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It’s a series of reindeer games.
Richard Gadd, the writer and lead actor in the popular Netflix series “Baby Reindeer,” has expressed his wish for viewers not to focus too much on unraveling the stalker storyline.
“People I love, have worked with, and admire (including Sean Foley) are unfairly getting caught up in speculation,” Gadd, 34, wrote via his Instagram Story on Monday, April 22, per “The Hollywood Reporter.”
“Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”
Sean Foley, the actor and director mentioned in Gadd’s post, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, “Police have been informed and are investigating all defamatory abusive and threatening posts against me.”
Now streaming, the show is based on Scottish comedian Gadd’s real life experience.
The story follows Donny (Gadd), a struggling comedian who meets Martha (Jessica Gunning) during a bartending gig.
He offers her a free cup of tea when she cries, which spirals into her stalking him.
“That one act of kindness changes Donny’s life forever, because for the next three years, Martha stalks him,” Jessica Gunning, who plays Martha, told Tudum. “She sends him 41,000 emails and hundreds of hours worth of voice messages. But it’s not your conventional stalker storyline.”
“I didn’t want it to be a victim narrative,” Gadd told the outlet. “I think there was a version of the show where I hid from my own mistakes a bit, and I offered her this cup of tea and I’m a perfect, nice guy. But I made mistakes. And I think art is quite interesting when you don’t know who you are on the side of. You sort of feel sorry for Martha, but then you feel sorry for Donny, and then you feel sorry for her again, then you hate her and you hate him.”
The show is currently No. 1 on Netflix’s TV chart in the U.K., and is No. 2 in the US.
“It’s all emotionally 100% true, if that makes sense,” Gadd told Variety.
“It’s all borrowed from instances that happened to me and real people that I met. But of course, you can’t do the exact truth, for both legal and artistic reasons. I mean there’s certain protections, you can’t just copy somebody else’s life and name and put it onto television. And obviously, we were very aware that some characters in it are vulnerable people, so you don’t want to make their lives more difficult. So you have to change things to protect yourself and protect other people.”
He also told the outlet that he wasn’t worried about the real stalker finding him after the show, “Due to where things ended in real life, it’s not a concern for me.”
Gadd added that he pitied the real woman. “I felt like [the real Martha] was a vulnerable person who genuinely couldn’t stop. It is a mental illness and I wanted to portray that. I did see someone who I felt sorry for.”
In an article from The Times, Gadd described the situation as being “resolved,” and implied that she wasn’t in jail, because he “didn’t want to throw someone who was that level of mentally unwell in prison.”
Nevertheless, Keyboard detectives have tried to figure out who the real stalker is, despite Gadd’s protests that it’s “not the point” of the show.
Many viewers have taken to social media to suss out who the real woman is from Gadd’s past.
Gadd described his stalker as “quite an idiosyncratic person” in an interview with GQ.
“We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognize herself,” he said. “What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.”
