Stories based on real-life tales have shaken the stage and screen time after time, and the age of streaming is no exception. Netflix’s hit offering Baby Reindeer is one example, which unravels the harrowing story behind a woman forming a dark obsession with its main character, as she follows his whereabouts to the point of trauma. But behind the fictional narrative is an actual account, which the actor, writer, and series producer Richard Gadd had experienced himself.
What Is “Baby Reindeer” About?
The story of Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer first came to fruition as an award-winning one-man play that debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and ran in London in 2019. Years later in April 2021, the show was commissioned by Netflix, largely following the original plot: A struggling comedian and bartender named Donny Dunn, played by Richard Gadd, displays an act of kindness by offering a drink to a lonely woman named Martha, as portrayed by Jessica Gunning.
Little does he know, the casual encounter would soon trigger her unhealthy obsession with the man. Donny becomes the subject of Martha’s stalking, who sends him 41,000 emails and a “hundred hours worth of voice messages,” arrives at his whereabouts uninvited, and harasses his girlfriend, which soon wrecks both their lives.
Is “Baby Reindeer” Based on a True Story?
The original play and the series adaptation take inspiration from real-life stalking incidents, which occurred to the writer and star Richard Gadd. Similar to the depiction of Martha, an unnamed woman had sent Richard “41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemail, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of letters, sleeping pills, a woolly hat, a pair of brand new boxer shorts and a cuddly reindeer toy.”
At the beginning of the interactions, Richard acknowledged to have “egged the situation on” by flirting with the older woman out of what The Independent called a “patronizing sense of pity.” In the 2019 interview with the British outlet, Richard detailed that the woman had also attended his shows and even turned up outside his house, showing up in his presence “within the realms of legality.”
“So, it became my life. Listening, logging, and annotating every single voicemail she ever left me in the hope of bringing it all to an end. Praying that she would say something incriminating so that the situation could be dealt with properly and effectively,” Richard wrote in a press release for Netflix’s Tudum.
“In the height of it all, I would go to bed at night and still hear her in my ears. Her voice swirling around my head. Her words leaping around my eyelids as I tried to sleep. Sometimes it was like she was there in the room with me. In the bed beside me, even.”
During a night of unrest for Richard, an idea sparked to “stage” the ordeal, layering voicemails on top of one another and “shoot them around a stage in a wash of projected light.” But while the story narrated a personal harrowing experience, the writer was keen not to present it as a “victim narrative.”
“Stalking is a mental illness. I really wanted to show the layers of stalking with a human quality I hadn’t seen on television before. It’s a stalker story turned on its head.”
He added: “I think art is quite interesting when you don’t know who you are on the side of. I wanted it to be layered, and I wanted it to capture the human experience. The human experience is that people are good, but they have bits of bad and they make mistakes.”
Who Is the Real Martha, the Person Behind the Stalking Who Inspired “Baby Reindeer”?
With news resurfacing about the real-life inspiration behind Baby Reindeer, viewers began to probe who the actual Martha was. The alleged stalker, a 58-year-old Scottish woman based in London, had claimed that she received “death threats and abuse from Richard Gadd supporters” after the release of the show.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, the unnamed woman accused Richard of “bullying an older woman on television for fame and fortune and using Baby Reindeer to “stalk” her, claiming that he had “main character syndrome.” “I'm the victim. He's written a bloody show about me.”
“He always thinks he’s at the center of things. I'm not writing shows about him or promoting them in the media, am I?” she said. “If he wanted me to be properly anonymous, he could have done so. Gadd should leave me alone.”
Previously, Richard had discouraged speculation about the real-life people behind the show’s characters and noted his intentions of concealing his stalker’s identity so as not to harm her. “We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognize herself. What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone,” he said.
Baby Reindeer is streaming on Netflix.
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