With 2024’s disturbing yet compelling Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd made a splashy debut as a TV creator and series lead. The Scottish stand-up comic and actor had previously appeared in Outlander and Stephen Graham’s Code 404, but his Netflix series quickly thrust him into the limelight and earned him three Emmys. The autobiographical Baby Reindeer made a mark with its intensity, and Gadd’s latest project doubles down on the dreariness, tackling the all-too-relevant subject of toxic masculinity.
HBO’s Half Man follows Niall and Ruben—quasi-stepbrothers who come in and out of each other’s lives but can’t stay apart for long—from their volatile teen years to an explosive adulthood. While shy Niall is in denial about being gay, Ruben is an agent of chaos who throws punches first, and asks questions later. After three episodes to showing how their upbringing, repressed feelings, and prejudices affect Niall and Ruben as grown-ups, Jamie Bell and Gadd fully take over the roles in this week’s episode, the first not directed by Alexandra Brodski (Rivals).
Gadd, who gained nearly 100 pounds for the role, looks and sounds unrecognizable as Ruben—a far cry from Baby Reindeer’s meek Donny Dunn. He tells The A.V. Club that, in playing this version of Ruben, he wanted to explore “an undercurrent of pain” behind his violent actions. We also spoke to Gadd and Brodski about the show’s expansive timeline, how Scotland influenced the writing and visuals (and how Russian-born, German-raised Brodski approached that influence), and why Half Man is best left “open to interpretation.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The A.V. Club: Richard, you wrote this pilot before working on Baby Reindeer. Did coming back to it after your experiences with the Netflix series influence your approach to Half Man at all?
Richard Gadd: I wouldn’t say it had any sort of creative impact on Half Man because they’re two very different projects that demand different pacing. This one’s completely based in a fictional space compared to Baby Reindeer. But what I learned during Baby Reindeer, most of all, is that what you put into a project is what you get back out. I went about with Half Man by just completely giving it top-level commitment from start to finish. I realized that the more you put into it, the more you get, because that’s what happened with Baby Reindeer, which was such a personal project. Either way, if you go about it with utter commitment and passion, then hopefully at the end of it all, you have something you’re proud of.
AVC: Alexandra, what resonated with you after reading the script of those first three episodes? And how did you envision being able to bring young Niall and Ruben to life?
Alexandra Brodski: When I read the script, I fell so in love with Niall and Ruben. I’m not just saying it because Richard is sitting next to me. I found the writing and these characters to be complicated and truthful. They had all this darkness, but also love. And when I say love, it’s from me as an audience member toward the show, but also between these two characters. Bringing that out was always the main priority. I think my job is to communicate this feeling that I had when I was reading it. So I put together a really big visual board with a lot of Scottish street photography to try and find ways to communicate the rawness and the warmth of this show. We never wanted to make a kitchen sink drama. We always wanted to be engaging and for it to have a sort of physical element to it. Richard and I connected over this approach and kept pushing for the same thing throughout the shoot and in post-production.
AVC: Why was it important for you to start Half Man in the ’80s in Scotland and stretch it out over decades? Can you both talk about how the time and place inform this specific story and group of people?
RG: With Half Man, I wanted to ultimately explore a sense of masculinity and what men can be like in modern society. But to do that, you need to flash back and contextualize how certain prejudices and learned behaviors come about. The ’80s in the UK were a famously unaccepting time. There’s a phrase where if somebody expresses something untoward or whatever, you say, “Oh, I didn’t know you were from the ’80s.” So to take two men who are adults in the present day and see how they grew up in a society full of prejudice, bullying, and these things that you soak up as trauma during your youth, and see how it exhibits itself during adulthood, was very interesting to me. Glasgow was an interesting setting because I grew up in a small village in Fife, where we considered Edinburgh as the good [city] and Glasgow as the scary city. But it has gone through a huge evolution. I think of it as a cultural capital of the UK and maybe even the world. It has a huge LGBT community, so I thought placing this story inside an ever-changing city is interesting and applies additional pressures to the central characters who are living in a place that is literally evolving faster than they are. Scotland just has a great identity that I love to be able to bring to the screen.
AB: Obviously, I’m not from Scotland. But getting to go there and spending time in various places with Richard, our heads of departments, and the production crew was key to learning about the environment and community that ends up manifesting in these characters. For example, I think the character of Niall’s mother, Lori, is such a product of that environment in terms of her harshness, but also the dark humor and the warmth. Characters have to be a product of where they live. I was also trying to find textures and layers in the design of the city and the spaces that we had. We had this idea to use a lot of brutalist architecture that is accessible in the city while shooting, which I think brought a neat element to Half Man.
AVC: Richard, you take over as adult Ruben fully starting with episode four. How did you prepare to play him, and was it challenging to get into his aggressive mindset as an actor?
RG: While playing Ruben, I thought it wasn’t important to only prioritize how he is domineering or particularly violent. He’s a man who already knows he is physically capable. But a lot of his masculinity comes from a deeply repressive place in his own head. So before shooting any scenes where I had to portray him as being very aggressive, I was trying to dig into the emotional pain he was feeling. The whole show would fall apart if Ruben were just this constant embodiment of oppressive violence. There are scenes in later episodes where I have to violently attack someone and go absolutely ballistic. People around me were asking me, “Oh, how are you teeing yourself up to do that? Are you doing push-ups or practicing with boxing gloves?” But no. I actually just tried to soak in this undercurrent of pain that Ruben feels at all times in his life.
AVC: Did you keep count of how many times you grunt as Ruben because that’s how he mostly responds to people as opposed to communicating with them. Was it intentional?
RG: Well, I’m glad you spotted it because it was a choice that he grunts a lot. It’s not something I do in my real life at all. And Baby Reindeer‘s Donnie Dunn never grunted either. I practiced this quite a lot because I wanted him to be primal and animalistic. It’s almost like that’s how he responds to the world, primarily with guttural noises. Ruben’s voice is also deeper and rougher than how I normally speak. But that gruffness just felt right for him, so it all emerged naturally.
AVC: For a show that tackles the heights of toxic masculinity, how do you hope people respond to Half Man and what they take away from it?
RG: I never want people to take away anything specific from my work. I don’t want to ask anything of them other than they just watch it and make up their own minds. I think too many times in this day and age, whether it’s television or film, it’s almost too clear with what they want you to think and feel. It’s like they’re stretching an arm out of the screen, pointing to your face, and saying, “This is how you need to feel about this subject.” To me, art is at its most interesting when it’s left open to interpretation so people can take what they need from it. How anyone receives this show emotionally or politically is because that’s their perception of it. I would never want to take that away from anyone.
AB: Even when we were filming, everyone was debating whose side they were on and stuff. So I couldn’t agree more about letting people take from it whatever they need to.
Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club‘s TV critic.
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