The one of Baby Reindeer, a Netflix miniseries streaming from April 11, is a story that is best understood starting from the numbers. The first is 41071, which are the emails received in 4 years by Richard Gadd, Scottish comedian and protagonist not only of the series but also of the true story which inspired it, on the part of his stalker; 350, the hours of voice messages she sent him. Added to these are 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages and 106 letters. Baby Reindeer it is the story of an obsession: Gadd, who experienced the story firsthand, has already told it in a very successful theater show, then rewrote and interpreted it for Netflix. The female protagonist, who for privacy reasons does not resemble Gadd’s stalker in any way, is the very good Jessica Gunning: in the series her name is Martha, a woman with mental problems who falls so in love with the young Scottish comedian Gadd that she convinces herself that she is his partner.
Baby Reindeer it is a complete and profound journey into the malaise and loneliness of Gadd/Donny Dunn, as his serial alter ego is called, who in Martha finds a person capable of boosting his self-esteem and loving him despite his personal and work failures. On the one hand he would like to push her away, on the other he finds comfort and guaranteed love in Martha. The story of the mental illness that leads the woman to approach her victim is also precise and raw. the “Baby Reindeer”, hence the title – without being able to let go. Reading the true story of Richard Gadd it is easier to understand the abyss of obsession of Martha, who went so far as to accuse the comedian’s father of pedophilia only to put him in difficulty, to insult him during his comedy shows stand up comedy, waiting for him at home every evening and persecuting him via the web and live. Four years, that’s how long this affair lasted, which began in 2015 in a London pub: Gadd said he wasn’t believed by the police for a long time because «When a man is the one being persecuted, his experience is sometimes portrayed in films as something sexy. The stalker becomes a femme fatale who becomes increasingly sinister. There isn’t the same threat of physical violence, but in my case I was still physically scared, because I didn’t know how far it could go. For all I knew she could have had a knife.”
If in the series – warning, spoilers – Martha’s stalking is resolved with one condemnation of nine months in prison and five years of restraining order for the woman and with many psychological consequences for Gadd/Dunn, it is not known how it ended in real life: it is a detail that the comedian never wanted to tell.
In 2016, Gadd spoke on stage about Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world which takes place every year in Edinburgh, of having suffered repeated violence from an older man who was part of the entertainment world. The monologue (it’s called Monkey See Monkey Do) with which he won the festival, has become viral and emblematic of the comedian’s style, who has always been very honest with respect not only to the baseness of other people’s behavior but also to his own. As he told the Guardian on the story of his stalker and how he thinks she endorsed his obsession «many people are afraid to admit their mistakes, and I believe that many are made to please others. We remain in the lie because it is easier to lower the tension that way. And I never wanted to upset someone who seemed so vulnerable».
