Despite creating and starring in a massively popular Netflix series, Richard Gadd had no plans to rest on his laurels. Six months after wrapping Baby Reindeer, his semi-autobiographical dark comedy, he’d already started pre-production on his next project. Half Man, a limited series airing on HBO tracing a turbulent relationship between two brothers over several decades. Audiences might think they know where the story is headed, but Gadd manages to subvert expectations at every turn.
“I thought early on that the most interesting thing was to show two examples of toxic male behavior,” Gadd said during a recent conversation with Gold Derby. “You have the more obvious example in Ruben (played as a teenager by Stuart Campbell and by Gadd as an adult), the version people think of when they think of violent male behavior; but there’s an insidious version, which Niall (played by Mitchell Robertson and Jamie Bell) inhabits by the end. I really wanted this question mark at the end of the show — which I think has succeeded — because there’s so much debate around it online as to who actually is the more toxic one.”
In this unfiltered interview, Gadd traces the evolution of the series and its characters, explains what the story means, and reveals whether he’s ready to return to his comedic origins after working with such heavy material.
Gold Derby: You’ve said this series is about the dangers of repression and how toxic masculinity can be intoxicating. What attracts you to writing about those themes?
Richard Gadd: I’ve had my own battles in my life that have been well-documented around senses of identity, battles with masculinity, societal expectations, and coming to terms with things. A lot of people’s biggest battle in life is themselves — accepting themselves, liking themselves, and not punishing themselves for making mistakes. That can be very hard, and I feel that I can write and speak to it quite well.
One of the things that always struck me about Baby Reindeer was how many people related to the line, “I loved one thing more than I loved her — and that was hating myself.” I always say that I like to write for the people who struggle — and with these themes, I just thought I could do it justice.
Half Man isn’t autobiographical, but what did the process of making it teach you about yourself as a creative person?
Baby Reindeer came out April 11, 2024, and I was in pre-production on Half Man by October. The turnaround time was just so intense. I write everything and I’m very involved as a showrunner across every aspect of production. The big pressure was time — the whole thing was done and released in two years. What I learned is that if you give everything to something, it will be alright.
I applied a similar work ethic to Half Man that I did to Baby Reindeer, which is to just leave no stone unturned. I think I realized that sometimes I’m not even sure I know how to stop working. As a showrunner, you can always be doing stuff. I have the ability to work 24-7 and I almost have no boundaries when it comes to work. I love it so much, but that’s what I realized going from Baby Reindeer to Half Man.
I know you initially wanted someone else to play adult Ruben — until Jamie Bell persuaded you to take on the role. Did your perspective on Ruben change once you moved beyond the writing process and had to embody him?
Absolutely. I never wrote Ruben thinking of myself acting the lines, so I had to really pivot to adjust my mind around the person I saw in my head now being me. I knew they were poles apart — Donnie Dunn and Ruben Pallister don’t go hand in hand as characters.
The one thing I was always worried about with Ruben was needing to get the truth behind it. He does so many bad things. He’s so violent and unsettling and all these things, but I knew there had to be a reality behind his eyes when he did it. The main thing I realized when I was trying to get into the headspace of Ruben was how much pain he’s in. The reality is — his actions, his running from the world, the way he reacts viscerally to any slight against him — it all comes from a river of pain from what he went through with his dad. Even when I was doing violent scenes or funny scenes, what surprised me most was that I was actually trying to find quite a lot of pain amongst all that. Because I think everything he does is affected quite severely by trauma. I think how much he was hurting was the biggest surprise for me moving from writing to acting.
As we shift into the adult timeline, the brothers reverse roles a bit. Do you think Niall becomes just as flawed as Ruben in those later episodes?
I thought early on that the most interesting thing was to show two examples of toxic male behavior. You have the more obvious example in Ruben, the version people think of when they think of violent male behavior; but there’s an insidious version, which Niall inhabits by the end.
I really wanted this question mark at the end of the show — which I think has succeeded — because there’s so much debate around it online as to who actually is the more toxic one. That was certainly intentional. I hope that the show’s strength was in its ambiguity in terms of asking the question as to who actually inflicts more damage in the end.
