The new Netflix series Baby Reindeer opens with a shot of Martha, an emotionally troubled woman (Jessica Gunning) as she sets eyes on the man with whom she will become obsessed. His name is Donny, he’s a bartender/comedian, and his fatal mistake is that he offers Martha a free drink and some offhand kindness that she latches onto like a lifeline. She stalks and smothers him—sending him hundreds of hours of voice messages, over 40,000 emails, and triggering an existential tailspin that spans seven episodes, streaming Thursday.
The bracing drama comes from Richard Gadd, a Scottish writer-actor-comedian who not only created, wrote, and stars in Baby Reindeer. He lived it.
While in his 20s, he was stalked by a woman he can no longer discuss in specifics for legal reasons. He says the experience lasted about five years and overlapped with a period in which Gadd was “dealing with the aftermath of severe sexual abuse.” His mind spun in compulsive circles: “I couldn’t understand how my life had gotten to this point. I grew up in a small town in Scotland with one shop, and I couldn’t understand how I was suddenly dealing with two major crimes at once.”
His obsessive analysis led him to the conclusion that he was complicit in the stalking. “One of the craziest parts is the fact that I seemed quite happy to indulge it early on,” he admits. The real-life Martha would walk into the bar, and stay Gadd’s whole shift—and the comedian would initially joke with her and engage. “My life was in such a bad way, I would have taken any positive emotion I could, regardless of the consequences.”
He hadn’t breathed a word of his sexual abuse to anyone. “It destroys you from the inside out, those secrets and that kind of disempowerment and that rumination and obsessive anger and wrath and self-hate.” And the real Martha offered him something else intoxicating—a reprieve from the terrible version of himself he was tortured by each day. As Gadd puts it in the show, “When someone sees you through the mire of it all, sees you as the person you came here to be, you notice them. You notice them noticing you.”
Plenty of movies and TV shows have depicted stalkers as horror-movie-type villains. But Baby Reindeer arguably offers the most tender depiction of a stalker ever committed to screen. Referring to films like the genre classic Fatal Attraction, Gadd says, “I would always take umbrage to the bunny-boiler-style stories where somebody’s really normal, usually quite good looking, and then it’s chipped away and they’re sociopathic or psychotic. Real stalking is a mental illness—it isn’t as contained or insidious or malicious as it has been portrayed on film and TV before. I saw a lot of humanity in her.”
Donny opens the Netflix series by confessing that the first time he saw Martha, he felt sorry for her—which is what Gadd felt for his stalker too. “I have what people have called toxic empathy,” the 34-year-old tells me. “I do feel sorry for people a lot. And sometimes I don’t know a thing about ’em, I just pass ’em in the street, and who am I to hand out empathy cards? But with her, I instantly sort of felt like, Oh, this is someone who needs help and isn’t getting it.”
The first iteration of Baby Reindeer was actually born five years ago, when Gadd premiered it as an hour-long stage show at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Gadd, who grew up in Fife, had dreamt of becoming a comedian-writer-actor like the performers he watched growing up on the original version of The Office. He loved that the show offered “complexity of character, pathos, and humor”—a trifecta Gadd achieved in the autobiographical show. It was a layered, wry rendering of a stalker relationship that seemed part thriller, part very dark comedy, and part psychological mystery as audiences slowly discover the damage that set Donny and Martha on their intersecting paths.
The 2019 Baby Reindeer show felt to Gadd like an overnight success. He had spent eight or nine years going to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, trying to build up an audience. Suddenly, this project born from the most painful chapter of his life was earning favorable reviews, igniting Hollywood interest, and allowing him to quit his day job. During the run of the show, he took 74 meetings with production companies and streamers before partnering with Netflix in 2020 to make a seven-episode series.
