‘Baby Reindeer’ Stars Richard Gadd + Jessica Gunning Go Deep on the Netflix Stalking Series

The response has been staggering, both on Netflix (the series dominated the streamer’s charts for weeks) and beyond. We Are Survivors, a Manchester-based charity dedicated to helping male sexual assault survivors, reported an 80% increase in new callers following the premiere. 

“I always believed in the show, but for it to be this big a hit and generate this much conversation—there’s been quite a lot to adapt to,” Gadd says, both professionally and in terms of “generally adapting to life in the public eye.” 

Gunning agrees. “It just feels like it’s all been a bit of a crazy dream.”

If it is a dream, it isn’t over yet. Just a week after we spoke, “Baby Reindeer” scored 11 Emmy nominations, including acting nods for Gadd and Gunning; it’s also in the running for outstanding limited or anthology series.

Here, the two discuss how they embraced the show’s challenging material, their emotional last moments on set, and why they’re determined to keep “Baby Reindeer” a one-season phenomenon. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) 

“Baby Reindeer” Credit: Ed Miller/Netflix

Between shooting the series and navigating the response, you’ve been through a lot together. In what ways have you discovered you’re most alike? 

Jessica Gunning: We both really agree that life is dramatic and funny at the same time. That’s the beauty of Richard’s writing for “Baby Reindeer”—the complexity of life and humans, and how they connect at moments when things are hard. But there’s also lightness there. 

Richard Gadd: I’ve made no secret that I really wanted Jess to play this role. And I totally agree with her—I struggle with pure comedies and pure dramas. If you talk about something like “The Sopranos,” it’s full of humor all the way through. When Jess came in to audition, not only did I feel like I saw someone who understood the plot, but who also understood what I and the rest of the team were trying to do. She got the nuances of the piece. 

We did so many auditions, and I remember when I was working with Jess, how giving she was as an actor. I just felt an ease between us. Jess is so expressive that my favorite scenes to do were usually just sitting in a café, where we would be locked in semi-stationary positions. Jess is very easy to feed off of and very easy to react to. There were times when I would slightly lose myself in the scene. 

It’s interesting to hear how you bounced off each other, especially since Martha is a character who tends to, as Donny says on Episode 3, “pick and choose the bits you want to hear.” How did you approach playing that dynamic? 

JG: In my backstory for Martha, I would always imagine that quite a lot of it is like a daydream. She would go home and visualize what may happen. In the café scene, I always imagined her improvising that line when she says, “I want the Scotch broth. I’m just wondering if it’s on the menu.”

The beauty of Donny, though, is that his comeback is even better than her wildest dreams. So it’s like a dream come true for her; it’s better than she even would’ve thought. There are these little breadcrumbs he leaves along the way that she can hold onto. Everything else might disappear, but it’s like she’s latching onto these little moments of connection and embellishing the rest.

Were there any other aspects of Martha you came up with that weren’t mentioned onscreen?

JG: I always imagined there was some sort of dramatic thing that had just happened off the back of Donny and Martha’s first meeting. Richard and [director Weronika Tofilska] agreed, as well, that they wanted to have that energy coming in. That’s the thing that intrigues Donny and draws him in: Martha is lost in that world, and the thing that breaks her out is him offering her the cup of tea. 

RG: That was certainly my intention when I wrote it. I always thought that the motivation for Martha is that she’s coming from some sort of explosion—the ending of her previous stalking experience. It probably blew up in the worst kinds of ways. She walks into the nearest bar, choked up and upset, and so begins the next chapter with a new person. I don’t think I ever fed you that, Jess. I think you just got that. 

Jess was so in tune with the project and the character. I remember a few things that you did from an actor’s point of view that I thought were interesting. I remember you didn’t read Episode 4, because Martha doesn’t know about that part of Donny’s life; and if she did, it would dictate her feelings for Donny or how she sees him.

JG: I was there for the read-through; but yeah, I didn’t study the script. The read-through was an incredible moment, actually, because it was kind of still [in the room] afterward. You could just cut the tension with a knife. And then when Martha comes back at the end, there’s this collective sigh of relief, like: Oh, thank God, he’s got her. And then you’re like, Oh, gosh, hold on. That’s what’s so clever about Richard’s writing, is that you’re relieved when she comes back into his life.

Episode 4 is such a brave piece of writing and acting. Is there anything you did, Richard, to make playing Donny easier on yourself, or did you just have to commit? 

RG: It was probably more the second one. I wouldn’t really recommend that, though. That’s the learning experience that I can hopefully take away from this. But I really had to go back. I’m one of those actors who likes to change a certain bit for the role that they’re doing. If I got cast in a role tomorrow, I’d hate walking onto set like this, with this hair and this beard. I want to try and figure out what weight [the character is], how they look, their hairstyle. I’m not Donny Dunn; Donny Dunn was inspired by a version of myself from over a decade ago, and I needed to get back to that. 

I remember so many things about [that time]. I was living with severe post-traumatic stress; all the stuff I’d gone through had a severe impact on my body and health. I just remember feeling so vulnerable in my body, feeling so thin. I couldn’t eat; I felt queasy all the time. But I’m so far away from that now. I wanted to bring a sense of realism [to the episode], so I made myself go back there, in terms of trying to capture the psychological realism of it all. I lost a lot of weight, and I really reminded myself of what it was like [at the time]. I really was throwing myself in the deep end. Those days were tough.

