‘Baby Reindeer’ real-life Martha tells Richard Gadd to ‘get a life’: ‘I am horrified’
She’s not playing reindeer games.
Richard Gadd, 34, the Scottish creator and star of the latest hit Netflix series “Baby Reindeer” has said that he doesn’t want viewers trying to figure out which real-world people the characters in his psychological thriller are based on.
“That’s not the point of our show,” he told the Hollywood Reporter.
Despite his statements, internet sleuths have searched out who the real “Martha” is, and now, 58-year-old Fiona Harvey, née Miur, has come forward and given her first TV interview to Piers Morgan for his show “Uncensored.”
When asked what message she had for Gadd, she said, “Leave me alone, please. Get a life, get a proper job. I am horrified at what you’ve done.”
Harvey said she has not watched the show, but “I find it quite obscene. I find it horrifying, misogynistic. Some of the death threats have been really terrible online. People phoning me up. You know, it’s been absolutely horrendous. I wouldn’t give credence to something like that and it’s not really my kind of drama.”
Based on events from Gadd’s life, the show (now streaming, with nearly 60 million viewers tuning in for its first month) follows Donny (Gadd), a struggling comedian who meets Martha (Jessica Gunning) while he’s working as a bartender. When he shows her a moment of kindness, that backfires, and she turns into an obsessed stalker — doing acts such as sending him over 41,000 emails.
On whether she was in love with Gadd, Harvey said: “I gave him the brushoff.”
“I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, I’m not interested.’ He asked me to sleep with him,” she claimed. “And I said, ‘I’ve got a boyfriend.’ I gave him the brushoff big time, I think, you know, subtly so. But the bottom line is … No, I don’t fancy little boys without jobs. That sounds awful. That sounds really, really callous. But, you know.”
Harvey added that she’s been in a five-year relationship with a lawyer.
“I don’t want to drag him in. He thinks this is horrendous. All of my lawyer friends do. All of my professional friends do. Other people do. People are being really sympathetic,” she continued to Morgan. “People I don’t know are saying things like, ‘Are you getting hounded in the street?’ You know, people are being really, really nice, anyone who does know about this.”
Read more about ‘Baby Reindeer’ subject Fiona Harvey’s exclusive interview with Piers Morgan:
Gadd, meanwhile, has told Variety that the show is “all emotionally 100% true” and “borrowed” from instances that happened to him and other people that he knows. But, he added, the show is not a direct translation of what happened in his real-life stalker situation.
“You can’t do the exact truth, for both legal and artistic reasons,” he said.
Harvey told Morgan that the show’s depiction of events is “completely untrue. Very, very defamatory to me, very career damaging. And I wanted to rebut that completely on this show. I’m not a stalker. I’ve not been to jail, I’ve not got injunctions, interdicts. This is just complete nonsense.”
She also said that no one from Netflix contacted her.
Gadd never named Harvey or confirmed that she is the real Martha, but he described his unnamed stalker as “quite an idiosyncratic person” in an interview with GQ.
“We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognize herself,” he said. “What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.”
Nevertheless, Harvey further said about Gadd, “I think he’s psychotic. And I think that anyone going along, being in that play and doing this to somebody, I find that, I find the behavior outrageous.”
