Netflix’s Baby Reindeer became an instant hit with viewers after it debuted earlier in April, with Variety calling the seven-episode limited series “shocking, hilarious, painful, and devastating,” and The New York Times dubbing it a “mesmerizing, complex drama.” The series follows Donny (played by creator Richard Gadd), a struggling comedian and bartender whose life is thrown into disarray when a customer named Martha (Jessica Gunning) comes into the bar. Soon she is sending him hundreds of emails, before her unwanted contact escalates even further. While attempting and failing to stop his stalker, Donny is also reminded of a period in his life during which he was violently abused by a mentor, Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill).
While Baby Reindeer draws on events that occurred in Gadd’s real life, the series is also a work of fiction. Here’s what you need to know about the true story behind the Netflix hit.
Baby Reindeer is based on Richard Gadd’s one-man play of the same name.
Scottish performer Richard Gadd is as the writer, creator, and star of Baby Reindeer, and the Netflix series is the culmination of almost a decade of work. While the show takes its title from his one-man play of the same name, which debuted as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019, his previous work also inspired the series. In 2016, Gadd took home the Edinburgh Comedy Award for his show Monkey See Monkey Do, in which he revealed the catastrophic sexual violence he experienced as a young comic at the hands of a mentor.
Discussing the success of Baby Reindeer’s Edinburgh theatrical run, Gadd wrote in a Netflix press release, “All I ever wanted to do was capture something complicated about the human condition. That we all make mistakes. That no person is ever good or bad. That we are all lost souls looking for love in our own weird way.”
Yes, the real Martha left a lot of voicemails.
In the Netflix series, Donny first connects with Martha after she wanders into the bar where he’s working. He makes her a free cup of tea in an attempt to cheer her up, but Martha takes the kind gesture to heart in a big way. Before long, she is turning up at the bar daily, commenting on his Facebook posts, and sending him a slew of emails. When she starts invading Donny’s real life by attending his comedy shows and harassing his trans girlfriend, it becomes clear Martha may pose a legitimate threat. Eventually, she acquires Donny’s phone number and begins leaving him countless voicemails, something the real Martha did, too.
In a 2019 interview with The Independent, Gadd said his stalker had sent him “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.” After being targeted by such a deluge, it’s perhaps unsurprising Gadd needed to write a theater show to make sense of the experience.
In the Netflix press release, Gadd said of Martha’s voicemails: “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.” He also began categorizing the messages, much like Donny does in the show, hoping to find evidence of wrongdoing in one of them that could be used to take legal action to protect himself.
Importantly, Gadd wanted viewers to understand that the violence perpetuated by the real-life Darrien left him vulnerable to Martha’s advances. “I wanted to show what Darrien did was perniciously evil, whereas Martha’s behavior came from a place of deep vulnerability,” he told GQ.
While in the show, Martha is sentenced for stalking Donny, it’s unclear whether Gadd’s real-life stalker faced any legal consequences. “The laws surrounding harassment and abuse are so stupid,” Gadd explained to The Independent, suggesting that his stalker’s actions largely did not violate the law. He also has made it clear that the real Martha is a victim, too. “It would have been wrong to paint her as a monster, because she’s unwell, and the system’s failed her.”
No, you shouldn’t search for the real Martha.
Since Baby Reindeer is based on a true story, some viewers have endeavored to uncover the real identities of some of the show’s characters. Police were forced to get involved after online sleuths started accusing people of being the real Darrien. Deadline reported that in an Instagram Story, Gadd wrote: “People I love, have worked with, and admire … are unfairly getting caught up in speculation. Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be.”
Jessica Gunning, who plays Martha, also urged fans to avoid trying to ID the real people behind the series’ characters. “I think it is quite sad, and I would urge them to watch the show again and see that that was not the point of the show at all,” the actor told the BBC.
Gadd has also repeatedly noted that he made efforts to conceal the identity of his stalker, so as not to harm her. As he told GQ, “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.”
Gadd feared sharing something so personal.
Writing and acting in Baby Reindeer was a difficult experience for Gadd, who told Tudum, “You are revisiting a period in your life, which was the worst period of your life. So it’s running back towards an awful fire you’ve been in.”
The Netflix series does sticks pretty closely to the facts, the creator says, noting the importance of telling the story accurately. “It’s pretty truthful,” Gadd told GQ. “Any time it veered too much into embellishment, I would always want to pull it back. It’s extremely emotionally truthful.” But he reiterated that it was important to change certain details to protect the identities of the people involved.
Nava Mau, who plays Donny’s girlfriend, Teri, in Baby Reindeer, praised the accuracy of her character’s arc. “[I]t felt like the first time reading a character that was written by someone who actually had known and loved a trans woman,” she told Tudum. “There’s a light that I think pulsates out of that kind of vulnerability, and so all of the characters in the story then are cast in that light. And I felt that in that first read of Teri.”
