Performing All the Way Through: A Conversation with ‘Half Man’ Creator and Writer Richard Gadd

Richard Gadd wrote the first draft of Half Man in 2019, during the live run of Baby Reindeer. At the time, Baby Reindeer had not yet made it to screen. The cultural phenomenon, the BAFTA, the Emmy, all the conversation that would follow, none of that had happened yet. He shelved Half Man for four years to see Baby Reindeer through. He came back to it. The reason he gives is both simple and revealing: he could not stop thinking about it.

Half Man is a six-part drama for BBC and HBO spanning thirty years in the lives of two stepbrothers, Ruben and Niall, whose relationship begins with violence at a wedding and slowly unfolds into something far more complex. Dark, uncomfortable, and relentlessly honest about what happens when trauma goes unresolved, it is a series about men who spend decades performing versions of themselves rather than confronting what is actually there.

After Baby Reindeer announced him as one of the most fearless storytellers working today, Half Man had the task of proving that what we saw in that first series was not a singular lightning strike. It proves it. The writing is unflinching. Jamie Bell delivers some of the finest work of his career. Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robertson as the younger versions of the characters are extraordinary. And Gadd himself, as Ruben, is genuinely frightening in the best possible way.

I spoke with Richard about the story he could not put down, the men he could not stop writing, and what authenticity actually means when you are making something under this much pressure.

This interview has been edited for flow and clarity.

Rahul Menon: Baby Reindeer arrived and immediately felt like something the world had not quite seen before: deeply personal, formally restless, and operating at an emotional frequency that caught everyone off guard. Half Man is a very different kind of story, spanning thirty years, built around two people who become brothers without sharing blood. What pulled you toward this particular relationship, and how did you know this was the right story to carry the weight of following Baby Reindeer?

Richard Gadd: Well, it was more a pull toward a project I had explored previously. It is pretty much public knowledge now that I wrote the first Half Man script while I was doing the live show of Baby Reindeer. I shelved it for four years to focus exclusively on Baby Reindeer, but I never really stopped thinking about it. I had this great sense of incompletion, and I found myself thinking about the project during the Baby Reindeer process often. I figured if I am struggling to shake the idea as much as I am, that is probably a good sign.

I never really thought about the weight of following Baby Reindeer. If anything, I did everything I could not to think about it. I feel that if you let the expectations of others in too much, you run the risk of writing for other people. This was an opportunity to work on a show I loved, exploring characters I found interesting, with two channels I had grown up adoring. It just seemed perfect.

Rahul Menon: Critics have reached for the phrase "toxic masculinity" to describe Half Man, and you have pushed back on that framing, describing the show instead as being about the difficulty of male relationships and the dangers of repression. That distinction feels important to you. Can you say more about why, and what you think the toxic masculinity label misses about what Ruben and Niall are actually going through?

Richard Gadd: Well, for a lot of reasons, toxic masculinity both fits and does not fit the show. Of course, it displays a lot of male violence and behavior which most people would consider toxic, and so I understand the link. But I also feel the phrasing is so modern and zeitgeisty that it feels somewhat unbefitting in describing a narrative that stretches back decades.

In a lot of ways, I have always seen Half Man as being about repression, the difficulty of communication, trying to express love for others and for yourself, and the impact of living with trauma. Not all of that fits neatly under the umbrella of toxic masculinity. A lot of these themes can lead to toxic behavior, for sure, but I would like people to take a whole host of things from it beyond that too. I just feel the phrase gets us to the endpoint a little too easily.

Rahul Menon: Ruben and Niall are presented almost as archetypes at first: one volatile and physically imposing, the other quiet and gentle. But you have described how those boxes become blurred and complicated as the story progresses. As a writer, how did you construct that unraveling, and at what point in the writing did you understand who these two men actually were underneath the versions of themselves they perform for each other?

Richard Gadd: Well, I knew from a storytelling point of view that they could not stay the same throughout the whole series. It just did not feel true to life. Who is the same person in their forties as they were in their teens? We often point to the Rubens of this world as the clearest examples of broken maleness, but there is also a more insidious form of masculinity that exists, which I explored through Niall's dishonesty, jealousy, and secrecy. I also thought it would be interesting to switch them up at the halfway point, so that by the end you are left questioning which brother is actually the more invidious one.

At the same time, both of their behaviors stem from pain, lack of acceptance, childhood trauma, abandonment. These kinds of issues, without remedy, move and mutate throughout life. The longer they go unresolved, the more they corrupt. For that reason, the characters are essentially performing all the way through to the final scene. In many ways, they are living fake lives throughout, and as a result they self-destruct in all sorts of ways by the end.

What makes Half Man so quietly devastating is precisely this: the refusal to offer one simple villain and one clean victim. Both men are performing. Both are hiding. The series is most powerful in the stretches where you can feel the weight of that self-deception pressing down on every scene, every exchange, every silence. Neither man is innocent. Neither is entirely guilty. Both spend years trapped inside cycles they neither fully understand nor know how to escape.

Rahul Menon: Jamie Bell's Niall and your Ruben have this bond described as a complicated love they seem incapable of expressing. How did you and Jamie build that dynamic together, and what did he bring to Niall that sharpened your understanding of Ruben?

