Baby Reindeer's Richard Gadd: "I grappled with inner demons, the likes of which I never thought I would"

We’re in the east end of Glasgow, the day after Baby Reindeer is nominated for eight BAFTAs. These are not the show’s first accolades. At last year’s Emmys, Gadd won three awards – for acting, writing and executive producing the series. Alongside him Jessica Gunning, who plays Martha, the woman who stalks Gadd’s character Donny Dunn, won best supporting actress and is also now nominated for a BAFTA.

Today we’re marking another public acknowledgement of his remarkable rise: the actor, writer, comedian and now showrunner is number one on the RadioTimes.com TV 100 (with Gunning ranked second), a list decided by leading figures in the television industry. “I’ve always felt outside of the industry in a lot of ways, always felt like I came up in a weird way,” says the 36-year-old, who has broken off from filming his new BBC One series Half Man in Glasgow to talk to Radio Times. “I’ve never really felt a part of it until now.”

Gadd was brought up, with his older sister Katie, in the Fife village of Wormit on the southern side of the Firth of Tay, opposite Dundee. Gadd’s father, the microbiologist Geoffrey Gadd OBE, is a professor at Dundee University. His mother Julia worked in schools and had a fear of flying, so the family would holiday in North Yorkshire. He recalls fish and chips in Whitby and walks on the moors.

It sounds a happy youth, but he says it wasn’t entirely so. “I think every childhood has its struggles,” he explains. “It wasn’t plain sailing. Every child has problems, and even adolescence, coming of age, is a challenge in and of itself, trying to figure out the world.”

In a pattern that would repeat through his life, Gadd buried himself in creativity. “I spent my whole childhood writing,” he says. “I was always attempting to write comedy, trying to act and just doing silly stuff that would make my friends laugh.”

He excelled in drama lessons at his secondary school in St Andrews, playing the lead in what he calls “the Scottish play” and became “completely obsessed” with The Office. “I was such a Ricky Gervais fanboy. I said to myself, ‘This is what I want to do, one day, to be in a show that I’ve written.’”

After studying English literature and theatre studies at Glasgow University, Gadd went south to London, where he struggled to make it on the stand-up circuit. This is the testing period of near breakdown that Gadd mined in Baby Reindeer.

“I’ve had real low points in my life,” he observes. “Numerous times where I thought, ‘God, maybe I should just get a job, get some stability in my life.’ I would call my parents and say, ‘I can’t do this any more.’ They would tell me, ‘No, keep going.’ Which is remarkable, because it’s not easy to know your son’s living in London, impoverished and working in a bar.”

What would Gadd say if I gave him a telephone and his own 25-year-old self was on the other end of the line? “Probably: ‘It’s going to be OK.’ Twenty-five was a difficult time for me. It was the aftermath of everything that happened, and I was still reeling. It felt like I was in a darkness that would never lift.”

Lest the darkness should settle again, Gadd continues to lose himself in writing. “You’ll never see me at the private members bars or parties. I just work really hard all the time; I’m constantly doing stuff and there are exciting things happening right now that I’m working on.”

He need only look at the effect of Baby Reindeer to see his labours have been worthwhile. “It was number one in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, places where it broke cultural boundaries. That is the power of Netflix; the power of television. It’s a hugely powerful medium, the most watched art form. Netflix now has a route to change lives around the world.”

And while his early exposure to Ricky Gervais on BBC Two, and plotting his own future television career, has left Gadd with an abiding respect for the Corporation – “I love the BBC,” he says, as near to punchy as he will get, “I think it’s hugely important as an independent voice in media, a fantastic institution and I’ll always want to work with the BBC” – Gadd has a three-year writing deal with Netflix and an understandable affection for a company that, arguably, threw him a lifeline when they gambled on his unlikely project.

“They took a chance on a story that was extreme,” he admits. “There were times where I’d think, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this’ and worry they would realise it was such a risk and suddenly pull the plug. But they stuck by it, and I’ll always be grateful for that.”

Not all the attention Gadd has received for Baby Reindeer has been positive. The series was a fictionalised version of Gadd’s earlier life, devised from two previous stand-up shows, but it was broadcast by Netflix with the tag: “This is a true story.”

Some viewers went online and claimed that a Scottish woman called Fiona Harvey was the real Martha. Harvey has since brought a $170 million defamation lawsuit against Netflix in the US. The case comes to court in California this May when, quite possibly, Gadd will be portrayed in an unfavourable light by Harvey’s legal team. How is he preparing for a moment when his motives and actions will be publicly questioned?

“There are limits to what I can say,” he observes, perhaps a little dazzled by the prospect. “It’s such new ground for me I’m not sure you know how to prepare, I don’t know how you’d want to be prepared.”

So, Gadd is losing himself in his new BBC series, which co-stars former Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell. The two play half-brothers whose lives entangle to dramatic effect. “There’s a lot of themes like isolation and loneliness and shared trauma and generational trauma in Baby Reindeer. It’s similar with Half Man – it borrows from a world of broken people.

“It’s 24/7 pretty obsessive,” he adds. “I’m writing, acting and producing at the same time. I work pretty much day and night; I only pause to sleep. Maybe it’s not healthy but no matter how it’s received, whether people like it or not, well, I gave it everything.”

Gadd has a vulnerable, almost boylike, demeanour. Pale and quietly spoken, his wispy black beard and tufted black hair make him appear near translucent and I find myself wondering about the welfare of a man I have never met before but who says things to me like “I grappled with inner demons, the likes of which I never thought I would”.

It’s worth remembering that Gadd has been damaged; when Donny is repeatedly sexual assaulted by an older man in the entertainment industry in Baby Reindeer, it’s a version of something that actually happened. Does he look after himself, attend to his own psychological needs? “I sometimes put the work first,” he admits. “Self-care isn’t something that happens overnight, but I definitely look after myself a lot better than I used to. I lost a third of my body weight to do Baby Reindeer. I’m getting slowly better, maybe, but things are all-consuming.”

Now he has met with such success, is he less likely to be overwhelmed by memories of what happened to him? “Probably not,” he says. “And I would be worried about acting like success is a solution to any internal struggle or traumatic experience. I can’t say that fame provided any solutions for it at all. Because now so many people know about what happened, it almost brings a new set of neuroses around it.” Better get back to work then.

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