Interview: Richard Gadd Talks ‘Half Man,’ Finding the Humor in Trauma, and That Hospital Scene with Jaime Bell
A couple of years ago, RG made it big when his Netflix series Baby Reindeer took off and skyrocketed his career. Gadd’s return to television is on HBO now, Half Man, follows the complex relationship between two young men as they grow up.
Over six episodes, the series explores violence and its place in the shared lives of men. Gadd makes his return as creator, showrunner, and actor in the show, portraying the older version of Ruben, a character so entrenched in violence that others shudder when they think of his arrival. Any time he’s brought up in the series, someone gets scared and starts asking if he’ll show up, worried that he’ll ruin someone else’s life as he did Alby’s. It’s a terrifying show that mimics the tension of Gadd’s previous work while expanding on the dire intensity that streaks every relationship Ruben’s ever had, but most particularly with Niall, his “stepbrother.” The two have a terrifying relationship where Ruben always has a hand on Niall’s throat, both literally and metaphorically.
I spoke to Richard Gadd about the series, finding his place in it as Ruben, the violence of male friendships, and the humor of the series.
Tyler Doster: what spoke to you most in creating a story about how intricate male friendships are?
Richard Gadd: Oh, good one. I think the whole naughty complication of it. I think what I’ve always found in my life that’s interesting is the difficulty of male expression, especially male to male expression.
I’ve often found it just to be a very naughty thing, and I think that sometimes these sort of ideas of what it means to be a man, they’ve certainly lighted my progress sometimes in life, and these thoughts and feelings and insecurities and all that stuff.
It just felt like the right material to explore and stuff that I feel I could speak to or know about, and themes that I thought were kind of important. I think the human capacity to repress itself has always been interesting to me. And I think male repression is at the heart of a lot of male violence. And I thought that that was something that I was quite keen to explore. And ultimately, once I’d drawn up Ruben and Niall into a sheet of paper and thought about them, I just thought, “Okay, this is kind of interesting. You take two alpha/beta… characters in a way.”
But I know everybody’s alpha/beta idea is right, so I don’t really like those words, alpha/beta, because everybody is a subjective sort of thing. But if you take the stereotypical version of alpha/beta and you deconstruct that over the course of six episodes, it just felt like something that intrigued me, something I could hopefully do justice to. And ultimately, all I need is a creative spark to light a fire under me sometimes and just see it through to the end.
TD: How soon into the inception of the idea did you know that Ruben was going to be as violent as he is?
RG: Well, I suppose it was a show about male violence in a way. So I think we had to have the extreme version of that in order to explore it. I think if you think all the way back to episode one, Ruben’s reputation precedes him. He’s spitting off a bus driver’s nose. His mythology transcends the towns. It’s this guy that’s just absolutely terrifying. And he’s picked up in a lot of ways as the epitome of violence.
And I think from just a storytelling point of view, we needed to live up to that. And I think also if you’re going to explore male violence, it’s almost the right, I think, to explore or you’re doing it to show the extremities of where it can get to. As something that’s so often discussed in society today, I feel it was right to show the extremes because it’s the extreme end which impacts people the most. But I knew he had to be almost the epitome of wild, untamed, masculine rage.
TD: When you pitched the idea, you weren’t originally going to star as Ruben, and then of course later came to, did that change your perception of the character, actually portraying him versus what you had written?
RG: Well, yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, I think I always wanted Ruben to run on a river of pain. I really wanted him to, because I think, really, at the heart of all of his actions is a desire to not feel disempowered. He did feel once upon a time. You’ve seen all six episodes, right?
TD: Yes.
RG: Yeah, yeah. So I think without giving away too many spoilers, I think he lives his life because of whatever’s happened to him in the past. “I’m not going to take anything from no one because I’m not going to feel vulnerable like I felt before.”
And that to me was the mantra I took into every single scene. So before every scene, even when I was shouting and throwing stuff out of houses and going kind of ballistic, I would actually, I wouldn’t be like, how do I get rage for? Because a lot of people say, “Did you do a lot of press-ups? Did you hit pads?”
No, I was actually trying to make myself incredibly sad because I felt like at the heart of Ruben was a deep sense of tragedy in the way that he thinks of himself and his past. And that was surprising for me in a lot of ways. I think once I really dug into the character and explored it, but I think I realized just how emotional he was, and then how emotional he made me feel when I was doing him in a way.
