Richard Gadd ‘Never Really Lost Faith’ That ‘Baby Reindeer’ Would Succeed
Welcome to It’s a Hit! In this series, IndieWire speaks to creators and showrunners behind a few of our favorite television programs about the moment they realized their show was breaking big.
While there was not really anyone, not even Netflix, that anticipated just how huge “Baby Reindeer” would become, its Emmy-nominated creator and star Richard Gadd told IndieWire over Zoom, “I always believed in it. I thought it was a hit when I was working on it.”
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Speaking more on the Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series nominee that explores his real life experience with stalking and sexual assault, the Scottish comedian said, “In a television process where there’s a lot of voices and a lot of questions being asked and a lot of feedback being given, I think it’s very easy to get disillusioned sometimes. And it’s very easy to sometimes see swaths of notes or swaths of feedback and sort of become like, ‘Oh God, oh God.’” But by the time he was performing scenes opposite Supporting Actress in a Limited Series nominee Jessica Gunning, like his Donny and her Martha shouting at each other in a doorway at the end of the third episode, Gadd was already hearing rumbling of the crew saying “Oh, this might be quite good.”
“When people work on set, and they change from set to set, they can tune out of the material sometimes. And there were moments on set where particular scenes went well or something, and I thought, ‘Oh, this could really be something.’ But I never really lost faith in it. I maintained my belief that it could be good even through some of the lower points of filming, of which there are many on every single show,” he said.
Latching onto the positive aspects of the experience has carried Gadd through the whirlwind of his “very idiosyncratic and British and dark and quirky,” extremely vulnerable tragicomedy being watched and discussed by hundreds of millions of people. How the wave of popularity hit the “Baby Reindeer” creator started with texts from friends coming in around noon after the series first premiered in his native U.K. at 8 a.m. Within a day he was being sent videos of people lipsyncing scenes from the show on TikTok. And then, “there was a point, I think about the second weekend or the third weekend, where I really felt like the whole world was watching it, and you could almost refresh your browser, wait a minute, refresh your browser again, and there’d be another five, six articles on it,” said Gadd.
“Twitter was exploding. It was trending. It was so huge. And then people were hanging around my street. I couldn’t really walk down the street anymore, and I had to kind of disguise myself to a certain degree, and it felt very intense suddenly,” said the creator/star. “I could feel it almost transmutating in a way. I don’t read much online, if anything, and I stay out of it. I didn’t write the show to read endless articles about it, and watch TikTok or go on Twitter and see what people have to say. I’ve stayed out of it mostly, but at one point I remember turning on the news and it was people discussing it on the news, turn on the radio, people were discussing it on the radio. I remember I was on the front page of the paper at one point, and it felt like everywhere I went, I couldn’t avoid it. It really felt like everyone was talking about it. And that lasted for about four to six weeks after it had come out.”
Of course, with that kind of attention comes controversy, like his alleged real life stalker filing a defamation lawsuit against Netflix, which Gadd only slightly alludes to, but that gets mixed in with the positive results he has seen and experienced from more people watching “Baby Reindeer” than he had ever imagined.
“Everyone has opinions and everyone shares their opinions and it can come with a lot of things, but I never want to curtail the show’s success because I feel anxious about a lot of people watching it,” he said. “I’ve been through a lot of my life, and yeah, it’s overwhelming and everything, but it’s also good that [the show] is having [an] impact.” The primary charity he and his collaborators worked with, We Are Survivors, a U.K.-based sexual abuse charity for men had its referrals grow by 80 percent since the show premiered, with 53 percent of those people citing “Baby Reindeer” as the reason they reached out for help. The Suzy Lamplugh Trust, another charity they worked with that helps stalking victims, grew its referrals by 47 percent.
But it is one thing to hear the statistics, and another to actually talk to viewers that have been affected by the show. “I remember this guy coming up and speaking to me and saying how he and his family had been through a really bad ordeal when he was younger and they never really spoke about it, but because of this show, they finally had this conversation,” said Gadd. “I might cry thinking about it, but he was like, ‘We’re closer because of the show.’ And I always think about that guy because that was at a tough period where there was a lot of debate, and I think, ‘Well, I’ll remember what he said to me.’”
One of this television season’s major breakouts, now also nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie and Outstanding Writing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie, Gadd said he keeps his mind on “the letters I get, the emails my agents get that they forward on. ‘I’ve been in the closet for this long and I’ve decided at the age of 60 to tell my kids,’ or, ‘I’ve carried this secret for years and I’ve finally taken action,’ or, ‘I finally told people,’ or, ‘I finally told my wife or my husband,’ and those are the people that I do the show for. Everything else is noise, as far as I’m concerned.”
The writer/performer is already onto his next project “Lions,” which had already been commissioned prior to the success of “Baby Reindeer,” and acquired by HBO, though he says “I certainly hope to work with Netflix [again] in the future.” With “Baby Reindeer” being an adaptation of his stage show that became a huge hit at Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, something he worked hard to maintain the essence of, Gadd is already eyeing a return to the stage, even if it is just in the capacity of an actor or playwright. “Television—’take one, take two’—is quite methodical, quite considered, and obviously it takes a while for that work to actually be shown to the world, but the thrill of live performing is crazy. It really is crazy. There’s no thrill like it, and I want to experience that again as soon as I can,” he said.
As for where he is at with “Baby Reindeer” itself, as final Emmy voting approaches, Gadd said “I wouldn’t change [this experience]. Like I say, I go back to that guy that came up to me and said that, and I go back to the charity statistics, and if I need to soak up a bit more pressure or criticism to bring a sense of good around this show, which I do believe it is—the show has done a phenomenal amount of good in the world in terms of changing people’s understanding of things like sexual abuse, mental health and all this kind of stuff—then that’s a good thing, and I can’t regret that.”
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