Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd) in "Baby Reindeer."
Baby Reindeer star Richard Gadd is revealing more details behind his riveting true-life stalker tale that became the new Netflix
The seven-part limited series has been racing up Netflix’s Global Top 10 TV Shows chart since its release on the streamer April 11. An adaptation of his 2019 one-man stage play, “Baby Reindeer” tells Gadd’s harrowing true story of how his act of kindness toward a woman he calls “Martha” while working as a bartender and struggling comedian turned into a stalker nightmare.
In an interview with Variety on Friday, Gadd says “Martha” wasn’t portrayed by another actor in the play because it was a one-man production, so he had to get creative. As such, creating the Netflix series out of the play that he staged in U.K. was a complicated process.
“In terms of developing it from a theater show into a television show, it was quite difficult,” Gadd told Variety. “The play itself was a one-man show where I spoke about my life. It was me and a stool — Martha was a stool and I carried the stool around stage and I’d move her into different positions.
“So, to bring it from a 70-minute monologue into seven episodes, multiple characters, different strands and plot lines, it was a massive undertaking and a load of pressure,” Gadd added.
Gadd Was Amazed At What His Co-Star Brought To Martha
In the Netflix version of Baby Reindeer, Martha is played by Jessica Gunning. During his real-life ordeal with his Martha, Gadd, among other things, received more than 43,000 text messages from his stalker, the star-writer told The Guardian in 2019.
Naturally, Gadd had to fictionalize Baby Reindeer for legal reasons and he even went so far as to change the name of his character to Donny Dunn.
Yet while Gadd couldn’t use direct references to any of the parties involved in his story, Martha still needed to feel like the person who stalked him and he found it in Gunning.
“What I needed to see was the essence of the person, the kind of energy, and no one did it like Jess. She’s phenomenal,” Gadd told Variety. “I needed to see someone who was vulnerable one moment, angry the next, volatile but so desperate and sympathetic.”
Donny Dunn (RIchard Gadd) and Martha (Jessica Gunning) in "Baby Reindeer."
However, Gadd told the trade publication, that he discovered that Gunning was someone who could play much more than just the extremes.
“I needed to see someone who could capture a full gamut of emotions,” Gadd explained to Variety. “When somebody has severe mental health problems, they tend to leap from one emotion to the next, sometimes even quite quickly. And that’s very hard to do from an acting point of view, but Jess seems to have it in her pores, it seems to just fall out of her.”
While Baby Reindeer gives us the fictionalized version of the events that happened to Gadd, the heart of the story remains throughout the series.
“It’s all emotionally 100% true, if that makes sense. It’s all borrowed from instances that happened to me and real people that I met,” Gadd told Variety. “But of course, you can’t do the exact truth, for both legal and artistic reasons. I mean there’s certain protections, you can’t just copy somebody else’s life and name and put it onto television.”
One of the considerations, Gadd added, is that he didn’t want to exacerbate the problems the true figures in the story have in real life.
“Obviously, we were very aware that some characters in it are vulnerable people, so you don’t want to make their lives more difficult,” Gadd told Variety. “So, you have to change things to protect yourself and protect other people.”
All seven episodes of Baby Reindeer are streaming on Netflix.
