00:00I don't think I strayed from my diet once.
00:01I'm one of those people I think I put so much pressure on myself in life in general
00:05that I thought if I strayed from my diet, even like a square of chocolate, then I've failed.
00:10This is in character, one apple one.
00:14Hello, I'm Richard Gad.
00:15I am the writer, actor, creator and exec producer on Half-Man
00:19and I'm going to chat about how I got into character.
00:26I wrote episode one back in 2019, then Baby Reindeer was commissioned into a full series.
00:30So I put it on the shelf for four years, but all the way through Baby Reindeer,
00:33I never stopped thinking about it and how much I wanted to return to it.
00:36I just had the creative impulse to sort of explore, I guess, broken masculinity.
00:40I thought if you take two men and you take them in their present as sort of corrupted adults
00:44and you flash back to their childhood, you contextualize all the stuff that they learned
00:47or the prejudices that they soak up in the 1980s UK, which is a very unaccepting
00:51time and see how those kinds of prejudices and learned behaviour got them to where they are
00:55as adults. I just thought that was kind of an interesting idea.
01:02I like to try and change as much as I possibly can for a role.
01:06I wouldn't call it like method acting or whatever, but I like to sort of first be like,
01:10how does this character kind of feel in their body? You know, Baby Reindeer, I felt like it was
01:15important for me to be quite slight and I slimmed down to 68.8 kilograms to do Baby Reindeer.
01:20And then at my heaviest for half man, I was close to 110 kilograms.
01:24I needed to be big, heavy set. I needed to be a physically imposing presence.
01:29And I also thought that it would help me as an actor in a way if I felt that in
01:31my body.
01:32If I felt big and I felt like I was towering over Jamie Bell and every time I saw him,
01:36I felt that that would not only help me as an actor, but make for some arresting visuals,
01:40which I hope they did. I had a nutritionist and I had a personal trainer and I had a company
01:44in
01:44England actually make meals for me to the calorie specifics that were required and he sent them up
01:48to Scotland and I ate them at specific times. I would have a little alarm on my phone that would
01:53go off and that was the time to eat. I suppose it's that idea really calorie load and really
01:56trying to add a bit of fat over the muscles and booking them that way. I always wanted Reuben to
02:00be
02:00real. You know, I never wanted him to have a sort of Hollywood six pack. I never wanted him to
02:05look
02:05like a gym goer in the purest sense, because I think like he, he actually, as a character,
02:10doesn't care about that kind of body image stuff. He's heavy set because he almost feels the pain
02:14of his life in his body. And I wanted him to be real. The word I kept coming back to
02:17with the
02:17personal trainer was, I want him to be burly. I want him to feel burly, you know, like heavy set.
02:22And so a lot of that was a lot of eating. And then when it came to the filming, we
02:26actually tapered
02:26off a lot of the eating and actually reduced the carbs right down. So then of course I was working
02:31out
02:31six days a week, um, constantly and also writing. So my body was in a lot of pain quite a
02:36lot of the
02:36time as well. It was very intense, but I felt it was all necessary for the visuals of the project.
02:41Come here. Come here.
02:47I remember I'd always say to the personal trainer, kind of, it's not enough. I need to go bigger.
02:51I need to go bigger. They'll say, trust me, you're growing, you're growing. But I could never see it
02:55because I guess you look in the mirror every single day, don't you to some capacity and you don't see
02:59that
02:59kind of incremental change. But if I, if I bumped into somebody I hadn't seen for ages, they would
03:02always say, are you looking massive? And I'm like, really? Really? Come here, look at me. Look at me.
03:09That's it.
03:13I work very hard in the voice of Ruben, you know, the voice is very different to what I'm doing
03:18now.
03:19He's much deeper, much more gruff. I wanted him to have an almost kind of like animalistic quality,
03:23like in a lot of ways. So it was a lot of grunting. Sometimes like the boar would pop into
03:28my head
03:29in a, in a strange way. Like that's, you know, like a, I don't know, like a weighty sort of
03:34animal of
03:35some kind. And even when scenes where he was like joking about or being funny, there's a couple of
03:39scenes where he was kind of just being silly or making fun of Jamie. I would actually still get
03:43and try to get in the headspace of, of sort of immeasurable pain that I think he is the undercurrent
03:48in which he, he exists all at once. I think like one thing that I I've always taken even
03:57in the violent moments of baby reindeer as well, it's that I want things to feel real. Sometimes
04:00you can watch a film that kind of purports. And I love these films that they purport to be real
04:04the whole way through. And then they get to a fight scene and you know, like people know how to
04:08punch
04:08and people know how to slap and, and everything just suddenly becomes choreographed. There are scenes
04:12where we're on the blueprint where sometimes like, okay, he comes in, he ducks, he dives,
04:16comes in with the left. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Ruben's not, not a sort of purebred fighter in
04:21that respect. He is epitome of psychotic rage. And to me, the two things were very different.
04:27It's violent. It's animalistic. It's, it's messy. It's completely messy. Get them down, stamp, kick,
04:33scream, everything. There's a lot of talk about toxic masculinity. And I suppose one of the,
04:42the, the show kind of sets out to explore not just the toxic aspects of it, but why are men
04:47drawn to
04:48each other in such kind of complicated and, and sort of mutually empowering yet mutually destructive
04:52ways. And I thought, well, for something to be toxic, it needs to be intoxicating first really. I mean,
04:57drugs are toxic, but they're intoxicating to begin with and they lead to that toxicity later on.
05:02And I thought the same kind of exists with masculinity. You know, you meet these two guys and, and the
05:07bond that
05:07they form in their childhood is intoxication. If done right, I hope so. The audience will feel that
05:14along with them and root for them and want to almost be a part of that weird, messed up dynamic.
05:18And that I think is, is the kind of bind of like male camaraderie. And it's a very strong, powerful
05:26force, almost transcendental. And I think a lot of men are drawn to each other to feel a sense of
05:31almost
05:31like, um, sense of mythical kinship. And, and, and, um, and I think even now I find it hard to
05:37explain,
05:37but you know, I think of some of the male relationships I've had and the, the, the close
05:40bonds I've felt with men and the feeling that we're shoulder to shoulder and we could take on and do
05:44anything in the world. I felt like there was, there was a version of the show where you dive straight
05:47into the toxic masculinity aspect. You don't really contextualize why men are so drawn to each other
05:52in the first place. I think that the mistake that a lot of like, I suppose, violent characters are on
05:56screen is that they're violent all the time or that they know they're violent. Like I, I really believe that
06:00Reuben doesn't know he's violent. I believe that he has a switch in his head that goes off
06:05when he's triggered by something that I just thought it was kind of true to, to, to portray
06:09somebody who is charismatic. And then when, when you lift the veil, they are capable of all these
06:13things that I think it's interesting. I think it can make you very confused as a viewer in a way
06:17where
06:17it can make you confused in human life. When somebody you love or adore does something out of character,
06:23where's that come from? And it makes you like, I don't know who this person is. I think these characters
06:27test your patience at all times, but at times you fall back in love with them and then fall out
06:30of love.
06:30them again. And I kind of think that's true to life and a lot of friendships. I find masculinity
06:35and male relationships even more complicated than I did when I set out. And I think, you know,
06:38my shows are for people to take their own meaning from it. So I think with Halfman, all I, all
06:42I ask is,
06:45well, I just hope that people enjoy it, really. I'm always just a guy looking at a viewership asking them
06:50to enjoy it.
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