Richard Gadd faced a challenging task as he began work on his next show after Baby reindeerwhich swept the award season.
However, the 36-year-old Scottish actor-writer was not swayed by people’s good or bad opinions about his art, because he believes that you will never, ever create good art that way.
The Emmy winner explores something similar regarding the themes of toxic masculinity on his upcoming show Half a manwhere 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 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 for four four years while I was doing it Baby reindeer. I knew I had to do this next,” he told a recent press conference for the Television Critics Association.
For his next show, Gadd took complete liberties with touching on all extremes because otherwise he would “deprive the audience of the truth of this big theme that we’re struggling with right now as a society,” he said.
In the same conference he also praised Youth for its themes that challenged the audience. “We like to face our own demons and watch it back on television.”
