-mens); he has a meeting there today. What can he tell me about the show? Not much, he cringes again, bound this time not by legalities but by the rules of press releases and [spoilers](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/anti-spoiler-culture). It’s about two brothers. It’s only autobiographical in the sense that everything is, in some way, drawn from life. Would he ever go back to straight autobiography? Is there anything left to tell? “I don’t know, have I sort of… expunged everything?” He thinks for a bit. “I thought I had another live show in me, but at the same time…I’ve given my life to the world as a sort of entity for people to pick apart and scrutinise, and… I think I might have to have my life for myself for a bit now,” he says. “I think, for now, that’s the end of the autobiography.”

As for the three Emmys, he gave one to his mum (Outstanding Acting – it was she who encouraged him to audition when the school put on *Macbeth*) and one to his dad (Outstanding Writing: “He encouraged me to beaver away at the laptop”). When he arrived home to his still-unfinished flat to find a bathtub in the middle of the sitting room, he clutched his remaining Emmy in his hand and had nowhere to put it. “I \[didn’t even have a\] toilet or shower,” he laughs. “I was like, Wow, the bright lights of Hollywood are pretty far away now.”

Shirt, tie and vest by Ferragamo. Trousers by Filippa K.

*Styling by **Kit Swann***  
*Hair by **Paul Donovan***  
*Grooming by **Pia Gartner***  
*Tailoring by **Faye Oakenfull***  
*Set Design by **Josh Shovell***

 
 

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