Everything is 100% emotionally true

Baby reindeer star Richard Gadd reveals more details about his gripping true-life stalker story that became the new Netflix
NFLX
series.

The seven-part limited series has climbed Netflix's Top 10 Global TV Shows rankings since its release on the streamer on April 11. An adaptation of his 2019 one-man play, Baby Reindeer tells Gadd's poignant true story of how his act of kindness toward a woman he calls Martha while working as a bartender and struggling comedian turned is transformed into a stalker's nightmare.

In an interview with Variety On Friday, Gadd said Martha wasn't played by another actor because it was a one-man production, so he got creative. As such, creating the Netflix series from the play he directed in the UK was a complicated process.

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As far as going from a theater show to a television show, it was quite difficult, Gadd said. Variety. The play itself was a one-man show where I talked about my life. It was me and a stool. Martha was a stool and I carried the stool on stage and put her in different positions.

So going from a 70-minute monologue to seven episodes, with multiple characters, different strands and storylines, was a huge 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 said. The Guardian in 2019.

Naturally, Gadd had to fictionalize Baby Reindeer for legal reasons and he even went so far as to change his character's name to Donny Dunn.

Yet even though Gadd couldn't use direct references to any of the parties involved in his story, Martha still needed to feel like the person stalking him and he found it in Gunning.

What I needed to see was the essence of the person, the type 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, unstable but so desperate and sympathetic.

However, Gadd told the trade publication that he found Gunning to be someone who could play much more than the extremes.

I needed to see someone who could capture a whole range of emotions, Gadd told Variety. When a person suffers from serious mental health problems, they tend to move from one emotion to another, sometimes quite quickly. And it's very difficult to do from an acting point of view, but Jess seems to have it in her pores, it seems to elude 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.

This is all 100% true on an emotional level, if that makes sense. This is all borrowed from cases that happened to me and from real people I met, Gadd told Variety. But of course, one cannot do exactly the truth, for reasons both legal and artistic. I mean, there are certain protections, you can't just copy someone else's life and name and put it on television.

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One consideration, Gadd added, is that he didn't want to exacerbate the problems the story's real characters face in real life.

“Obviously, we were very aware that some characters are vulnerable people, so you don't want to make their lives harder,” Gadd told Variety. We must therefore change things to protect ourselves and others.

All seven episodes of Baby Reindeer are streaming on Netflix.