TD: Yeah. That emotional repression, like you were mentioning before, coming out as anger and aggression, is truly interesting. He’s a very intimidating, imposing presence. And I know that you’re a very hands-on showrunner. How did you work with Stuart Campbell to calibrate past and present Ruben with that level of anger and sadness that you mentioned?
RG: Yeah. Well, I thought it was very important that he didn’t… that the characters changed. So the characters… without giving me too many points, the characters do undergo significant sort of change during the show. Niall’s not the Niall in his youth, and Ruben’s not the Reuben and his youth. And as a result, I actually kept four, five, and six from the young lads because I didn’t want, for example, Stuart to realize how broken Ruben gets. And I didn’t want Niall to know that somewhere down the line, he false pray to excesses, shall we say. And I hope that’s not too much of a spoiler.
And so, as a result, I kept it back. I wanted it to be the youthful versions of these characters. And I wanted Ruben to be that kind of charismatic unhinge guy you kind of knew at school, you kind of want to be him, but equally you’re scared of him. And I really wanted to hone down on this vivacious youth aspect of vivacious adolescence. And that was what I drilled down into it with. And I always wanted to… it was always about truth with Ruben because there was always something about… and it was always truthful with Stuart and I.
It was always talking about the truth about what’s he feeling? What’s he feeling? What’s he feeling? Because I guess I worry that actors came in… a lot of the actors who audition came in and they played the state. “I’m an angry guy, and I’m starting to fight with you.” But really, I felt like even when Ruben was being angry, he needed to be real in a way and sad. And so it was always chatting Stuart through that. And he brought so much himself, of course, but I needed it to… I needed him to kind of… It was about youth and capturing the reality of his internal struggles.
TD: The show can be jarringly funny at times. What’s the importance of humor to you amongst so much darkness?
RG: Oh, thank you. I’d love to know which bits you referred to, but I won’t take us off track. I feel like that whole, is it Hozier song like, “Giggle at a funeral” kind of thing?
I think it’s so true. I think in all of the great times in my life where I felt a degree of… a huge degree of struggle or uncertainty or bereavement or loss or whatever, I’ve always… there’s always been odd humor in it. And indeed, even in my giddiest of times, there’s been a sense of sadness or I feel like one always comes in hand with another in a lot of ways.
And I think as long as it’s not gags, as long as the character’s Ruben and Niall doing their gags, as long as it’s born out of character and circumstance, I think not only does it feel truthful to life, but I think it helps the process along. I think audiences appreciate it. And I think it’s true to life. I think if we think about our life as scenes, I tend to laugh in most scenes. If I go downstairs to the restaurant and meet a friend, chances are we’ll laugh quite soon into the thing.
And I just think it’s true to life, I think. And I think humor is the soul of a piece. So, whereas I really wanted this to be socially realist, a real slice of life, like you’re looking at reality kind of thing, I knew in a way it couldn’t stray to the point where it was kind of like everything was deadly serious. I think it needed some humor to pull through. It needed a bit of that soul.
TD: Yeah. What’s… I think it works so well because, like I said, sometimes you’re in such darkness that it actually tonally is a slap in the face when you start laughing during the scenes. What is the significance of Niall and Ruben’s moms being together and there never being a dominant masculine force in their life? And do you think either of them would’ve been different if they did have someone like their dad in their life?
RG: I think it’s interesting. I think the whole show explores nature-nurture in a lot of ways, and I think it throws up those questions. And I intentionally threw up those questions, being like, well, had they had a masculine role model, would things be different? But what would that masculine role model be? Clearly, Ruben’s father wasn’t one, but what if he had a really kind, loving, supportive one?
I think things could have and very well probably would have been very different, but that’s… the show’s also equally not about that. I think it’s also about the kind of environments in which they find themselves in, the kind of nurture aspect of it as well, the school, the cat calls, the stuff in the street. And I think what I’m really interested in is the capacity to which someone can repress themselves.
I’ve certainly repressed myself down the years in various ways, but I thought it’s interesting that you take a character like Niall and he’s given all of the possibilities. You’ve got his moms there, and you’ve got Ruben even saying, “Hey, it’s all right having moms like that. It’s all right having gay moms. You’ll be at a party, it makes you more interesting.” And despite all of these things, he still displaces his… what is his own internal struggles are, his own fears onto other people as… by way of blame. And that was just kind of an interesting thing for me.
