Warning: spoilers ahead for Baby Reindeer.
Writing is difficult because ideas are unpredictable, they’re mostly fleeting and could come from anywhere at any time. There are exceptions though, like with Richard Gadd, whose idea actively pursued him. After six years of paranoia, 41,071 emails, 744 tweets and 350 hours of voicemail he decided to write a show about his stalker, an older woman named ‘Martha’.
Gadd, who started his career as a stand-up telling anti-jokes, has become a uniquely confessional artist. Gadd’s new Netflix series, Baby Reindeer, (named after one of Martha’s nicknames for him) began as a one-man show at the 2019 Edinburgh fringe before graduating to the West End and winning an Olivier Award. This proceeded Monkey See, Monkey Do (2016), another one-man show in which Gadd explored his experience as a survivor of sexual violence, whist running on a treadmill pursued by a gorilla. The Netflix series is an amalgam of both plays and their respective traumas.
Although the series often feels nightmarishly claustrophobic, the central relationship between Gadd — ‘Donny’ in the show — and Martha (portrayed by Jessica Gunning) is an empathic one. Neither are wholly victims nor wholly perpetrators. Even as developments spiral, every action comes with its own emotional mitigation. The show also probes Donny’s relationship with Teri (Nava Mau), a trans woman he meets via a dating app.
No aspect of Donny, and consequently Gadd, seems to have been spared in this radically revealing series. Baby Reindeer leaves you feeling almost like a stalker yourself. Before we get started, framed by a wall of hanging guitars, its creator admits it’s time for a holiday.
GQ: A lot of things are branded ‘confessionals’ without really confessing very much. Baby Reindeer confesses a lot and, as of this week, to an audience of 260 million people.
Gadd: Yeah, [laughs] it is daunting. I’ve long learned that shame serves you nothing and I’ve grown up with a lot of shame. The only way to get through these negative emotions is to tackle them head-on.
The series revolves around your relationship with a stalker but this was not a typical stalker narrative.
There’s been some great stalker movies in the past. Misery, Fatal Attraction are amazing films. But the mistake that has been made — and I don’t think it’s a mistake because it’s an artistic choice — is that they’re often sexed up. It’s usually a femme fatale narrative. Someone comes in who seems very normal, they seem perfect, but bit by bit they get weirder and weirder. Stalking is a mental dysfunction, it’s an illness and I wasn’t dealing with someone who felt calculated or insidious. I felt I was dealing with someone who was vulnerable, somebody who was mentally ill, someone who couldn’t stop because they believed what was in their head.
At the start, a caption reads ‘This is a true story’. Were there parts of this you had to adapt?
It’s pretty truthful. Any time it veered too much into embellishment I would always want to pull it back. It’s extremely emotionally truthful. Of course, this is a medium where structure is so important, you need to change things to protect people… but I like to think, artistically, that it never moved too far from the truth.
Your stalker might watch Baby Reindeer. What do you think she’ll make of it?
I honestly couldn’t speak as to whether she would watch it. Her reactions to things varied so much that I almost couldn't predict how she’d react to anything. She was quite an idiosyncratic person. We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognise herself. What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.
How did it feel casting Martha? What did Jessica Gunning bring to the role?
I think she genuinely might be the best actress around. She was on my radar months before Baby Reindeer. I’d always seen a spark, an actor bursting to get out of some of the roles she’d been given... I’d touted her name before I’d even written the script. She played it with cuteness, vulnerability, fear, anger, she just captured all the emotions at once. It lived and died on Martha and we couldn’t have been luckier.
In the show, you were also at fault for indulging your stalker. Was it difficult coming to terms with your own accountability in this way?
It was. In a lot of ways that’s what makes Baby Reindeer interesting. We live in a time where everyone’s trying to be perfect. It’s interesting when someone holds their hands up and says, ‘I made some mistakes.’ There was a version of the show I was going to do in 2019 that makes me look good, where I offer her a cup of tea and oh woe is me. But that felt disingenuous and the second you start to write art from a place where you’re lying, I don’t think the art’s going to be any good.
One aspect of comedy, or at least, absurdity, in the show is in your interactions with the police. What was your experience of trying to bring charges against your stalker?
I do think the institution needs improvement, especially around stalking. I can think of numerous examples where people have complained to the police about a stalker but because maybe they’ve had a previous relationship the police haven’t taken it seriously. They can look for a concrete reason to arrest… but sometimes situations are more nuanced than that. The first thing the police should do is try to preserve the safety of the person who is making the report rather than going through a long, arduous process to work out whether they should believe them or not.
Baby Reindeer also details your experience as a victim of sexual violence. At the end of the show you directly confront your abuser. Events do not play out as expected. Why did you choose to portray that scene?
I think that was almost the most truthful scene of the entire show. What abuse does is it creates psychological damage as well as physical damage… Abuse leaves an imprint. Especially abuse like this where it’s repeated with promises. There’s a pattern where a lot of people who have been abused feel like they need their abusers. I don’t think it was a cynical ending, it was showing an element of abuse that hadn’t been seen on television before, which is, unfortunately, the deeply entrenched, negative, psychological effects of attachment you can sometimes have with your abuser.
There’s an interesting dichotomy between the malefic deliberateness of your abuser and the involuntary compulsiveness of your stalker.
What episode four does is that, for the first three episodes, you ask ‘Why is he indulging this person?’ But when you realise what he’s been through, by the time [Martha] comes through the doors at the end of episode four and does that big smile that only Jess can do, you think ‘Thank God, Martha’s back.’ And you understand why Donny indulged her… I wanted to show what Darrien did was perniciously evil whereas Martha’s behaviour came from a place of deep vulnerability.
The love interest in Baby Reindeer is a trans woman, Teri. There’s a tension between Teri’s self-actualisation and Donny’s own internalised homophobia and transphobia.
Baby Reindeer was [about] the messiness of my early twenties. Transness is very much in the public consciousness now but back then it wasn’t spoken about. I’d fallen for someone who was trans but with that came a lot of questioning and all of this unfortunate shame that you have when you’re young. When somebody like Martha came along I saw it as some kind of weird bent to my manhood. You take this guy’s life. he’s just been through sexual violence but he’s trying to be a comedian. He’s indulging this woman who buffers his heteronormativity but he’s dating a trans woman and being very secretive about it. It was taking this character and putting him between these big extremes.
The audience is also privy to an intensely intimate confession from Donny’s father in one of the closing episodes. How do your parents feel about all this?
My parents are my biggest fans. They’ll do what they’ve done whenever I say ‘Oh mum I’m going up to Edinburgh to do a show about sexual abuse — by the way I was sexually abused, I’m going to be running on a treadmill for an hour getting chased by a giant monkey…’ They’ll say, “Okay no worries see you up there!”... My dad’s chuffed to bits.
You probably haven’t had very much time to reflect on your experiences. Are you okay?
It’s definitely time for a holiday… I’ve been going hammer and tongs for almost a decade now and that does certainly take its toll. But at the same time, I’ve reached a phenomenal level of understanding through doing it this way. If I go back to Monkey See, Monkey Do, coming clean about the sexual abuse I went through was more helpful than any therapy.
Baby Reindeer is out on Netflix now.
