I put absolutely everything into Half Man – Richard Gadd

Richard Gadd has said he put “absolutely everything” into his follow-up to runaway hit Baby Reindeer, and that the result is a story he “needed” to tell.

The writer, director and actor’s new show Half Man centres on the bond between two men who were first “flung” together as teenagers in Glasgow in the 1980s when their mothers started a relationship.

The six-part series opens with the by-now estranged pair as adults in a “surprising” encounter at a wedding, before flashing back four decades to chart how they got there.

The two men – Ruben and Niall – are each played by two sets of actors, with Gadd himself playing a grown-up Ruben opposite Jamie Bell’s Niall, and their younger selves played by Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robertson.

In an interview with the Press Association at the show’s Scottish premiere at the Glasgow Film Theatre, Gadd said he was drawn to the dynamic between the two characters as he wanted to “dig deep into manhood, and see where it takes me”.

“You meet them as adults, they’re broken down in their masculinity, a really surprising event happens,” he said.

“And then we flash back to the youth and show all the kind of learned prejudices and behaviours that got them to that point.

“It’s basically a show about two men struggling to love themselves and struggling to love one another.”

He added: “I thought it’s interesting to paint this kind of ‘can’t live with you, can’t live without you’ dynamic between the two of them.

“I found all their inconsistencies very human, and the pain of it all, it just felt to me very real.

“I just felt I wanted to contextualise the sort of male repression through the decades.”

The show is set in Glasgow – a city Gadd said has seen “phenomenal” growth during the lives of his characters, making it, he said, “an interesting backdrop for two repressed men”.

So keen was Gadd to start work on the show that he began writing it the day after finishing work on Baby Reindeer.

“I just needed to do it,” he explained.

“I don’t know how to describe it. It just spoke to me, and I needed to see it through to the end.”

Gadd also acknowledged the “pressure” that goes with following up a show as successful as Baby Reindeer.

“I’m aware it’s there, and it’s funny, once I join a sort of creative process, an artistic process where I decide I’m going to do something, and channels are expecting work from me and all kinds of stuff, then I kick into a sort of fierce determination where I give it absolutely everything.

“And that becomes the pressure.

“The pressure I put myself far outweighs the pressure I feel from the public.

“I know it’s there, the show’s out in only a few days, and I know it’s there, and I know people are expecting big things from this.

“I can never look back and say, didn’t give it my everything.”

Half Man will be released weekly on BBC iPlayer from April 24.