But it was also just interesting to explore that in the 80s, and I thought not only is it quite rare and hasn’t I think been explored the idea of lesbianism in the household in the 80s, I thought it was just an interesting way as well of not only seeing the prejudices around that and the struggles in which Lori and Maura have in their lives, but also how that invokes a sense of prejudice in Niall’s life as well. I thought, yeah, you take that household, you place it in the 80s, and you see how the world reacts. And back in the UK during that time, they clearly wouldn’t have reacted very well.
TD: Even now, losing his virginity and thinking he’s going to get HIV from having sex.
RG: Yeah, yeah. Well, that was… I always reach out a lot into the time, and I never wanted it to be spelled out like, “Oh, we’re in this era, so therefore we’re talking about the Prime Minister.” And I never really wanted it to be like that, but I looked at the attitudes at the time, and when we set episode one, there was that real sort of… it was during that crisis and the chats around it and the internalized phobias that that brought. And it was right in the height of that.
And then even if we go to the court scene, I’m worried about spoilers here, but that defense was a very common defense then. It was called the Portsmouth defense, and it was a really commonly used defense at that time to get people out of crimes, being like… And it would tap into the innate homophobias of the court and the juries, and it was a way of getting off.
It’s not loud anymore in the UK. That port is set during the exact time where the Portsmouth defense, which is defense… which is actually also called the homosexual panic defense, where somebody gropes me and, “Ah, I battered them because they groped me.” That was actually… That episode is set during that time. And so that is… that was very true to the trials that were happening at the time.
And so I always tried to research into the era that these episodes happened in, and just see how subtly they would change the characters’ mindsets at certain points. And clearly Niall’s worried about and anxious about himself, and he’s reading all this information, and that’s what causes him to blot that out in that moment.
TD: I do want to get into a little spoilery territory about the end of episode four. I want to talk about the hospital, that scene. That scene is pivotal. It actualizes a lot of the thoughts they’ve had for their entirety of their relationship. How was that writing that and then subsequently performing in that scene?
RG: Well, I loved writing it. It was interesting because I kept thinking the only way we’re going to get them to a place at the end of the episode where they make up after everything that’s happened. We’ve got to be in that room for a long period of time. If it was a five-minute scene after everything that’s happened, jail, Maura getting sick, everything, it just wouldn’t have felt true. I felt like they needed to be in their door closed to the end, almost like lock these two in the room until they hash it out.
And the more and more I wrote into it, the more and more I felt like the only way they were going to make up is if they expunged every single pocket of hate they had for one another or every single bitterness and resentment. And in a lot of ways they gave what the other one was looking for, which in a lot of ways, was an apology to one another. And so it was really hard to write, and it was really hard to shoot. We shot it in less than a day, if you can believe that.
TD: Wow.
RG: I mean, people don’t believe it. I mean, when I say that, but it is true, and it had intimacy, it had stunts, and it was a monumental thing to shoot. And I think we had two takes each, me and Jamie, and we just kind of took a deep breath in and just went through it.
But it was hugely… it was very challenging, like half-mind in general, but that was one of the most challenging days. But it was one of those days where everyone turns up with a real super focus, and you almost feel the whole set. It’s like, “Right, this is a big day. We got to get this right.” And we just turned up, and I guess we gave it as much as we could.
TD: Speaking of difficulty, what was your most difficult day on set?
RG: That was difficult for sure. I mean, that was kind of like… Yeah, I mean, I think it was even longer, that scene in the script. I think it was probably about five pages longer than that.
So you’re thinking in your head, you’re calculating things. And of course, I’m showrunning as well, so I always have to keep an eye on time and how things are moving. And when… Yeah, that was so intense that day. It was so intense. That was really tricky.
I guess the last penultimate scene was really tricky in the prison, getting into that headspace, doing it over and over again, and over again and over again. That was really tricky. Again, we had so little time to… We had less than a day to do that scene, and about less than half a day almost. And so I guess time pressure plus emotional gravitas is where I think the most tension emerges.
And then even the last scene of just it was one of the first scenes we ever shot, was the final crescendo scene in the barn on… in the floor without giving away too many sports. And me and Jamie had to get to know each other very, very quickly, I’ll put it that way. And it was one of those things where it’s just, “Wow, hello, nice to meet you, right. Let’s roll around in the mud.” It wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t that quick, but it was a hell of a way of getting to know one another. I mean, spitting, snot, flying, shouting, screaming. I really felt me and Jamie, thanks to that scene, shortcutted our way to hopefully, fingers crossed, a good onscreen connection.
The final two episodes of the HBO Max Original limited series Half Man will air on Thursday the 21st and 28th.
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