After the extraordinary success of Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd could have taken a moment to rest. Instead, the morning after finishing the series, he was already returning to a story that had stayed with him for years.
I recently caught up with Gadd again following our conversation at Televerse, where we spoke about the series Half Man, a project whose origins predate Baby Reindeer. Gadd began developing the story years earlier, and even as Baby Reindeer consumed his attention, Half Man never completely left his thoughts.
“I just kept thinking of it, and I thought that was a good sign,” Gadd told me.
Throughout his work on Baby Reindeer, he found himself thinking about the earlier script, its ambition and what it could ultimately become. By the time Baby Reindeer was finished, interest in Half Man had emerged from the BBC and HBO, giving Gadd an opportunity to finally bring the project to the screen.
But his decision to return wasn’t simply driven by outside interest. It was something he felt creatively compelled to finish.
“If I don’t think about that idea for four years being away from it, then that’s got to be a good sign,” he explained.
There wasn’t much downtime between projects, either.
“Literally, the next day, 8 a.m., I got up after finishing Baby Reindeer and then got to work.”
Considering everything that would ultimately happen with Baby Reindeer, I wondered whether there was ever a moment when Gadd considered leaving Half Man behind and simply seeing what opportunities came his way.
For him, that was never really an option.
“I didn’t want to rest on my laurels, and I still don’t want to rest on my laurels,” Gadd said. “I want to get better, and I want to keep challenging myself by doing new and interesting things.”
He described Half Man as not only the project he wanted to make, but the project that felt like the natural next step in his development as a creator.
“There was no question in my mind that I wanted to do this next, and I wanted to do it next right away.”
That desire to keep moving forward comes as Gadd prepares for another trip to the Emmy Awards. But despite his success, the magnitude of attending television’s biggest night hasn’t become ordinary to him.
Gadd reflected on growing up in a tiny town in Scotland where, as he described it, there wasn’t much to do. Going from there to attending the Emmys remains almost surreal.
“I look at it with pride because it shows hard work and dedication,” he said.
At his previous Emmy experience, Gadd found himself surrounded by artists whose work he had admired for years, including Steve Martin and Jodie Foster. Rather than treating the ceremony simply as an awards show, he tried to absorb the entire experience—the speeches, the people and the realization that he was witnessing some of the biggest moments of other artists’ lives.
For someone who once watched those performers from afar, suddenly sharing the room with them carried enormous meaning.
“It felt so big and glamorous, and just a really exciting evening,” Gadd recalled.
He went into that night without expectations. What followed became something he’ll never forget.
“Probably the greatest night of my life.”
As Gadd heads toward another Emmy celebration and prepares to celebrate for Half Man, he’s still looking forward rather than settling into what he’s already accomplished.
Perhaps that’s why a project he first began years ago survived everything that happened in between. Even while Baby Reindeer changed his career, Gadd couldn’t stop thinking about the story he’d left waiting for him.
Listen to the full exchange with Richard Gadd by clicking on the player above.
