‘Baby Reindeer’ creator never revealed real-life Martha to actor playing her

Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd has revealed that his co-star Jessica Gunning didn’t know many details about his real stalker.

The series, which was written, created by and starring Gadd, is a semi-autobiographical story depicting his real experience of being stalked by an older woman.

It follows a struggling comedian named Donny who is relentlessly stalked by a woman named Martha. Baby Reindeer spent almost a month at the top of Netflix’s viewership rankings, and sparked many conversations around reporting and dealing with stalkers.

Following the series’ release, and its declaration of being a “true story”, many viewers tried to find out the real identities of the characters in the show. This led to Fiona Harvey, a woman claiming to be the inspiration behind Martha, coming forward and directly threatening legal action against Gadd.

The aftermath of the series led to many conversations about the protection of the real people behind the story, with Gadd long maintaining that he had made Martha’s character so unrecognisable, that the real stalker might not even be able to spot it was her.

Now, in a new interview with Variety, Gadd has opened up further about the portrayal of his stalker, sharing that Jessica Gunning, who played Martha, didn’t even know many details about the real woman behind the character.

“I didn’t share any real life voicemails or emails with Jessica,” Gadd shared. “And she was also very good at being like, ‘I just need the script and that’s fine’.”

He continued: “I wanted Martha to take on a life of its own, to exist outside the real-life people, and I didn’t want it to be like an actor trying to inhabit a person.”

“I wanted it to be its own character,” he added.

Gunning agreed, saying: “Donny as a character and Martha as a character were just so clear to me, and I didn’t want to muddy it by confusing it with any information about the real person.”

She continued: “Because obviously this is told through Donny’s point of view and it’s based on a true story that happened to Richard but she’s a character.”

This comes after Gunning told Radio Times recently: “I absolutely saw Martha as a character, I wasn’t doing an impersonation of a real person. She was very clear to me in the script, but I genuinely didn’t know anything about the real person.”

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