The Edinburgh Festival Fringe may be known for its immersive theater, but comedian Richard Gadd does not want you to get involved in his personal life. The creator and star of Netflix’s Baby Reindeer, which dramatizes real-life trauma Gadd experienced, recently took to Instagram to tell fans of his hit series to stop trying to uncover the identities of people depicted in the show.
Based on Gadd’s one-man show of the same name, Baby Reindeer finds Gadd playing barkeep and aspiring comedian Donny Dunn, who is harassed and stalked by pub patron Martha (Jessica Gunning), with the latter sending Donny hundreds of hours of voice messages and more than 40,000 emails. The series also sees Donny develop a friendship with a predatory television comedy writer, Darrien O’Connor (Tom Goodman-Hill), who sexually abuses Donny.
The series has sparked intense speculation from some viewers around the actual identities of the people Gadd has written about. The person who inspired Darrien has been of particular interest—so much so that director, writer, and Tony nominee Sean Foley contacted the police following false accusations that he was Gadd’s abuser.
“Police have been informed and are investigating all defamatory abusive and threatening posts against me,” wrote Foley on his X account.
Earlier this week, Gadd defended Foley and requested that viewers stop trying to determine the identities of those depicted in his series. “People I love, have worked with, and admire (including Sean Foley) are unfairly getting caught up in speculation,” wrote Gadd in an Instagram story. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of our show. Lots of love, Richard.” Foley later posted a screenshot of Gadd’s Instagram story on X.
Baby Reindeer began as a one-man show written by and starring Gadd, who performed it at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019. It then transferred to an off–West End theater in London and won an Olivier Award for outstanding achievement in affiliate theater. The series adaptation has been a surprise hit for Netflix and will be submitted in the outstanding-limited-series category at the Emmys. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Gadd spoke of the parallels between the television show and his real life, noting that his ordeal with his real-life stalker “did result in a situation, shall we say, where she cannot contact me again.”
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