Half Man, writer and actor Richard Gadd’s eagerly-anticipated follow-up to the hugely successful Baby Reindeer, begins with a joyous scene. A glorious wedding party is in full flow with revellers dancing merrily in the sunlight. In typical Gadd fashion, however, it doesn’t take long for a more brutal reality to kick in. He plays the hench and brooding Ruben, who viewers meet stripped to the waist and looking like he’s about to step into the UFC Octagon. Opposite him is Niall (Jamie Bell), the kilted groom clearly wishing he was anywhere but in a dimly lit barn with a man whose heavily strapped hands suggest he didn’t come to propose a toast to the happy couple. “You don’t have to speak,” Ruben tells him. “You have to listen.”
- READ MORE: ‘Half Man’ review: more dark and addictive drama from ‘Baby Reindeer’ creator Richard Gadd
It’s a scene that makes the dynamic between the pair clear – a direct and physically imposing alpha male whose mere presence suggests danger and, alongside him, the bookish and lower status Niall, forever in his shadow. The series skips back through three decades of history between the two, slowly piecing together a story of obsession, repulsion, loyalty, betrayal and life-altering violence that leads to the wedding showdown. Like Baby Reindeer, Half Man finds Gadd exploring what draws people together and the voids we fill in each other’s lives.
“Both of them need what the other one has,” Gadd says while speaking in a private room at a Soho hotel, the sleeves of his crisp white T-shirt stretching against the muscular frame he trained six days a week to build. “As a result they form a bond at a young age which is kind of unbreakable.” In a nuanced and richly written story, Gadd explores the ways in which that unbreakable bond feels like a suffocating headlock. “It’s about the thin line between love and hate,” he explains. “No matter how fractured things become, their love still outweighs the hatred.”
Half Man is about two men who display harmful traits but Gadd is keen to stress he did not write the show as a means of tackling the hot button issue of toxic masculinity. “I never want my work to have this kind of overarching moral point,” he says, drawing a line between his complicated characters and the manosphere-led characters shown in Adolescence or Louis Theroux’s recent Netflix documentary. “I don’t write to answer issues. If anything, what it offers is a lot of questions and not many solutions. At the heart of Baby Reindeer and Half Man is a confusion about human existence.”
For Ruben and Niall, that existence begins when their mothers start a relationship and bring their respective sons together in a blended family. “My brother from another lover,” Ruben (played as a teenager in a series of flashbacks by Stuart Campbell) calls Niall (Mitchell Robertson). Niall is being bullied at school until Ruben, freshly released from a young offenders institute, scares them away. Niall is also questioning his sexuality, something he is desperate to hide from the imposing figure he now shares a bedroom with. Both young men have absent fathers and harbour deep-seated resentments. Ruben meets his feelings with anger while Niall might appear innocent on first impression but slowly reveals more insidious character traits as the series progresses. Questions are asked of how responsible we are for our actions and, in Ruben’s case, why violence is so often the solution he reaches for.
Music helps set the scene for these 1980s flashbacks, which are soundtracked by era-perfect needle drops from The Boomtown Rats, Echo & The Bunnymen and Yazoo among others.
“I obsess over every little track [in my shows]”
Proof of Gadd’s obsession with music comes before our interview begins. “I need to show you something,” he says. We ask if it’s the NME cover spotted on the bedroom wall Niall and Ruben share as teenagers. In fact, it’s something better. Gadd has been scouring eBay for vintage covers of the magazine released around the time of huge events in musical history; there’s the deaths of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain sat next to the famous Blur vs Oasis cover of August 1995. Each one is framed and lines the wall of his London flat, meaning visitors move through time as they get closer to the door.
“I obsess over every little track,” Gadd says, returning to the show. “The songs offer such interesting timestamps.” That said, picking the tunes for the show wasn’t as simple as finding what was most likely to be played in a student union in 1989. There’s a scene in the second episode that requires a steely disposition to watch. Without spoiling specific details, a friend of Niall’s gets on the wrong side of Ruben’s temper while ‘Only You’, Yazoo’s shimmering and tender ballad, plays as blood spatters the floor of a university halls kitchen. Gadd explains that the song’s lyrics (“All I ever knew… Only you”) capture the poisoned connection between the pair. “Lyrically, ‘Only You’ couldn’t have been more perfect for Ruben and Niall’s relationship. I put a lot of thought and cerebral explanation into the way Half Man sounds.”
Gadd says he was adamant that every stomp, kick, and punch of Ruben’s blind fury felt as real as possible. “A problem I have with violence on TV is how choreographed and fake it can feel,” he says. “Acts of violence are always sort of awkward so I wanted it to be messy. The second it feels choreographed is the second he loses his power.”
