It started with a kind gesture. The comedian Richard Gadd was working in a pub when a woman came in and sat down at the bar. She told him she couldn’t afford a drink and he felt sorry for her, so he made her a cup of tea on the house.
Gadd has replayed this moment thousands of times, agonising over whether he could have done anything differently. That woman, whom he calls Martha to protect her identity, became his stalker for four and a half years. “At first everyone at the pub thought it was funny that I had an admirer,” says Gadd, a wiry 34-year-old from a tiny town near Fife. “Then she started to invade my life, following me, turning up at my gigs, waiting outside my house, sending thousands of voicemails and emails.”
He turned his experience into a harrowing one-man show at the Edinburgh Festival in 2019 and it’s now a Netflix series called Baby Reindeer, after the pet name Martha gave him. It has shot to the top of the charts, with viewers speculating about who the real Martha might be. When I saw the show in Edinburgh it made the audience so tense that when an ambulance drove past, siren on, as we filed out, a few people screamed. The series has the same anxious energy and pace as it tells Gadd’s story with dark humour and nuance. After four years of not knowing what to do about this woman, feeling guilty that he had somehow encouraged her or been flattered by her attention (although they were never friends or had any kind of sexual relationship) and failing to explain the situation to the police, who said they were powerless to do anything unless she physically attacked him, telling his story live to an audience provided relief.
The show comes out as momentum is building round campaigns to address the low prosecution rates for stalking. Just 6.6 per cent of reported stalkers are charged with a crime, and only 1.4 per cent are convicted, while more than 80 per cent of stalking cases in London were wrongly categorised between 2015 and 2023, with victims often dismissed or made to feel paranoid.
When Gadd went to the police about Martha, they found it unfathomable that he, a fit young man, was being threatened by a woman. “When a man gets stalked it can be portrayed in films and television as a sexy thing,” he says, unwrapping the biscuit that’s come with his oat latte. “Like a femme fatale who gradually becomes more sinister. It doesn’t carry as much threat of physical violence, is less common and can be trivialised. I was physically scared because I didn’t know how far she could take it, she could have a knife, but I did think how terrifying it would be if she was a tall scary man.”
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In the end, he had to prove the threat by recording all her messages and trawling through them for times she was threatening him or people round him — a task that consumed him because there were so many of them. In the show, she receives nine months in prison and a five-year restraining order. In real life, he can’t say too much about the real Martha other than “it is resolved. I had mixed feelings about it — I didn’t want to throw someone who was that level of mentally unwell in prison.”
In general, he thinks, men find it harder to ask for help. “Men tend to exist in a prism of self-denial, that’s how they tend to react to anything they can wrongfully see as a dent to their masculinity or male pride.”
For him, talking about it to an audience was cathartic. “It was a weird thing to tell people,” he says. “But I couldn’t keep it all in any more. Making shows about it was all I had. I was shell-shocked, but by performing it you gain ownership. When you keep it inside for so long it becomes gigantic and insurmountable, but through performance you can somehow go outside yourself, observe and process it. And the adrenaline of doing the show and the reaction was addictive.”
The show was a sold-out, critically acclaimed success, but did reliving the experience every night on stage take its toll? “The nights where I didn’t want to go on stage ended up being the best performances. I felt like it was actively mending me.”
What he went through is, he says, best described as “like PTSD”. He has had “every type of therapy going”, lives alone and isn’t in a relationship. “I am way more cautious around people now,” he says. “It takes me a long time to trust them. Before, I entered situations with such abandonment and I got burnt.”
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Gadd doesn’t want his parents, a microbiologist and secretary, to watch the show — he banned them from his 2016 Perrier award-winning show Monkey See Monkey Do, about a previous sexual assault (which feeds into Baby Reindeer). He shares Netflix with them (“I pay for it, it’s the least I can do”) and has warned them that he will be able to see if they have watched.
He wrote the Netflix adaptation during lockdown, living alone in his new flat in north London that he hadn’t had time to furnish before the shops closed. “I was sitting on a deckchair, laptop on my legs and on a mattress on the floor, digging up all this stuff — it was a pathway to madness.” It became even more intense when he went on a strict diet to play himself at his most neurotic rock bottom in Baby Reindeer, going down to 10½st. His weight has fluctuated — before he made Baby Reindeer, he was 15st, after putting on weight for a role in the Hulu series Wedding Season (he followed a weight training and junk food diet regimen called “dirty bulking” for that and wouldn’t recommend it).
Now, he is busy writing a BBC show called Lions, about a toxic relationship between two brothers over 40 years. It’s what he’s always wanted to do. Growing up in a place “where there was one corner shop and that was it”, he became obsessed with sitcoms and comedy; inhaling episodes of The Office, Black Books and Father Ted, then researching how all the actors and writers got to where they were.
At Glasgow university, where he went to appease his parents, he got into stand-up and drama. “I was terrible,” he says. “I was at mainstream comedy clubs doing comedy that was arguably quite bad, pressing the wrong buttons, alienatingly subversive.” On one occasion, when just one person turned up, he took them to the pub instead of performing.
Despite nerves about how Baby Reindeer will be received, he is glad he has spoken about Martha. “It is hard to live with, but I think I’m all right at the moment.”
Baby Reindeer is available on Netflix
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