Entertainment
‘I turned my real-life hell into Netflix’s Baby Reindeer. Having a stalker is nothing like you’d imagine’-Adam Miller and Tom Stichbury-Entertainment – Metro
Meet the man behind the show everyone is talking about on Netflix.
![‘I turned my real-life hell into Netflix’s Baby Reindeer. Having a stalker is nothing like you’d imagine’-Adam Miller and Tom Stichbury-Entertainment – Metro](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/SEI_198502769-b0a8.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1024)
Baby Reindeer is the autobiographical comedy drama everyone’s obsessed with on Netflix (Picture: Ed Miller/Netflix)
After performing Baby Reindeer to small rooms of 200 people, Richard Gadd’s real stalker nightmare is now Netflix’s number one show.
Over the course of eight disturbing episodes, Donny (played by Gadd) is terrorised by Martha (Jessica Gunning) after she wanders into the pub where he’s working as a barman and immediately becomes unhealthily infatuated.
Infatuation becomes obsession and eventually there isn’t a corner of Donny’s life which has been touched or tarnished by Martha.
Richard wrote and created Baby Reindeer, a true story based on his genuine ordeal with a stalker which was so far from the experience he’d imagined it would be after watching films such as Misery and ‘bunny boiler’ thriller Fatal Attraction.
‘I wanted Baby Reindeer to be three-dimensional. I wanted it to be nuanced. I just remember my idea of stalking in life was so different to what actually happened,’ he tells Metro.co.uk.
‘My idea of what a stalker was, was that they are fundamentally, sort of, psychopathic characters. But it just wasn’t that case. I saw someone very vulnerable, really.
Stalking, it is a mental illness, a mental state. It’s like, I guess, a fantasy addiction of some kind, and the person genuinely believes the reality in which they are living. It’s just not the reality as it is. And I hadn’t really seen that before… there’s a calculatedness to the stalkers, and a sinister, sort of, insidious intent.
‘I didn’t see that at all. I saw someone who genuinely was lost in a fantasy that wasn’t true, and it was a state of mind, a state of being. I hadn’t seen that before. I felt it was important to show that in a way, and I felt it was important to show that people like that need help too, and that there should be help.’
‘I never want Baby Reindeer to have a moral point for people to take away. It’s not about anything, but I think there is a subtle reference to the fact that this is a vulnerable person who needs help.’
Jessica Gunning stars as Donny’s infatuated stalker Martha (Picture: Netflix)
In Baby Reindeer it’s alarming how little support there is for the victims of stalking as Richard is initially dismissed by police until he can prove Martha is a danger to his life. Likewise, Martha clearly needs professional help which isn’t on offer.
‘I hope that that comes through, – that there should be systems in place to help – to not only protect the victim but help these people who are lost in these real, what I envision, dark obsessive states of minds.’
Baby Reindeer is as brave as it is bold. Richard lays out his trauma bare, it’s constantly uncomfortable and often extremely harrowing.
For a fictionalised drama it’s a lot to take in but knowing every dark chapter played out in real life is quite something.
‘Trauma is very hard to shake off at times but I’m certainly miles away – I do watch Baby Reindeer now, and I think, “oh, Donny, that’s a character, that’s not me.”
‘I don’t recognise that version of myself, who was so relentlessly traumatised, and so in turmoil, and had such a lack of self that he had no ability to be confident and direct with anyone whatsoever.
‘I’ve come a long way from there. But I would be doing a disservice to anyone reading if I said that I was perfect, I was fully over it, and it was all behind me. It’s a process and it’s progress, and I’m definitely on that journey.’
Baby Reindeer is available to stream on Netflix now.
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