“The battle I had with myself during my twenties was intolerable”
Toxic masculinity is something we often see projected outwards by men in the way they treat others. In Half Man, Gadd suggests its roots may actually be more tied up with how men treat themselves. When we ask if he sees a connection between the bookish and sexually confused Niall and Baby Reindeer’s similarly self-loathing Donny Dunn, the writer pinpoints their shared struggle with self-identity: “They are both going through a crisis of self.”
The struggle to truly accept oneself is something Gadd says he will continue to return to in his work. “I’ve gone through a sort of identity battle in a lot of ways in my life and I’m not done exploring that. I look back at my twenties and I’m in a lot better place now, but the battle I had with myself was intolerable at times. It was like being in a prison. I felt so trapped inside of myself, I almost couldn’t have a conversation without real trickle-down intrusive thoughts that were just crushingly negative. I was so damning about everything I did all the time.”
What surprised Gadd the most after Baby Reindeer is how many people would approach him to share that they, too, felt the same “cosmic” struggle. “Self-hate, more than we would care to admit, is something that people struggle with a lot.” Gadd knows first-hand what that feels like and says his work directly addresses people in the same boat. “I feel like it’s something that should be honoured on screen so people can see it reflected back and know that they’re not alone.”
Isolation and loneliness lay at the heart of Baby Reindeer, too. It was the breakout moment for Gadd who, until that point, had been a relatively unknown stand up comedian. He took two stage shows, ‘Monkey See Monkey Do’ and ‘Baby Reindeer’, and transformed his real life story into an excavating work that chronicled his experiences of being stalked by a female fan, Martha, and sexually assaulted by a TV industry figure he met earlier in his career.
It’s hard to state just how big the 2024 Netflix show became upon its release. It made its way onto the streamer’s list of the most-watched English-language TV series of all-time and won six Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Writing for Gadd and Outstanding Supporting Actress for Jessica Gunning, whose masterful turn as Martha was both terrifying and unflinchingly vulnerable.
In addition to awards and eyeballs, Baby Reindeer also caught fire among a group of true crime-trained viewers keen to take a more active role in the TV they consume and begin working things out for themselves. Martha was established by online sleuths as being based on London-based lawyer Fiona Harvey, something she acknowledged while keenly disputing the depiction of the character in relation to real life events. In June 2024 Harvey brought a $170million defamation lawsuit against Netflix. Prior to speaking with Gadd, it was established that he would be unable to comment on the ongoing legal case.
“I haven’t made any new famous friends and I still drive a 2007 Skoda”
Success, in both positive and negative ways, is no longer something Gadd is a stranger to. Baby Reindeer resulted in a lucrative Netflix deal and newfound recognition, taking him from doing stand-up comedy in London pubs to Paris Fashion Week, having been personally invited to Jonathan Anderson’s spring/summer 2025 presentation for Loewe. Gadd says he doesn’t let the newfound fame alter his life too much. “I haven’t made any new famous friends and I still drive a 2007 Skoda Fabia,” he laughs. “Materialism means nothing to me, I’d rather be connected to life. I don’t want to ever feel like I’m above that, because then I won’t be able to write about it.”
Even so, it must have been hard to adjust to the aftermath of Baby Reindeer – a cathartic but exposing story informed by real life trauma that turned into a global phenomenon. At some point, any writer would lose control of the narrative. “Since Baby Reindeer, I feel like I’ve been walking around naked,” Gadd told the New York Times in a recent interview. It begs the question of whether he is still chasing that same high, or whether he is keen to step out of the limelight with Half Man and his future projects?
“My only hope is that Half Man is received well,” Gadd says diplomatically. “Whatever ‘well’ means, I don’t really know.” We put it more bluntly to him. If there was a button that would guarantee the show would play out on the same scale, rave reviews and awards but with the same intense focus on him personally, would he press it? He deflects once again and argues, fairly, that the fallout from Baby Reindeer still has him feeling windswept. “At the end of the day, I just want to make something that gets people talking,” he says. “I almost can’t speak to the success of Baby Reindeer and whether I want to replicate it or not, because I haven’t even processed it yet.”
If he can’t predict the outcome of his new TV show, what about humanity more generally? Does Gadd, whose work often plumbs the depths that people can push each other to, see any hope in our destabilised and dystopian world right now? “Maybe it’s foolish but I do believe in human beings at the end of the day,” he says. “We’re going through such a crisis right now, not just in terms of masculinity, but in society and even the way we’re interacting as countries, but I still believe in kindred spirits and just basic human decency.”
He concedes, though, that this might just be hopeful naivety speaking. “The news cycle is so extreme and there’s so much shouting and debate and discussion. You can sometimes just feel like you’re in the middle of a whirlpool not knowing which direction to turn or what to do. It leads to this mass alienation of people who just don’t know what to do anymore.”
Gadd is the first to admit he doesn’t have the answers people are looking for. But from the middle of the confusion, he offers a much needed dose of compassion and understanding. It feels like a step in the right direction.
‘Half Man’ episode one is out now via BBC iPlayer and new episodes are released every Friday