But it was something that just hadn’t been done on television before. I felt like the whole show hinged on a number of things: Martha’s ability to capture everything in one sentence—scary, vulnerable, sad, angry, unlikable, likable—and Donny’s ability to bring a sense of realism to the experience. Otherwise, the show would fall apart.

The series features dozens of Martha’s voicemails, including the final one, in which she explains the origins of the term “baby reindeer.” What was it like to record those? 

JG: We did quite a lot, actually, in those last ADR sessions. Luckily for me, Richard was there. It felt good to have him there, especially for that final voicemail Martha leaves. That was actually the last thing we did, so it felt quite special to have that moment together. 

RG: When Jess recorded that final voicemail, it occurred to me that it was your last day. I think we had about 10 minutes left to go in the sound booth. I just remember you knocked two pitch-perfect takes out of the park, and I recorded it. I recorded her doing her last-ever take. I remember just as you were doing it, I was looking down at the phone and crying. And I remember there was someone else who worked on the show who was in the room, and they were crying, too.

JG: I was crying.

RG: A lot of emotions going around. Even the sound guy, who was just there for that day, seemed to be crying. So it felt like a monumental moment. But I’ve got that recorded on my phone—us all weeping and crying on Jess’ last day. 

JG: I could never get through that voicemail, even in the read-throughs, without crying. It’s the thing that I used to read if I needed to get into Martha’s headspace. So it was not easy, but it just came so easily. We just did it and felt it, really. And that sounds cheesy to say, but that was all that was needed: to feel it.

Richard, what was it like for you to record Donny’s voiceover, which is present throughout the show?  

RG: Voiceover is something I always battled with. Sometimes it’s done absolutely amazingly, in “Trainspotting” and “Goodfellas” and stuff like that. But it’s something that can very subtly affect the way an audience receives something. If it’s done not quite right, it very subtly can cheapen a show. It can be discombobulating if you haven’t heard it for 10 minutes and then all of a sudden it’s back again. 

I remember the breakthrough came in Episode 4. I had so much ground to cover in terms of trying to squeeze this whole awful experience into 50 pages. The voiceover needed to propel you through time: Edinburgh to London, to breaking up with Keeley [Shalom Brune-Franklin], and all these things, all the way through to meeting Martha. 

I was heavily relying on the voiceover to whip you through: “Every night, me and Darrien went out, and we drank cocktails till the early hours of the morning while I coughed up my latest throat infection.” And it felt like I’d broken the back of the voiceover by having it propel you through time and through the world—to be a very constant feeling and a constant source of energy and information. Whereas [on previous episodes] it had been very sporadic, and I was never sure of it.

When I handed in Episode 4, everyone agreed that it felt like I had finally found it, the voiceover. I said, “In that case, I’m going back and rewriting Episodes 1, 2, and 3 in the same style”: “Every day, Martha would come into the pub, each time in new outfits, new makeup”—this rushing timeline. But it’s a pain in the ass, doing voiceover. [Laughs]

I can imagine it was challenging on the day to perform a moment that would later be paired with voiceover. 

JG: Actually, our first assistant director, [Jordan Kotras,] would read it out for us, which was helpful—and sometimes maybe not so much. [Laughs] He was great. He’s a very dry Canadian guy.

RG: He was blessed with the most neutral voice ever given.

JG: He had the most neutral tone.

RG: It was kind of perfect, because he didn’t try to emote too much. But then occasionally, he would give a bit of sauce on a couple of lines, and I would have to tell him to go back to neutral. I remember one line being like, “Here I was, Tony the builder, four stops away from a sex crime” on Episode 2. And he kept going, “Tony the builder, four stops away from a sex crime.” I said, “Jordan, can you just tone down the ‘sex crime’?” But he was actually quite perfect, and it all worked out really well.

When you talked about the extra work you put into crafting Martha’s backstory, the most cynical part of me imagined that someone was already thinking about making a prequel or sequel. 

JG: I’m hugely protective of the show being as it is. It’s nice that people can see a further world. I don’t know about you, Richard; you might be already writing Series 2. But I think it’s just perfect as it is, really. 

RG: I used to always say, “I’ll leave 0.0001% in the bank as a ‘never say never.’ ” But I’m not even sure I’m willing to do that anymore. I think it works as a limited series. I love the way it starts, love the way it ends, love the mirror there. I’ve always really respected television shows that know when to quit. Half the comments I get online are: “When is Season 2 coming out?” But I think the show will maintain its power the most if it’s left where it is. 

Part of that has to do with how perfect the ending is. 

RG: I fought quite hard for the ending. There were lots of different versions that people were pitching—one of which was to just end on the voiceover as it was and cut out from there. I fought really hard for [the ending I wanted], because it is ambiguous, in my opinion, in a way that is very interesting and open to interpretation. I think that can scare people sometimes because it’s not so clear. But out of all the battles I fought hard and won, that is the one I’m certainly most proud of.

This story originally appeared in the Aug. 8 issue of Backstage Magazine. Listen and subscribe to In the Envelope: The Actor's Podcast to hear our full conversation with Gadd + Gunning.