Richard Gadd was faced with a challenging task as he began working on his next show after Baby Reindeer, which swept the awards season.
However, the 36-year-old Scottish actor-writer did not let himself be swayed by people’s good or bad opinions over his art, because he believes you’re never going to ever create good art that way.
The Emmy winner is exploring something similar in regards to the themes of toxic masculinity on his upcoming show Half Man, where he plays Ruben and Jamie Bell plays Niall, two estranged stepbrothers who bring out each other’s violent tendencies.
In a new interview, Gadd shared that when Baby Reindeer went viral, he didn’t want to give himself “time to think.”
“I wrote an episode [of Half Man] back in 2019, and shelved it four four years while I did Baby Reindeer. I knew I was going to this, next,” he shared at a recent Television Critics Association press conference.
For his next show, Gadd took complete liberty over touching upon all extremes, because otherwise “robbing the audience of the truth of this big theme that we’re grappling with right now, as a society,” he said.
In the same conference, he also praised Adolescence for its themes which challenged the audience. “We like to face our own demons and see it back on television.”
