There’s a scene in the new Netflix series Baby Reindeer where Martha, the stalker played by Jessica Gunning, confesses something to the subject of her obsession, a bartender-comedian named Donny (Richard Gadd). It’s Martha’s dream superpower—which, on paper, sounds like a fantasy pulled straight from Silence of the Lambs.
“Did you ever want to, like, unzip people, and climb inside them?” Martha asks. “I wish humans had a chin zip, and it would go all the way to their bellies…[I’d] just unzip them and tuck myself away.”
Most actors who auditioned to play Martha interpreted the character as evil, and underscored these lines with ominousness. But Gunning, a British actor perhaps best known to US audiences for the Amazon ensemble comedy The Outlaws, played Martha as soft, not sociopathic. Like a person so profoundly alone that she wished she could live life cozied up inside somebody special.
In a phone call with Vanity Fair, Gunning explains, “If I ever tried to play the stalker side of Martha, you’d lose her completely because she isn’t a villain. She’s not scary in that sense. I mean, her actions might be received as that, but she never intends it that way. I never, ever saw her like that.” In a separate phone call, Gadd says that’s what made her right for the role. “The 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.”
By Theo Tennant.
The thing about Baby Reindeer is that Gadd did not only create and star in the series: He also lived it. During a particularly dark time in his life, Gadd really was stalked by a customer to whom he had offered a free drink; his ordeal lasted about five years. Though the specifics have been changed—and Gadd cannot legally discuss details of the real-life situation—the compelling series seems to parallel Gadd’s life down to the more than 40,000 emails that Martha sends Donny. (When I ask Gadd if “Baby Reindeer” is the nickname his real-life stalker gave him, he tells me, “I don’t think I can talk about that.”)
Like his character in the show, Gadd did initially feel sorry for the real Martha—and acknowledges his complicity in their relationship. Reeling from the impact of severe sexual abuse, Gadd was trapped in such a cycle of self-hatred that he initially appreciated getting attention from someone who saw him as a better version of himself. He fed into it, sometimes indulging her flirtations.
On the phone, Gunning defends Martha: “The truth of it, for Martha, is this is the first time in a long time she connects to somebody who compliments her, who’s nice to her, who spends time with her. I think he got out of it as much as she did.”