Baby Reindeer’s Richard Gadd is returning to our screens after two years with a new BBC drama – but the idea had been haunting him long before he found global fame with his controversial Netflix debut.
The 36-year-old writes and stars in Half Man – a miniseries that follows meek teenager Niall (Jamie Bell) as he’s forced to live with his volatile but fiercely loyal stepbrother Ruben (Gadd). While the pair are inseparable in their youth, it’s a different story decades on when an older Ruben gatecrashes a horrified Niall’s wedding day.
Speaking about the new drama, Gadd revealed at a screening for Half Man that he came up with the idea before writing Baby Reindeer – the critically-acclaimed 2024 thriller based on Gadd’s real-life experience with a stalker.
“I had the idea quite a long time ago. I wrote one episode pre-Baby Reindeer. I went off to do that and always hoped it would be there at the end of it, but the genesis of it happened quite a number of years ago,” he said.
“There was obviously such a big discussion and conversation around men, male behaviour, male violence, male repression, all these things. It’s not that I took the discussion and thought, ‘I need to do something about that.’ Something just sparked in my mind and I thought, ‘Where does this stuff come from?’
“I think a lot of behaviour with men when they get into later life can be stemmed back to traumas and things they learned in childhood because in your formative years, when bad things happen to you or you experience trauma, your brain is developing so it stays in there and becomes very hard to uproot.”
He added that he couldn’t stop thinking about the idea, which made him put pen to paper. “I always come up with ideas for things and if I can shake them within a day, then I’m like, ‘They weren’t worth thinking about,’ but this one, I couldn’t shake. It stayed with me all the way through Baby Reindeer and I would be like, ‘Please can it still be there on the other side,’ because I knew the BBC were interested and I really wanted to do it with the Beeb.”
The show seems more relevant than ever, with last year’s drama Adolescence and Louis Theroux’s 2026 documentary on the manosphere highlighting the rise of toxic masculinity and misogyny among young men. When asked whether conversations around those ideas informed the show, he added: “I’m aware of them even more now than I was when I was writing it.
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“I was aware of toxic masculinity more than I was the manosphere, which came into my orbit as of a few months ago to be honest. I don’t usually take artistic inspiration from phrases – and these phrases are important because they encapsulate so much complicated stuff but I sometimes feel I just have to feel it inwards in a lot of ways.
“I knew there was a general male problem that I was interested to explore and dig into and try to contextualise to a certain degree, but that’s about as far as it went. It just sparked an idea which couldn’t leave me.”
Gadd stressed that Half Man is not autobiographical in the same way as Baby Reindeer – which hopefully means he’ll run into less legal trouble with the new show.
In June 2024, Fiona Muir Harvey – who viewers began suspecting was the real inspiration behind Gadd’s stalker “Martha” on the show after finding online connections between her and the character – sued Netflix for $170m (£132m).
She accused Netflix of defamation, negligence, international infliction of emotional distress and violations of her right to privacy among other allegations, arguing that the series being marketed as a “true story” is “the biggest lie in television history”.
The case is still currently pending, however Gadd said in April that he was still “very proud” of the show. When asked how he felt about Baby Reindeer in the wake of the lawsuit, he acknowledged that the legal action made the question “quite tricky to speak to”, but said he felt that “in all of the noise and things that happened it did a lot of good”.
