Richard Gadd digs deep into his Baby Reindeer follow-up, Half Man, and his transformation into Ruben Pallister.
Key Points
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"Initially I wasn’t going to play him," Gadd reveals.
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He explains why he decided to play Ruben and how he "did everything I could to change everything about myself."
It’s a Tuesday morning in April in New York City, where Richard Gadd, the creator ofNetflix’s Emmys-sweeping juggernautBaby Reindeer, brings his next project, HBO and the BBC’sHalf Man, on the road in the States.
The Scottish triple threat (actor/comedian/writer) sits at a table in a room at Midtown’s The Whitby Hotel, donning the same royal blue long-sleeve knit polo he wore earlier that morning for aTodayshow appearance.
He shed the image of that tall, slender bartender and aspiring comic, named Donny Dunn, that Netflix subscribers met on his haunting but captivating limited series in 2024 — an observation that comes as a relief to Gadd. The 36-year-old now maintains some of the muscles he amassed for the role of Ruben Pallister, the burly brute ofHalf Man.
“I always wanted Ruben to stand alone in his masculinity,” Gadd tellsEntertainment Weekly. “When I was putting on muscle size, it needed to be real. It couldn’t be, like, ‘gym body.’ It had to be like a real man, in a way.” Meaning, “Any size is just a byproduct of the way he's learned to defend himself against life.”
“In terms of my own transformation,” he adds, “initially I wasn’t going to play him.”
On Dec. 13, 2023, Gadd finished the final sound mix onBaby Reindeer, and by 8 a.m. the very next morning, he returned to a pilot script that he wrote a few years prior.Originally titledLions,Half Manis a story Gadd describes as “the concept of man.”
The six-episode series, coming to HBO and the BBC this week, stars Gadd as Ruben, who crashes the wedding of his blood brother, Niall Kennedy (Jamie Bell).
Just as the exchange turns violent, the story jumps backwards in time to see younger actors Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robertson depict Ruben and Niall, respectively, as teens and the events that brought them together.
The series jostles back and forth in time to show how their bond as men shaped their lives over the course of 40 years, often in extremely violent, self-destructive ways.
In the aftermath ofBaby Reindeer, which was notably inspired by Gadd's own experience with a stalker and sexual abuse, networks were ravenous for the writer's next project. “If I told you some of the opportunities that I was offered, you probably wouldn't believe them,” he says.
There were times when he lingered over those opportunities he turned down, but in hindsight, he has no regrets. HBO and the BBC together represent the TV Gadd grew up watching, from the Ricky Gervais-ledThe OfficetoThe WireandThe Sopranos.
In the early days ofHalf Man, a fictionalized work, “I wasn't going to really be in it at all,” Gadd says. AfterBaby Reindeer, “I wanted to take a load off, I wanted to take some responsibility off my plate,” he recalls. Maybe he’d pop in for a cameo, an Easter egg for appreciators of his work to find, like a stray cop part, but that would be the extent of it.
“And then, for various reasons, it came about,” he adds.
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Bell was among the first to suggest Gadd for the role of Ruben. TheBilly ElliotandSkinactor, 40, was an early casting addition to the piece. He really enjoyedBaby Reindeerand was determined to act opposite Gadd. Then when HBO got involved, network leads made the same suggestion.
“I remember my initial impulse was, ‘Well, I won't be able to do that,’” Gadd says. “I said I’d think about it for about 24 hours and I'd email in the morning. I went to bed. I remember my heart was just going, like adrenaline. And all of it was [this] tightness, like, ‘What if I don't do it? What if people don't buy it? Am I capable of this?’ 'Cause it's so out of my comfort zone. I think about Donny Dunn — which I'm not saying was a comfort zone at all, there were lots of challenging things there, but that's what people see as my acting sweet spot. Ruben is almost like a polar opposite.”
It was the fear of failure, but the more Gadd mused on the matter, a different fear overshadowed those concerns: regret over missing the opportunity to play a character so many actors would kill for, someone so scary and big, but also someone vulnerable with a traumatic history.
“I guess the fear of ‘would people buy Donny Dunn as Ruben Pallister?’ was the big driver behind going to the gym so often and never straying from my diet,” Gadd continues. “I don't think I strayed from my diet the whole time I was working on it. I did everything I could to change everything about myself from my hair, my beard, my size, my voice, everything. It was a real commitment and we'll see if people buy it.”
Gadd now feelsHalf Manwould be a different show if he didn’t bulk up, noting the “arresting visuals” they created with the varying size and heights between him and Bell. It also came down to what the character needed. For Cambell’s portrayal of younger Ruben, masculinity was more about presence than physical form. Adult Ruben, however, needed to feel big as his own defense mechanism.
“I’m not saying people can’t be intimidated by thin people,” Gadd clarifies. “Look at Begbie.” Robert Carlye famously portrayed the violent brawler Francis "Franco" Begbie in Danny Boyle’s 1996 crime-dramaTrainspotting. “Begbie was a great character that was very scary and he was thin, quite small. I just felt with Ruben, he was the epitome of masculinity. We had to see a visual representation of that in his older life.”
Gadd dispels the assumption that he set out to make a show about masculinity, or even specifically toxic masculinity, despite the modern culture of the manosphere. That, he says, feels more serendipitous than anything. Though, he acknowledges how the show borrows certain themes or struggles that he understands intimately.
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“I've realized, in a lot of ways, that masculinity is a projection of whoever's trying to speak about it,” Gadd explains. “Some people see masculinity as the strong, aggressive guy in the corner of the gym, or is masculinity the quiet guy who holds his shoulders back and speaks with quiet confidence and has a perfect grasp of who he is? It’s in such a state of flux that the word is now being used to encompass all aspects of male behavior.”
Half Man, in many ways, is a show about repression — the attacks men make on themselves more than any violence they inflict on each other. Gadd points as far back to the nursery rhymes children are fed as kids, the ones that always seem to depict certain male and female roles.
“It does seep its way into your subconscious,” he says. “The man has to be the rescuer, the man has to be the provider, the man has to be brave and strong and bold. I think that can create such a conflict with interior pain in a lot of ways, almost like generations of people thinking that emotions are something to be kept within. That, of course, leads to repression, which of course leads to dysfunctional behavior.”
Half Manpremieres Thursday on HBO in the U.S.
Read the original article onEntertainment Weekly
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