Scottish comedian Richard Gadd mined the darkest moments of his own life — from the grooming and abuse he suffered at the hands of an older TV producer to the barrage of voice- mails from a woman he says obsessively stalked him — to make the Netflix limited series “Baby Reindeer,” which began as two stage shows, “Monkey See Monkey Do” and “Baby Reindeer.” The fictionalized seven-part series landed 11 nominations, including acting, writing and producing noms for Gadd. (The comic can’t talk about the ongoing lawsuit filed by a woman who says she was the model for the stalker character and that the show defamed her.)
Was it a breakthrough when you first made the leap into confessional shows that used the ordeals from your life and put them onstage?
Yeah, it was. It felt super exposing and super risky, and I remember a lot of people telling me that I shouldn’t do it. I went up there [to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe] and questioned if I’d even get through the month. And then it turned into, without a doubt, the best month of my life. Not only did I feel such an acceptance from the comedy industry and from audiences, that sense of acceptance was like 1,000 therapy sessions in one.
Still, it must have been a very painful thing to relive.
Yeah, it was hard. But if I need to go through a little bit of pain to bring a wider sense of understanding, I guess I’m willing to do it. I don’t want to sound self-righteous and self-congratulatory, you know? That’s just the way it is. I think whatever pain I felt has contributed to a little bit of a societal shift, which is good.
Did you expect that viewers would try to uncover the real-life people you’d based the characters on?
My primary concern was making it as good a television show as it could possibly be. When you are employed in those roles and you have that pressure on you, I can’t think about anything else. I can’t think about what the internet’s gonna do or anything like that. I can’t police the internet anyway, so it didn’t come into my mind at all because I was too busy trying to make it a good piece of art.
In the aftermath of the show, does it feel like everything has spiraled into something crazy, either in a good or a bad way?
Yeah. There’s been a lot of noise around the show. But I think fundamentally the show has done a lot of good. I’ll never stop harping on about the charity statistics, because I feel they need to be out there: a 40% rise in [contributions to] stalking charities, 53% rise in abuse charities. You just need to type “Baby Reindeer” into Twitter to see that 98% of the comments are, “This encouraged me to come out to my parents, to admit my abuse to my wife, to do this and do that.” There is a lot of noise, but it shouldn’t detract from the good that this show has done and is doing.
This story first ran in TheWrap’s awards magazine.
