The new Netflix series Baby Reindeer opens with a shot of Martha, an emotionally troubled woman (Jessica Gunning) as she sets eyes on the man with whom she will become obsessed. His name is Donny, he’s a bartender/comedian, and his fatal mistake is that he offers Martha a free drink and some offhand kindness that she latches onto like a lifeline. She stalks and smothers him—sending him hundreds of hours of voice messages, over 40,000 emails, and triggering an existential tailspin that spans seven episodes, streaming Thursday. 

The bracing drama comes from Richard Gadd, a Scottish writer-actor-comedian who not only created, wrote, and stars in Baby Reindeer. He lived it. 

While in his 20s, he was stalked by a woman he can no longer discuss in specifics for legal reasons. He says the experience lasted about five years and overlapped with a period in which Gadd was “dealing with the aftermath of severe sexual abuse.” His mind spun in compulsive circles: “I couldn’t understand how my life had gotten to this point. I grew up in a small town in Scotland with one shop, and I couldn’t understand how I was suddenly dealing with two major crimes at once.” 

His obsessive analysis led him to the conclusion that he was complicit in the stalking. “One of the craziest parts is the fact that I seemed quite happy to indulge it early on,” he admits. The real-life Martha would walk into the bar, and stay Gadd’s whole shift—and the comedian would initially joke with her and engage. “My life was in such a bad way, I would have taken any positive emotion I could, regardless of the consequences.”

He hadn’t breathed a word of his sexual abuse to anyone. “It destroys you from the inside out, those secrets and that kind of disempowerment and that rumination and obsessive anger and wrath and self-hate.” And the real Martha offered him something else intoxicating—a reprieve from the terrible version of himself he was tortured by each day. As Gadd puts it in the show, “When someone sees you through the mire of it all, sees you as the person you came here to be, you notice them. You notice them noticing you.”

Plenty of movies and TV shows have depicted stalkers as horror-movie-type villains. But Baby Reindeer arguably offers the most tender depiction of a stalker ever committed to screen. Referring to films like the genre classic Fatal Attraction, Gadd says, “I would always take umbrage to the bunny-boiler-style stories where somebody’s really normal, usually quite good looking, and then it’s chipped away and they’re sociopathic or psychotic. Real stalking is a mental illness—it isn’t as contained or insidious or malicious as it has been portrayed on film and TV before. I saw a lot of humanity in her.”

Donny opens the Netflix series by confessing that the first time he saw Martha, he felt sorry for her—which is what Gadd felt for his stalker too. “I have what people have called toxic empathy,” the 34-year-old tells me. “I do feel sorry for people a lot. And sometimes I don’t know a thing about ’em, I just pass ’em in the street, and who am I to hand out empathy cards? But with her, I instantly sort of felt like, Oh, this is someone who needs help and isn’t getting it.”

The first iteration of Baby Reindeer was actually born five years ago, when Gadd premiered it as an hour-long stage show at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Gadd, who grew up in Fife, had dreamt of becoming a comedian-writer-actor like the performers he watched growing up on the original version of The Office. He loved that the show offered “complexity of character, pathos, and humor”—a trifecta Gadd achieved in the autobiographical show. It was a layered, wry rendering of a stalker relationship that seemed part thriller, part very dark comedy, and part psychological mystery as audiences slowly discover the damage that set Donny and Martha on their intersecting paths. 

The 2019 Baby Reindeer show felt to Gadd like an overnight success. He had spent eight or nine years going to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, trying to build up an audience. Suddenly, this project born from the most painful chapter of his life was earning favorable reviews, igniting Hollywood interest, and allowing him to quit his day job. During the run of the show, he took 74 meetings with production companies and streamers before partnering with Netflix in 2020 to make a seven-episode series.

Gadd’s depiction of Martha was so nuanced and refreshing that Gadd started hearing from “big name” actresses who wanted to play her. Ultimately, though, Gadd succeeded in casting his first choice: Jessica Gunning, a prolific English character actor, currently seen on Amazon’s The Outlaws, who is lesser-known in the states. “I fought for Jess against the tide, but then she came in one day and knocked everyone away. The one thing Jess got straight away was the fact that Martha was  a bit cute and a bit odd and a bit empathetic and a bit weird. I felt like Jess believed the reality of Martha in a way, rather than playing the character.”

Another autobiographical storyline that Gadd winds into the series is how he struggled to overcome “a great deal of shame” he felt over dating a trans woman (played in the series by Nava Mau). “I shouldn’t have felt that. I wouldn’t now, but I wasn’t as emotionally developed as I am now,” he tells me. Given the subject matter, Gadd was nervous about striking a respectful balance. “Obviously I don’t want to bring any more negative conversation around a community of people who have enough conversation going on around ’em. I wanted to have the truth of the story, but I also wanted to get it right. So I was almost inundated with advisers.”

Before Baby Reindeer, Gadd first channeled his emotional distress into another autobiographical show called Monkey See Monkey Do in 2016. It was about a man running from his demons and Gadd performed most of its 60 minutes each night while literally running on a treadmill.“ The show was inspired by Gadd coming to terms with the same sexual abuse that also inspired Baby Reindeer, and ended up winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award. “That came as a shock, especially for a show that was so serious. It was a comedy show about sexual abuse, and it was pre–Time’s Up as well. It felt very exposing at the time.”

Though he’s been doing it for eight years now, Gadd’s decision to exorcise his personal demons onstage, and now onscreen to the entire world, still feels “quite high risk. If this show goes well and people accept me for what I’m saying, then I’ve taken the negative experience and made it into a positive on. And I don’t feel so resentful around that experience anymore,” he explains. “But if it goes badly, I’ve taken a bad experience and made it another bad experience.” With Baby Reindeer going global on Netflix, Gadd admits, “I’m back in that place now.”

I ask Gadd whether he’s worried that the Netflix series will stir up interest from his real-life stalker. Choosing his words carefully, he says, “The situation did result in a situation, shall we say, where she cannot contact me again.” 

After five years creatively devoted to his experience with the real Martha, he’s also pivoting—writing a six-episode BBC series about “two dysfunctional brothers who grow up in a dead-end Scottish town.” Partly autobiographical, the show explores male repression—how “those things that you learn when you’re young as men come to be corrupting forces when you’re older—being strong and masculine and not speaking your mind and problems.”

But Gadd knows that, despite the passing time and seeming legal barrier between him and his stalker, the real Martha will always pose a threat. “When it comes to stalking, you can never really escape. There’s always the nugget of worry in the back of your head.”