Baby Reindeer’s Richard Gadd redefines masculinity in his provocative new series Half Man
When Richard Gadd’s new show first entered the consciousness of those who had previously devoured his Emmy-winning drama series Baby Reindeer, an early press release promised it would get to the bottom of what it meant to be a man. “It’s out there and you’re like, ‘What has this promised people?’ It was never my intention to set out to answer any questions,” says the Scottish creator of now two series that delve into male trauma. “It was an exploration and I think the more I dug deep in it, the more I realized just how complicated and contradicting everything it was. I don’t write to find solutions or answers or try to build a series to a moral point that people can take away. I took two characters I really cared about and tried to understand them. At the end of it all, I just thought that they’d lived, in a lot of ways, a great tragedy.”
Half Man stars Gadd and Jamie Bell as stepbrothers Ruben and Niall, who form a relationship in their youth that is as toxic as it is codependent. In their teenage years, the roles are played by Stuart Campbell, as young Ruben, and Mitchell Robertson, as young Niall. Early on, Ruben returns from a juvenile detention facility, and while Niall is terrified of his mother’s partner’s son, he comes to enjoy the protection that having a violent brother affords him. That dysfunctional dynamic carries them well into their adulthood. “You take two men that are kind of broken in their adult life and you go back to their childhood, in a more unaccepting time of U.K. society, and show all that learned behaviour and repression that they soak up and the trauma that they experience,” says Gadd. “You contextualize the adults and how they’ve got to this point of broken masculinity in the present.”
As Gadd moved between decades and tonal shifts in his scripts, executive producer Sophie Gardiner saw the epic potential of a very intimate story. “The thing that really interested me most about the piece is the ‘why’ people behave the way they do: the complicated interaction of what’s happened to them, their families, who they are,” she says. “To explore that with the forensic precision that Richard does with his characters, you need scale. It’s about how what happens in the past impacts upon the present. In terms of the tone, that’s just the way Richard writes and sees the world. It’s huge. It’s epic. It’s small, imperfect. It really is everything. And that makes it utterly distinctive, but also true to lives lived.”
To portray the younger versions of Bell and Gadd, Robertson and Campbell relied more on director Alexandra Brodski than their counterparts. “We didn’t want [episodes] four, five and sixth to influence the guys. They go through a phenomenal change during the series,” says Gadd. “The Niall and Ruben we meet later on in the series aren’t the ones that we grow up with, in that respect. So, we wanted them to stay close to the instincts that they captured in their auditions. What I loved about these two actors was that they brought such vivacious youth to things. If you know how corruptible adults can be, would you lose a bit of that youth?”
Instead of adopting Bell and Gadd’s mannerisms, the two young actors worked on maintaining their characters’ connection to each other, despite the horrors they experience onscreen. “The darkness, the hostility, the rage — speaking from Ruben’s perspective — is there on the page. It was there from the first reading,” says Campbell. “But we did work, in the rehearsal process and on set, to make sure that we kept the lightness, making sure that we continued to see this unspoken connection between us. I think it helps that we are really close anyway. I don’t know what it would have been like if we didn’t like each other.”
It was in the auditions of Campbell and Robertson that Gadd saw the potential of what the characters could be, once fully realized. “They offered such a window into the soul of the characters,” he says. “A lot of people thought, ‘If Ruben’s the epitome of masculinity, I’m going to have to shout every line, I’m going to puff my chest,’ but really, Ruben is vulnerable in his own way as well, and that’s what Stuart captured in spades,” says Gadd. “And a lot of people played Niall kind of meek, but he’s a guy shuffling through his own internal conflicts, and I thought Mitchell did that so beautifully.” To guide them through the process, Gadd was present on set, in his capacity as executive producer. “There was a constant conversation happening,” says Campbell. “But to Richard’s credit, he said really early on that he didn’t want to inhibit my performance or take away any sort of spontaneity that we could find on the day, truthfully or organically.”
Despite being known for material that evokes strong reactions, the multi-hyphenate says he spends little time thinking about the outcome of his work. “If I spent my life worried about how people will respond to things, then you’re not going to ever write good art,” he says. “If you really hone down into writers’ motivations, usually they’re very inspired either by what’s going on with other people and how they want people to react. Other people want to set out to say something, and therefore the piece devolves into almost a moral tale which is too blatant to the viewer. All I really sit down every day to do is write the best possible story.” Gadd is also not a fan of gratuitous sex or violence. “Every time you see violence, or something challenging within the show, it leads to plot development, or character psychology going deeper and I think it’s completely justified,” he says. “But in a show where you explore the extremities of male violence, you have to show how extreme that can go. Otherwise, you’re robbing the audience of the truth of this big theme that we’re grappling with right now as a society.”
For Gadd, there is no specific message he wants viewers to take away from the drama — he’d prefer they make up their own minds. “I never want to patronize my audience,” he says. “There’s a wrongful opinion that in order to keep the most viewers, you have to appeal to the most people and broaden things out and explain things as much as possible. I think if Baby Reindeer and Adolescence has proved anything, it’s that we like to be challenged and we like to face our own demons and see it back on television. I think as an art form that’s probably the most watched in the world, we should be at the tip-o-sphere of conversation and change. I always want to give my audiences credit where credit’s due, and I think people are a lot more clever than we give them credit for.”
Half Man, streaming from Friday, May 22, on Crave