Richard Gadd

it like life is not like that i think and i think that we're all made up of good qualities and bad qualities and mistakes and successes and all these kinds of things and i just dug into it and it kind of goes all the way back to the stage show because i remember you know when i was i wrote the stage show which later became the tv show i i would trial it and and the story went you know i offered this person a cup of tea and look at what happened

My one act of kindness, my God.

And I remember just feeling like it wasn't coming to the fore, like it wasn't working.

And I think it wasn't working because I was avoiding the truth.

And the truth is that, you know, I egged it on and I indulged in it.

And I indulged in it because I was going through a lot and I would take any attention wherever I got it just because anything that would take me out of the mire of what I was feeling and experiencing.

And that to me was the heart of Baby Reindeer and that was what I was avoiding when I was trying to workshop the live show into something that was worth watching.

Because I realized that I wasn't really writing the truth of what happened.

And truth is the fundamental key to writing something, you know, authentic and interesting.

But Baby Reindeer, you know...

It was tough because it was like, you know, not many people would do that, especially in this day and age of kind of moral enlightenment.

And, oh, hey, look at all the mistakes I made.

Like it felt very daring and it felt very like vulnerable and exposing.

But really, in a lot of ways, I think therein lay the success of Baby Ranger because I think people recognize something in that.

and in the flawed idea of human consistency.

I think a lot of people struggle.

One of Donny's big struggles was his inability to put up boundaries, his inability to say no or inability to hurt someone's feelings.

I think a lot of people relate to it.

I think a lot of people struggle to be honest.

It's not that they're good liars, it's that they struggle to not circumvent the pain of having honest conversations.