Object of desire
A budding comedian is stalked by an obsessive fan
British comedian Richard Gadd’s awardwinning play Baby Reindeer told of his experience of being stalked, and now he’s bringing the dark episode of his life to our screens in a thought-provoking Netflix drama series also called Baby Reindeer.
As with the stage show, Gadd plays a fictionalised version of himself called Donny Dunn as he explores how falling foul of older woman Martha (Jessica Gunning) changed his life.
Comedian Donny is working in a pub when he shows an act of kindness to Martha – only for the vulnerable customer to become obsessed, bombarding him with messages, sending him gifts and turning up at his shows and outside his home.
WARPED RELATIONSHIP
‘At the height of it all, I would go to bed at night and still hear her in my ears, her voice swirling around my head as I tried to sleep,’ recalls Gadd. ‘Sometimes it was like she was there in the room with me – in the bed beside me, even.
‘Stalking is a mental illness and I really wanted to show the layers of stalking in a way I hadn’t seen on television before. It’s a stalker story turned on its head.’
The series also stars Nava Mau as Teri, an American therapist who meets Donny through a dating app, and Tom Goodman-hill as
Darrien, a successful TV writer.
For her part, Gunning says she felt a sense of responsibility to do the story justice from Martha’s perspective.
‘I think as an actor I’m not sure if you can focus on the harm Martha causes, because I don’t think it’s intentional from her,’ she explains. ‘I didn’t want to play her as a villain.’
Gadd says that he wanted the script to be a warts-and-all story, where he also examines his own culpability.
‘It was a big moment for me – coming clean with what happened after so many years suffering in silence,’ he admits. ‘It felt like a risky thing, to do a version of the story where I held my hands up to the mistakes I made with Martha – the foolish flirting, the cowardly excuses as to why we could not be together.
‘You are revisiting a period in your life, which was the worst period of your life. So it’s running back towards an awful fire you’ve been in. It is a heavy brew and it’s been very challenging.’