Netflix‘s Baby Reindeer tells the bizarre story of a man who is stalked by a particularly strange woman. While the events might seem too random to be real, the story is an adaptation of Richard Gadd’s one-man show of the same name, which is based on real-life events that Gadd went through at the beginning of his career.
Gadd premiered Baby Reindeer as a way to cope with his strange relationship with woman named Martha, who he met at a pub he worked at. “At first everyone at the pub thought it was funny that I had an admirer,” Gadd recently told The Times. “Then she started to invade my life, following me, turning up at my gigs, waiting outside my house, sending thousands of voicemails and emails.”
Gadd was harassed by this woman for four years, and he decided to make a stage show about it. He told Tudum, “I remember during a particularly long night of unrest; the idea came to me. To stage this whole ordeal, one day, when the time was right. What an opening, it might be, to layer the voicemails on top of one another and shoot them around a stage in a wash of projected light. A cacophony of oscillating words and sounds bending and mutating along with her different emotional states. Mirroring her madness. Mirroring my madness. I mean… what better way to start a show than to plunge the audience straight inside the horror of it all?”
The show became a hit, and soon Netflix picked it up for a seven-episode season, written by and starring Gadd himself, as he retells the events (with a few minor tweaks). Of the series, he said, “All I ever wanted to do was capture something complicated about the human condition. That we all make mistakes. That no person is ever good or bad. That we are all lost souls looking for love in our own weird way. ”
Baby Reindeer is now streaming on Netflix.