Richard Gadd: Well, I think as people, we all know that complicated pull toward someone you know is not good for you. I read a poll somewhere recently that said people care more about what people who do not like them think of them than those who do. It kind of sums us up really as a species. Inside Ruben and Niall, there is an abusive dynamic that gives life as much as it takes it away. Without that, the two men, especially Niall, would feel inextricably lost.

Jamie understood all of that early on and had an instinctive connection to it. I rarely offer parts to people without auditioning, in fact this was a first, but something in the way he acts and performs made me think he would be perfect for Niall in capturing all that nuance and pain as he spirals towards self-destruction. Thankfully, my instincts were right, and he utterly nailed it.

Rahul Menon: Half Man moves across thirty years of shared history between two people, which means you are asking the audience to hold an enormous amount of time and emotional memory simultaneously. As a writer, how do you structure a story that spans that much of two lives without losing the intimacy that makes each individual moment matter?

Richard Gadd: Well, I knew it was ambitious. It is not only the giant span of time, but also the disordered way I have structured the wedding sequences. But as writers, I believe we should trust the intelligence of our audiences more than we do in the current climate, and so far, people seem to be following it perfectly well.

I also thought that to explore male violence in the present, you have to flashback to their youth and capture all the learned behavior, traumas, and vulnerabilities we absorb early in life. Each episode, I had to recontextualize where everything was at. It felt like doing six Episode Ones, starting over each time whilst still trying to tie the series together. But I felt as long as I stayed loyal to the characters, their flaws, their indignities, their good qualities and bad, people would still relate to and understand them, no matter how much it jumps between decades.

The structure of Half Man is one of its bravest choices. Gadd commits to nonlinear storytelling across six episodes, each one demanding that the audience reconstruct the timeline as they go. The effect is cumulative and quietly devastating. Every piece of information lands differently once you know what surrounds it. And the fact that it works as well as it does is testament to how completely Gadd trusts the emotional logic of his characters to carry the audience even when the chronology refuses to behave.

Rahul Menon: Your route to this kind of work came through stand-up and one-man theater, forms that put you completely alone in front of an audience with no safety net. How much of that live performance experience informs the way you write for screen?

Richard Gadd: I suppose the main thing I learned from live performance is that no audience will tolerate anything if it does not feel genuine. You can have the loftiest themes and the most highbrow prose in the world, but if you are not connecting to your own emotional instincts as a writer or performer, then the audience will not either.

I remember in my early years doing stand-up, spinning anecdotes about my parents, my partner, my car, my dog, which I did not even have. You could have heard a pin drop. The reason it failed was because it was all fake. The second I started to adapt my work to my own taste, experiences, and worldview, that is when things started to work. Authenticity and truth. If you are writing about something you genuinely care about, it is likely that other people will care about it too.

Also, never change something that works. When I did Baby Reindeer as a live play, I felt it worked, and so I worked tirelessly to bring its essence from stage to screen. The email over black in the series came from emails projected into the live space with the lights down. The brutal honesty of the first-person monologue becoming the voiceover. A good number of songs and lines from the live show also made it into the television version. The two spaces, different though they are, can have a real symbiosis.

Rahul Menon: Baby Reindeer was drawn from your own life in ways that were very public and very costly. Half Man feels like a different kind of excavation: less autobiographical in the literal sense but perhaps more thematically connected to questions about male identity and repression that have clearly been with you for a long time. How do you think about the difference between writing from personal experience and writing toward personal truth, and where does Half Man sit on that spectrum for you?

Richard Gadd: Well, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference because both were hugely challenging. I was aware that Half Man started as a blank page, but I still had to look inwards to find certain truths in the characters and things I found interesting. I feel all work is autobiographical, in a way, because it is formed by someone's understanding of the world, their opinions, worldview, character traits they are drawn to. All art comes from a sense of personal excavation, whether it is semi-autobiographical or not.

Ultimately, when I think of both projects, I feel they both operated under extreme pressure. Baby Reindeer was the pressure of doing my first show. Half Man was the pressure of doing my follow-up in under two years. So really, across both, all I remember is fighting tooth and nail to get everything done as well as I possibly could.

That last answer is the one that stays with me. Fighting tooth and nail. It is not the language of artistic vision or creative intention. It is the language of someone who has been in the room for a very long time, working very hard, under conditions that do not get easier because the last thing you made was good. What Half Man achieves, and what this conversation makes clear, is that Gadd earns every frame of it.

At some point during the writing of Half Man, Gadd had to decide what the title actually meant. The answer the series arrives at is not the one you expect. It is smaller and more devastating than anything a tagline could carry. And that precision, the willingness to give you something quieter than the thing you were bracing for, is the quality that defines his work.

What this conversation keeps returning to is belief. Gadd does not write toward themes. He writes toward characters he cannot shake, situations he cannot stop thinking about, truths he cannot fake his way around. The sociopolitical resonance of Half Man, and it is considerable, arrives as a byproduct of that commitment rather than a design. That is a harder thing to pull off than it sounds, especially the second time, under the weight of everything Baby Reindeer became.

He pulled it off. And the question Half Man keeps asking, about what men perform in order to avoid being seen, and what it costs them over thirty years to keep performing, does not leave you quickly. I feel genuinely fortunate to be covering television at a moment when Richard Gadd is making it. Baby Reindeer was not a one-off. It was an introduction.

Half Man is now streaming on HBO Max.