it is a stalker story but it's a stalker story with a twist it's a stalker story
done differently every now and again I have these sort of giddy bursts of excitement
where I'm almost like a kid back at school and then I have these bouts of oh
my god everyone's gonna know my shit Oh my God, everyone's gonna know what happened to me.
41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemail, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 4 fake Facebook accounts, 106 pages of letters and one cup of tea.
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
I sometimes find the baby reindeer plot quite hard to describe, which kind of speaks to its strengths in a way.
Based in my early 20s where it went for quite a lot of pretty crazy things,
paper reindeer follows the story of a man who gives a woman a cup of tea on the house,
a kind gesture to cheer her up,
and then the negative fallout of that kind gesture,
a sort of a gesture that goes on to create extreme negative ramifications in his life, and how ultimately his warped relationship with that woman.
confront other things in his life.
If you leave my family alone, I will hang your curtains tonight.
Essentially, it is a stalker story, but it's a stalker story with a twist.
It's a stalker story done differently.
I had a friend who used to live here once.
It shows, in my opinion, the messy side of stalking.
The side of stalking, which isn't necessarily black and white.
You can't call me a stalker!
Well, you're the one creeping around my house at night!
peering in through my windows, sending me emails, begging for my bumble!
I'm aware that baby reindeer touches on themes that are quite current and quite present in society,
but I like to think it doesn't form an opinion or ram a certain sense of morals down people's throat.
Ultimately, yeah, it is just an autobiographical story that I felt the need to tell.
The story of a messed up period of time in my life.
Shit, don't worry, I don't mind a bit of strange.
Yeah, the stand-up in the other years was terrible.
I think what I was trying to do was do a weird brand of comedy,
a sort of anti-comedy like its subversive style, to audiences that just weren't interested in that, they just wanted to hear some jokes.
I alienated people on mass.
When the real life Martha turned up,
who thought I was hilarious, she might have been the only one on the planet that found me hilarious.
I loved somebody laughing at all my jokes.
Baby reindeer actually started out as a one-man show.
I took it to dinner festival.
And it was kind of a first-hand account of everything that kind of happens in Baby reindeer.
It transferred to London and it was a massive hit.
And was at that point that Netflix came to me in the light.
Have ever thought about putting this in a series?
And was like, yes, I have.
It a hell of a journey transforming a one-man stage show to big old production.
I really wanted the humor to provide sort of release during the series.
You know with a show like this that goes to the territory it goes to I just knew That without laughter,
along the way, it could have been a very, very dark experience indeed.
You say this woman is stoking yet?
Yeah, she comes to my work, she comes to my house.
She sends me emails, like all the time.
I wouldn't say that's particularly threatening.
So, Drew and Baby Randy, there's the flashback episode where we actually go back in time.
To Donnie going to the Edinburgh Fringe,
meeting in the industry who takes them under their wing, helps them in their career, but on to abuse, Donnie.
Fucking hell that's disgusting.
Little pain for a little game.
And that's obviously taken from my real life experiences.
And it was a hell of a thing to write and shoot.
And it kind of shows a side of abuse that And I think we've seen before,
I still think there's an idea that sexual abuse is a kind of a pill and a drink that dissolves and someone wakes up and they don't know where they are.
And that does happen and that is a big problem, but a lot of abuse occurs in very intimate relationships.
I think I wanted to show just how complicated and psychologically messed up situations can get to.
And so I hope that when people see it,
who been through similar things, that they feel less shame around it, that feel maybe emboldened too.
take it on in their life and deal with it in a way where they don't see it as a
dent to the character in some way.
I hope it provides peace.
I think it would have provided peace for me.
I was going through like a masculinity crisis.
I all these kind of like broken ideas of what it meant to be a man, and this doesn't happen to a man.
I just didn't know who I was anymore.
I felt disconnected from everyone.
I in a working in a very sort of heteronormative bar.
When are you two going to shag?
Oh, don't believe in sex before marriage.
I like I didn't belong, and then there was someone there filling me up with all of these kinds of...
They me the way I wanted to be.
family hands, haven't ya?
Big deep voice, chiseled jawline.
Should be illegal to have your bones structured too, you know?
Having someone at the end of the bar who was pure,
unadulterated adoration, it's kind of what I needed, but it was foolish of me, and it was using someone.
And I guess I was punished for that in quite an extreme way.
Jesus Christ, Mother, how long you been sitting out here for?
Things got pre-out of control,
I was going through so many different crises at once, I was trying to come to terms with the past.
I was to come to terms with the present figure out how to solve this situation with Martha.
I was also having a relationship on the slide and trying to keep it under wraps because I felt a degree of shame.
And I think my whole life existed in a prism of denial and shame and lying.
When you're not living truthfully and when you're not speaking the truth to people and you're
not being honorable to those around you and you're not being honorable to yourself, nothing but the struggle.
to show the side of stalking that it is a mental illness and show the fact that
there was someone there who was doing a bad thing who wasn't necessarily a
person that just had a lot of trauma in their life that they were going through
and no one brought that to the screen like Jess When I was on stage, I would sort of play Martha.
I sort of be like, can I offer you a cup of tea?
But then to see Martha come alive, like through Jess's performance, it was something to behold.
There were times on set where I was acting without it.
I'd almost forget to say my line back because I was too busy going, fucking hell, she's good.
I almost couldn't believe how much she was channeling the real-life person.
Terry's like the voice of reason.
The real life person is always calling me out on my shit.
Now I wish he was final confronting.
My behavior was so irrational.
And so it was very important to have Terry be the voice of reason in the show.
That's like the craziest shit I've ever heard.
I mean she was the voice of reason in my life at that point as well.
Not I listen to her as much as I should have.
My parents haven't seen this show already and I've won them against certain episodes.
My mum will phone up on behalf of my dad and be like, so he like in the show?
I think he said, fucking come back from work.
It was very important to get my parents what they've done for me kind of in there.
I think the things I've been through are pretty, you know.
They take their toll on parents and my biggest regret is putting them through some of the things that I put them through.
I feel bad about that, you know, but I had nowhere else to turn, I needed my mum and my dad.
But they've been, yeah, they've been very, yeah, they've been very special.
But I really regret the worry, of course, which still continues to this day, I think.
I think there's a lot of people who are going to want to drill into the debate around the show,
the morality of the show itself.
My ultimate hope is that it moves people and that it touches people and it affects people.
Oh, that does his take from here.
I want people to feel a sense of peace around it and people who have been through similar
things to feel a great sense of comfort in it.
I ultimately wanted to stand on its own two feet as a really good piece of art and a good television show.
That's what I hope I can't control how this is going to be received and I can't control
how people are going to see me as a of this show.
And that's kind of uncomfortable.
My main hope is that people see the place.
It's born out of true events,
it's born out of a real life happening, and ultimately at the end of the day it's just someone telling a story about their life.