Screenwriter Richard Gadd also starred in his debut miniseries, Baby Reindeer. His latest series, Half Man, continues to explore gay men’s mistreatment and the trauma that follows.Ed Miller/Netflix/Supplied
Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer was one of those word-of-mouth hits of the streaming era that came as a complete surprise.
The surprise came, in part, because half the words you’d hear coming out of the mouths of viewers were about how difficult it was to stomach the 2024 Emmy-winning Netflix limited series.
The critics’ consensus section on Rotten Tomatoes summarizes thusly: “Punishing watch.”
While some creators might have followed-up a project inspired by the dark corners of their life – being stalked, surviving sexual assault – with something a little lighter, maybe even joyful, that’s not the Scottish actor and stage-scribe-turned-screenwriter’s way.
Johanna Schneller: Baby Reindeer transcends its trauma drama and succeeds as art
Half Man, Gadd’s new six-episode limited series on Crave about a pair of Glaswegian brothers who make Cain and Abel seem like model siblings, is for those who want it even darker. Like Baby Reindeer, it tackles queer themes in a way that runs counter to other TV storytelling these days, such as Heated Rivalry.
“There’s room for both: You can have shows that have a lot of queer joy in them – and I think you can have shows that show a certain sense of sexual struggle,” Gadd says, leaning in with intensity toward his laptop in a video interview from a hotel in London.
“I write for the people who struggle.”
A BBC and HBO co-production, Half Man follows the complex relationship between self-described “brothers from another lover” Niall and Ruben, who make Cain and Abel seem like model siblings, over three decades.
The two are played by Mitchell Robertson and Stuart Campbell as teenagers and young men, and Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott) and a terrifyingly beefed-up Gadd later in life.
After opening with a violent confrontation between the two men at Niall’s wedding, the series flashes back to Glasgow in 1989 (the year Gadd was born – a coincidence, he says).
Then, Niall is a shy and nervous but academically talented high-school student, facing relentless homophobic bullying.
This is both because he is perceived as gay – it will take him a long time to accept his sexuality – and because his widowed mother is now in a relationship with a woman.
Things gets worse for Niall when the physically intimidating Ruben – his mother’s partner’s son; we’d just call him his stepbrother in our age – is released from prison, moves into his bedroom and enrols at his school.
But it also, in some ways, gets better.
Ruben deals with Niall’s bullies (in a brutal manner), while Niall helps Ruben with his grades (in a deceptive fashion).
In the first episode, there’s a confusing sexual encounter that begins when Ruben brings a girlfriend home to the room he shares with Niall. The lines of consent and attraction are nothing if not blurred.
The fall out will continue over the course of the brother’s twisty, symbiotic lives as they try to break out of patterns of harming others and themselves.
In addition to the effects of internalized homophobia, another theme connects Half Man to Baby Reindeer: the long-tailed consequences of trauma on a male survivor of sexual abuse.
“I guess I wasn’t done exploring it,” says Gadd, who notes he doesn’t like to think of his work as having “moral take-aways” or being “about” something.
That’s not to say that Gadd doesn’t understand that representing certain subject matter – not always spoken about, especially among men – can be helpful. “When I was going through a sexuality crisis, in a masculinity crisis, and going through the aftermath of sexual abuse, something like Baby Reindeer would really have helped me,” he says.
But Gadd is also clear that, for him, it’s important to not shy away from the darker corners his tormented or tormenting characters go.
“I know a lot of people in my life who find that this age of progressiveness makes them feel left behind, because they still have these sort of synaptic responses to ideas of shame relating to themselves,” he says.
In Half Man, Niall grows up to be a writer and releases a novel that draws on his experiences with his brother, whose crimes are a matter of public record.
In one scene, he gets upset after being peppered with questions about the real stories that inspired his work. His publicist steps in and says: “We will only be taking questions that relate to the author and the writing process behind this novel.”
For those who followed the fallout of Baby Reindeer, this can seem like meta-commentary. Billed as a “true story,” it set off legions of internet sleuths who pried into Gadd’s personal life, and inspired a continuing defamation lawsuit from a woman who says she’s the basis for the stalker character.
“It would be doing a disservice to the work itself if I was to try and comment on other things outside the show about myself,” Gadd says. “But I can see why people would take that out of it. It’s that age-old question: Do you divorce the author from the work?”
The Half Man publicist scene stuck in my mind because, ahead of my interview with Gadd, I received a similar note from the BBC advising that Gadd could not discuss any personal matters.
Does Gadd regret the framing of Baby Reindeer as a personal story? And is it easier to put a purely fictional work such as Half Man out into the world?
“Obviously, there’s so many aspects of this question that I can’t really speak to because, as you probably know, it is part of a sort of an ongoing, sort of legal process,” Gadd begins.
“But I don’t feel any sense of freedom writing something that’s now fictional, because my struggle with the art is the same.”
Gadd’s struggle involves what he calls “utter devotion” and “obsession” with asking himself every day how to make Half Man better – an auteurist artistic ethos that is apparent in how multi-layered each scene of the show is.
“I still find it hugely fulfilling, but I don’t find it any more freeing that it’s a fictional piece,” repeats the king of tormented and tormenting TV.
New episodes of Half Man stream on Crave Thursday.