Inside Richard Gadd’s Genre-Defying ‘Baby Reindeer’ Journey

Richard Gadd ’s genre-defying Netflix sensation Baby Reindeer blurs the lines between comedy, drama and autobiography, challenging viewers’ perceptions while sparking crucial conversations about trauma, stalking and the power of storytelling.

By Nicholas Barber

Photography by Philip Sinden

Richard wears shirt, trousers and shoes, all by DIOR MEN . Jessica wears earrings by ALICE SKEWIS , vintage dress, and tights by FALKE .

B aby Reindeer has now been watched by tens of millions of Netflix viewers around the world. But many of those viewers aren’t quite sure what kind of show it is. The seven-part series tells the harrowing story of a Scottish stand-up comedian, Donny Dunn, who is stalked by a delusional woman named Martha Scott. And most people know that Richard Gadd, the series’ star, writer and executive producer, based the story on an ordeal he endured himself. But is the show a hard-hitting docudrama? A nerve-racking crime thriller? A heartrending confession? A twisted romantic comedy? Or some combination of all of the above?

“I think you could point to every single show I’ve done, and I probably had that debate,” Gadd says. “Is it theater? Is it comedy? Is it drama? Is it funny? I’ve met people who find Baby Reindeer hilarious and find Donny’s failings on the comedy stage really funny. Other people remember some of the darker things and think, No way should it be listed as comedy, it’s definitely a drama. But I think it’s an accomplishment if it escapes genre and people can’t pin it down, because that whole experience that I went through, you couldn’t really place it. It was a mixture of a whole bunch of things.”

Jessica Gunning, who plays Martha, agrees the genre question is a tricky one. “I practiced a scene with a friend of mine where Martha says she wants to unzip Donny and squirrel away inside him for winter,” says Gunning, who is sitting next to Gadd in a fabulously bohemian pub-turned-photo-studio in East London. “I thought that was the most romantic scene I’d ever read, and my friend was like, ‘This is kind of scary.’ I never read it in that way, really. I just thought it was an unrequited love story. And I think that’s a good way to view it, because as soon as you start playing Martha as a villain, you ruin the essence of what Richard was going for in the script.”

Richard wears trench coat, turtleneck, pants and shows, all by Burberry.

Gadd, 35, began breaking down genre barriers as a stand-up comedian a decade ago. Much like Donny in Baby Reindeer , he initially specialized in “anarchic, crazy, prop-heavy anti-comedy.” But after being sexually assaulted by a writer he had perceived as a mentor, he realized that the next hour-long show he put on at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe had to be different. “My life had reached this weird pitch, like in Baby Reindeer , when I was going on stage to do silly, wacky stuff whilst going through post-traumatic stress and trying to come to terms with what happened to me, and I couldn’t keep that juxtaposition up anymore. It was causing me too much pain. I thought, if I’m going to keep on the creative trajectory that I’m on, then I need to twin the two together.”

Gadd’s grooming by a predator he then fictionalized as Darrien would eventually be the basis of Episode 4 of Baby Reindeer , but before that it was the inspiration for a stage show, Monkey See Monkey Do , which won the Edinburgh Fringe’s top comedy award in 2016. It was far from a conventional piece of stand-up, not just because of its searingly candid, “really dark and challenging” content, but because of its experimental form: Gadd performed it while running on a treadmill with an actor in a gorilla suit behind him.

Richard wears jacket, shirt, shorts, socks and boots, all by THOM BROWNE . Jessica wears earrings by ALICE SKEWIS , bracelet by FRIDA AND FLORENCE ,

Three years later, he devised Baby Reindeer , a similarly exposing autobiographical show. Again, it veered far away from “stereotypical man-microphone anecdotal stuff” by using recordings and lighting effects to evoke the barrage of Martha’s texts and voice messages. “I’ve got a terrible attention span,” Gadd explains of his preference for multi-media theater, “and when I go to shows and even watch TV, my mind flicks all around the place, so I always try to cater to people like me in the audience who have the least ability to focus. I like all my shows to have an oscillating visual design and an all-encompassing sound design. I think it helps an audience immerse themselves in the emotions of the show.”

The Baby Reindeer play was such a hit that its London run sold out—ironically, Gunning herself tried and failed to get a ticket. Instead, she says, she bought a copy of the script, “which was a bit Martha of me,” and immediately noticed “how filmic it was.” Gadd, too, knew that the play could be adapted to television. But it took him two exhausting years to take the scripts of two separate one-man shows and weave them into a tightly structured screenplay which retained the “breathless” immersive quality of his theater work.

Jessica wears trench coat by BURBERRY .

One key decision was that the central character in Baby Reindeer wouldn’t have the same name as its creator. “I wanted the show to exist in a fictional realm,” says Gadd. “I wanted the emotional truth to remain, but for the show to be received as a piece of art and the characters to be treated as characters. I’m not Donny Dunn. Donny Dunn is based on a version of myself that existed over 10 years ago now.”

Sure enough, the warm and garrulous Gadd is almost undeniably different from the haunted, tongue-tied Donny, but the line drawn between fact and fiction in the series was too fine for some viewers to see, and they set about finding the real-life inspirations for Martha and Darrien. One candidate is taking legal action against Netflix as a result. Gadd’s response is that he “can’t police the Internet,” and that if the series has had any negative consequences, they are outweighed by the increased interest it has brought to stalking and abuse survivors’ charities. “Not to mention that you just have to type Baby Reindeer [into a search engine] 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 to do that.’ There’s been a lot of noise around Baby Reindeer , but in my soul, I don’t think it detracts from the good that this show is doing.”

Richard wears shirt and pants, both by LOEWE .

Credits

FASHION CREATIVE DIRECTOR: MICHAELA DOSAMANTES

FASHION EDITOR: SARAH ROSE-HARRISON

PRODUCTION: CINDY PARTHONNAUD AT SIDELINES STUDIO

HAIR: CHAD MAXWELL

MAKEUP: ZOE TAYLOR

GROOMING: SANDRA HAHNEL

PRODUCER: MICHELLE KAPUSCINSKI

PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT: ELLIOT GUNNING

FASHION ASSISTANT: FREYA WATSON.

PHILIP SINDEN

Fashion and portrait photographer Philip Sinden’s work has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, British Vogue, Town & Country and more. His gritty photographs of the stars of Baby Reindeer bring the series’ dark subject matter to our pages.

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