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'The Interview': ‘Baby Reindeer’ Exploded Richard Gadd's Life. It Also Set Him Free.

March 21, 2026·45 min·3 clips

Gadd compares keeping trauma inside to a billiard ball ricocheting harder until it becomes intolerable.

The conversation starts with consequence. Before Baby Reindeer became one of Netflix's biggest critical hits and one of the streamer's most popular shows ever, Richard Gadd had been a relatively unknown writer and actor. Then his lowest moments belonged, in some sense, to a huge audience. David Marchese keeps the interview there, in the odd and uncomfortable gap between private pain and public fascination. Gadd does not dress fame up as healing. Asked whether success filled some internal absence, he gives a careful no, not a neat revelation. He sounds grateful for parts of it and suspicious of the rest. Baby Reindeer had already poked at the fantasy that strangers seeing you clearly will fix a damaged life, and the Donnie Dunn monologue hangs over this exchange. Gadd says people may see fame while he feels fear, judgment, and the pressure of being watched by more people. He also says the success brought things he likes, especially opportunities. Marchese moves from body insecurity to artistic validation, and Gadd answers without polishing the edges. The talk stays personal instead of lurid. Half Man sits off to the side as proof that work is moving forward, but the interview keeps circling the cost of recognition.

As heard by us

Richard Gadd gives a frank account of fame, damage, and why success did not resolve the hard questions.

Richard Gadd's conversation with David Marchese is not a victory lap for Baby Reindeer. It is a measured account of what happens when the worst parts of a person's life become mass entertainment, then professional opportunity, then another kind of pressure.

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Why you'd press play

If fame looks simple from the outside, this is the conversation that complicates it.

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