The prison scene between Niall and Ruben in Episode 6 is really cathartic. It’s almost like a “what could have been” for these characters. How important was it to nail that scene?
Very important. I felt the pressure that day, for sure. We actually did all three prison scenes the same day — the one where Niall finds out that Mona’s been visiting Ruben; the one where he tells me that Maura died and I go ballistic and start shouting through the glass; and then we have the big confessional scene. We had a third of a filming day to do each of them and only had a few takes of each. The pressure was intense. I remember the film set being extremely concentrated that day because everyone knew that this was a show-defining moment.
I knew that the whole show rested on it, and I think Jamie did as well. We would speak regularly in the buildup to the scene being like, “How are you feeling?” We were always off-book, but the big scenes, like the hospital scene [in Episode 4] and that prison scene, we’d be running the lines in the truck while we were doing our makeup and hair just so there were no mistakes on the day. I knew it was important and I really worked very hard. I kept myself in a headspace and pushed myself to those emotional limits, which was another challenge. I remember I just had to grab five minutes, put some headphones in and try to evoke the feelings that Ruben felt around his dad and around Niall. That was such a challenging day.
There’s some ambiguity in the ending, but it seems like Ruben and Niall couldn’t live without the other. Did you explore other endings or was it always headed this way?
I think it became very apparent through the writing process that these guys couldn’t live together, so they had to die together. It felt like, poetically, the correct way of honoring the story, in a lot of ways. You know where they need to get to as characters, but they just can’t get there. It only felt fitting that they would self-destruct and combust to the fullest degree. It sparked a lot of debate — in a good way. It just felt like where it had to go.
Baby Reindeer swept the Emmys in 2024 and Adolescence did the same last year. Do you think audiences are more open now to stories that wrestle with toxic masculinity?
I find it very fascinating that the two shows of the past three years that have exploded in terms of viewership and societal conversation are Baby Reindeer and Adolescence. It’s the story of a comedian’s psychosexual relationship with his stalker, and then a young boy killing his 15-year-old female classmate; none of them scream commercial hit, yet they were. I think they were because they went against the cultural vein of television. They showed a side of life that we hadn’t seen before. Television, right now, there’s so much of it all the time, and a lot of the content is very broad storytelling — which is great — but sometimes a show can puncture through because it offers something so different from what we normally see.
I also think there’s a common misconception in television that people don’t like dark stuff and people don’t like to be challenged. But I actually think people love to be challenged. Look how popular true crime documentaries are; I think we are, as human beings, attracted to the darker side of life. I think we go through it more than we like to admit as a society.
The limited series space is a great medium to do that. How did you feel about episodes releasing weekly versus the binge model that Baby Reindeer broke out with?
They both have their merits in a lot of ways. Baby Reindeer dropped and boom — it kind of exploded. I think it really added to the unknown quantity of it all. People were binging it to catch up with the conversation.
What I loved about Half Man was that it took its time, and the conversation would build week to week. By the time we were at Episode 4 in the hospital with Niall and Ruben’s characters turning a little bit, I felt like social media was abuzz with discussion. I think the weekly thing really helped build conversation. Half Man is an hour-long and I feel like that also lended itself to the weekly intrigue of taking a break, discussing, and coming back to it. Both shows have got a good following, and I think they’re both interesting ways of doing it, but they do feel different.
I always thought it was funny with Baby Reindeer, which was a four-year process, and then it gets released in a day. Half Man was a two-year process, and it’s six weeks. It’s remarkable — you spend so much time doing these things, and they’re released in such short spaces of time.
After creating these two emotionally intense pieces of work, do you have any interest in exploring comedic projects in the future?
I think so. I love and miss comedy. I always try to have comedy in my work. I know Half Man was a bit more of a departure from comedy than Baby Reindeer was, which was intentional, because I wanted it to feel real and visceral; but it still had comedic moments in it, because I knew we need to take the audience on a journey, and I think showing them a bit of humor every now and again helps with the flow of things. But yeah, I certainly have an interest in doing that.
I think it would still hopefully be based in human truth and struggle, because I would never want things to be purely sitcom funny; that doesn’t feel like my flavor. But I certainly am intrigued to get back to the comedy game, so I guess watch this space.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
