Bearded, tattooed, all rippling muscle and menacing stares, Richard Gadd’s physical appearance is a vivid illustration of how much can change in two years.
For compared to the figure he cut on screen as troubled comedian Donny Dunn in Baby Reindeer, the series which catapulted him to stardom, Gadd is almost unrecognisable in Half Man, his new drama which started on the BBC on Friday night.
The plot of the six-part series, which has divided critics, centres around the relationship between two men, Niall, played by Jamie Bell, and Ruben, played by Gadd, who are thrown together as teenagers and whose explosive bond is then charted through several decades into their adult lives.
In Baby Reindeer, Gadd dropped from 15st to 10kg to better recall the gaunt version of his younger self on which the story was based.
By contrast, to play man-mountain Ruben, whose rage spills over into wild acts of violence, the star piled on 3.5st of muscle, not to mention grew a bushy beard.
As one associate of the comedian-turned-actor told the Daily Mail this week, he is committed to inhabiting his role.
‘He is such a nice man,’ says the associate. ‘He’s also really disciplined, it’s amazing how focused he is.’
As Gadd, who worked with a personal trainer to transform his physique for the drama, has said: ‘I knew that in order to explore what people consider an alpha male character, I needed to be big.
Richard Gadd holds co-star Jamie Bell in a headlock in a promotional shot for their new BBC drama called Half Man, which started last Friday
Niall, played by Bell, and Ruben, played by Gadd, who are thrown together as teenagers and whose explosive bond is then charted through several decades into their lives
‘I worked out six days a week; I had a nutritionist, I had the meals made for me and sent to me and I had to eat them at certain times.
‘I didn’t stray from my diet once, apart from days where I do topless scenes and I would go through a process of dehydration to make the muscles more defined.
‘It is incredible how it works. I would be looking at myself in the mirror the day before thinking, I’m just not there and then you go through a very intense – and I can’t believe how intense it is – period of sweating yourself down to make the muscles more defined.
‘It’s kind of incredible.’
Indeed it is.
Earlier this month, Gadd said it took a ‘leap of faith’ to ‘go from a skinny comedian to the epitome of masculinity’.
‘But I knew,’ he added, ‘in order to get away from the past that I had to change everything about myself.’
Gadd’s self-penned drama Baby Reindeer, based on his own experience of being stalked and sexually assaulted, became a surprise Netflix smash hit in April 2024 and a global phenomenon.
Since its launch it has clocked up more than 250million views and Gadd has been up and down the red carpet like a yo-yo, the show clinching three Baftas, two Golden Globes and six Emmys.
But it wasn’t just Gadd, now 36, who was catapulted to overnight stardom.
Amid feverish debate about the inspiration for his characters, so too was another figure – Fiona Harvey, the woman identified by online sleuths as his real-life stalker.
Two years on, the ensuing ruckus continues to unfold after Harvey filed a $170million lawsuit against Netflix claiming the show billed as a ‘true story,’ ‘viciously destroyed’ her.
There have been claims and counter-claims, with Harvey, then 58, vehemently denying that over four-and-a-half years she sent the 41,071 emails, 744 tweets, letters totalling 106 pages and 350 hours of voicemail messages, which is what Gadd says his stalker did.
But as that case lingers – Netflix is awaiting a decision in response to its appeal against the case being allowed to proceed to trial – Gadd’s career is going from strength to strength.
In recent weeks he’s been promoting Half Man in the US and proudly sharing with his Instagram followers photographs of billboard advertising in New York and Los Angeles.
The success of Baby Reindeer would appear to have strengthened its creator’s finances too.
The deal to make Half Man with the BBC and HBO had already been signed when he agreed a major contract with Netflix in September 2024.
Latest accounts for the 36-year-old’s company RRSG (reflecting the initials of its director Richard Robert Steven Gadd) show how his coffers have swelled.
The firm declared total assets of £2,462,405 for 2025 which included money held in a bank account and an investment portfolio.
Baby Reindeer has clocked up more than 250million views and Gadd has clinched three Baftas, two Golden Globes and six Emmys
After paying off creditors the company has shareholder funds of £1,875,649 – more than double the previous year’s figure of £772,544.
By contrast, in 2019, after a first year of trading, funds stood at £1,789.
Back in 2020 Gadd, whose career was then in its infancy, invested in a £500,000 top-floor flat with a roof garden in trendy Finsbury Park, north London.
But little has been seen of the star, who recently registered a property firm with Companies House, in recent months.
As one neighbour told the Daily Mail: ‘He’s quite busy – I think they’ve been filming in Glasgow. He hasn’t been living here for some time.
‘I don’t know what his plans are for this place. I haven’t seen him for a while now.’
Another woman who has lived in the area for more than 40 years says: ‘I didn’t know he was here – he must have been very much below the radar.
