Richard Gadd 'changed everything' about himself for new show Half Man

Richard Gadd “changed everything” about himself, undergoing a radical body transformation for his new show.

The Emmy Award-winning actor told STV Radio he had a personal trainer and nutritionist to prepare himself for the follow-up to runaway hit Baby Reindeer.

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.

Stuart Campbell, Mitchell Robertson and Richard Gadd. STV/Alan Peebles

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.

“I knew I needed to change everything about myself. I changed my entire diet, I worked out six days a week, sometimes twice a day,” he told Ewen and Cat at Breakfast.

“I even had meals made for me in England that would be sent up [to Scotland] to the exact calorie requirements that was needed and I’d eat them at the exact same time each day.

“You wouldn’t believe what I ate on the last day of filming.”

Ewen Cameron, Stuart Campbell, Richard Gadd, Mitchell Robertson and Cat Harvey. STV/Alan Peebles

Gadd said it was so “gluttonous” that he doesn’t think he’ll ever live it down.

“It was a momentous moment for the production [crew],” Gadd said.

“It was a McDonald’s… you would think they were feeding the whole crew, I’ll put it that way.”

Gadd describes Half Man as a show about two men struggling to love themselves and struggling to love one another.

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.

He also spoke about his comedy career before the success of Baby Reindeer, describing it as “50/50” and an “extreme way to live”.

“I did a show in 2016 called Monkey See Monkey Do, which was a very theatrical show in a lot of ways. I ran on a treadmill, I was getting chased by a monkey – it’s very hard to describe,” he said.

“It went really well but it was a very serious show, it explored very dark themes. A lot of people were saying, ‘okay, we love this show, but it’s not funny enough to be a comedy show’. There was a debate around whether it was a comedy show.

“To me it was a comedy show, but I thought, you know what, if everyone’s saying I’m too serious now to be on comedy stages, why don’t I go and do a theatre piece? And that was Baby Reindeer, and that’s what got me to here.”