‘There is quite a community spirit here. Twice a year we have two big street events.
‘If you’ve lived in the street for a while you get to know people but there was never any whisper that Richard Gadd was among us at any of these events which there would have been had he been there.’
The house is around three miles from the Hawley Arms pub where Gadd had worked behind the bar as he launched his comedy career and where he infamously met his stalker ‘Martha’.
A quiet life might well suit Gadd, who by his own admission was stunned by the impact of a show which charted Donny’s multiple traumatic experiences – not just under the relentless focus of Martha, but also an account, in flashback, of how he is groomed and raped by a man he considered a friend (another experience based in Gadd’s equally traumatic reality).
He said in the wake of Baby Reindeer’s triumph, he thought it would be successful in a ‘critical, artistic’ sense, but never dreamed what would actually unfold.
‘I remember thinking, “Maybe some people will watch it this weekend.” It came out on a Thursday, and I thought people would probably catch up with it on Saturday or Sunday, and I might get a few messages on Monday. Maybe a few more the weekend after. My hope was that the reviews would be good enough that perhaps I’d get to make another TV show off the back of it.’
By midday on launch day his phone ‘was just exploding’.
And that was just the start.
‘It was this weird feeling that it was becoming too big to control,’ said Gadd. ‘Not that I wanted to control it, but it was becoming too big for its own good. It just felt like it was everywhere on the news, on the radio, outside my house.’
But the actor, who says he has been single for ‘well over three years’, seems pragmatic about being catapulted into the limelight.
Earlier this month, he highlighted not just the creative opportunities that had come his way as a result, ‘being able to take the next step in my career and fulfil my dreams’, but also the impact on abuse charities.
Referrals to abuse charities, he says, went up 53 per cent, 47 per cent for stalking charities.
Gadd’s self-penned drama Baby Reindeer, based on his own experience of being stalked and sexually assaulted, became a surprise Netflix smash hit in April 2024
Amid feverish debate about the inspiration for his characters, so too was another figure – Fiona Harvey, the woman identified by online sleuths as his real-life stalker
In Baby Reindeer, Gadd dropped from 15st to 10kg to better recall the gaunt version of his younger self on which the story was based
And what of Half Man? Given the autobiographical nature of Baby Reindeer, will there be more online sleuthing to come?
Gadd, who has been candid about the fact that while now sober, there was a time in his life ‘when the darkness got too much’ as he turned to drink and drugs, in the wake of his own ordeals, insists Half Man is a fictional series.
‘There are clearly themes I relate to: confusion, trauma, abuse,’ he says.
But, as he wrote: ‘Everything I do now, people will assume is based on my life, but Half Man is a fictional series, which I have built from a blank page.
‘All they need to do is a bit of Googling to discover that my childhood was very different from that of the central characters, Ruben and Niall, who are brought together when their mothers start living together.
‘And while I grew up in Scotland, my upbringing differed greatly from the one shown on screen.
‘I grew up in a much smaller town than the one Ruben and Niall grow up in. The characters in Half Man live in a more populated, urban environment, whereas I grew up in a tiny little town with one shop and a bus that came around once a year in June.’
Indeed it was. Gadd grew up with his older sister Kate and parents Geoff – a Dundee University professor who was awarded an OBE for services to Mycology and Environmental Microbiology – and Julia – a school secretary – in a large, detached home in Wormit, a village in north-east Fife.
Richard played football and tennis for the local club and made his first appearance treading the boards in his school nativity play as one of the Wise Men.
At secondary school he dropped Latin in favour of drama and landed the starring role of Macbeth in his final year.
He went on to study English Literature and Theatre Studies at Glasgow University before completing a year at Oxford School of Drama.
Already an avid writer, he started to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe while still a student.
His breakthrough moment came in 2016 with his Fringe show Monkey See Monkey Do, a harrowing account of being sexually assaulted by an older man, made even more harrowing by the physical presence on stage of Gadd, pounding away on a treadmill, night after night, mile after mile, trying to escape a figure in a gorilla suit.
Half Man was, he says, a work in progress before Baby Reindeer hit the screen, although he wasn’t intending to be its co-star.
Rather, it was Jamie Bell (who sprang to fame as the child star of Billy Elliot) who suggested he should be Ruben, a suggestion reiterated by HBO, which co-produced the series with the BBC.
Gadd, who says he doesn’t like being in public and still has ‘down days’, says the drama is rooted in the question of ‘what it means to be a man in this ever-changing world’.
‘For me, the series isn’t about toxic masculinity. It’s more about male existence and repression – about internal brokenness and hard-wired expectations. I’m sure people will pull that phrase from the show, but ultimately, at its core, it’s a complicated human story of two boys growing into men and struggling to come to terms with themselves – and, moreover, struggling to love one another.’
And not, one hopes, with a stalker in sight.
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