Welp. It turns out there were two bodies in the barn. Thursday night’s series finale of Half Man, the HBO show from Baby Reindeer creator and star Richard Gadd, ended with a staggering scene of brutality and a twist: We knew from an earlier episode that Ruben (Gadd) would die, having seen his body get wheeled out on a stretcher, but before he perished, he managed to kill Niall (Jamie Bell) at his wedding in one final act of revenge.
Across the show’s six episodes, the two “brothers”—Niall and Ruben aren’t biologically related, but their mothers were in a romantic relationship for decades—orbited each other, occasionally crashing into one another in moments of bloodshed and anger. Their relationship was doomed, lethal, but also evidently the most important one in either of their lives.
Earlier in the finale, we watched Niall continue to spiral, despite the professional success he was finally enjoying as a writer with a book based on Ruben. He’s addicted to drugs and visiting gay bathhouses for risky, unprotected sex. He even vomits on Ruben’s mother Moira (Marianne McIvor) as she’s dying, then shows up late and high to her funeral, having been arrested for crashing his car while under the influence. It’s only when he reconnects with Alby (Charlie De Melo), his former university love interest whom Ruben assaulted and disfigured, that his life begins to change. Alby not only offers Niall the promise of forgiveness, but the encouragement he needs to finally—finally—be honest with Ruben about his sexuality.
When Niall does finally open up to Ruben through the prison glass, he’s forced to question who was holding him back his whole life: Ruben or himself? But as the two men bond and share their secret true selves with one another—Ruben reveals that his father sexually abused him when he was a child, causing him a lifetime of pain and confusion—Niall accidentally reveals that he is the true father of the baby Ruben had thought he fathered. The admission sends Ruben into a primal rage that he holds on to for years, until he finally confronts Niall at his wedding, locks them in the barn, and they fight to the death.
I spoke with Gadd from his home in London via Zoom, where we talked about the dark side of masculinity, addictive relationships, how he became comfortable exploring his true self through art, and the one thing people keep asking him about the finale—but which he won’t reveal. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
David Mack: Let’s start by talking about the final scene and that shocking twist. Was it evident to you from the start that both these guys were going to die at each other’s hands?
Richard Gadd: It felt kind of inevitable, really, as I was writing it. It felt like two people who needed the other to feel whole almost couldn’t live without the other. It felt only natural that if they couldn’t live together, they kind of had to die together. Poetic justice. The more I was writing it, the more I thought that this is where it has to go.
In the last shot, you make this sound, and it’s sort of animalistic. I viewed it as half contentment, half regret—as if, in that moment, your life’s work was suddenly over. But I’m curious how you saw it when writing it and playing it.
It’s funny, I think I get the most questions about this. About half of all people who’ve seen all six episodes want to ask about what that final grunt means or what happens after the grunt. I never really answer them because I think people interpret things in different ways, and I think that’s really important. I never want to spell out things for them, because sometimes I’ll watch a film or a show and I’ll be like, That show was about this, then I’ll Google it and they’ll say, “When I wrote that scene, it was about this,” and I’m like, Oh. I know how he dies and how he gets to the stretcher, but I don’t want to rob people of their own interpretations.
Very diplomatic. You hinted at this before when you talked about them not being able to live without each other, but I’m curious what words you would use to describe their relationship. Toxic, surely, but codependent? Parasitic? Symbiotic?
Contorted is one that springs to mind, but if I said loving, would you think I was insane?
No. It’s a toxic love, but it’s love. It’s what they were denied in their childhoods, and this is the only other person who gave it to them, I suppose.
Exactly. There’s a contorted love to it. Their relationship is everything from euphoric camaraderie and connection to almost subliminal undercurrents of desire. It’s a spectrum of deep human complication.
I think sometimes if we look back in our lives and you think of the most defining relationships that you’ve had, not all of them are really good and clear relationships. They’re ones that are loving and deep and meaningful, but they can carry a lot of pain and confusion. Sometimes a love for someone can be almost hard to express. Like, love is a word that is almost used to express an unexpressible feeling towards someone. There’s certainly feelings that I’ve had for people that I almost think escape definition. I think that’s what Niall and Ruben feel towards each other, and I think part of the reason they are so dysfunctional is because they have a love for each other they can’t describe, and it leads to frustration and a lack of communication and destruction.
In this episode, Niall likens it to a drug addiction, a chemical dependency, which felt very apt.
People can get addicted to each other. I think there is a dopamine thing that goes on around certain people when they connect.
There is an unspoken yearning between them—at least in one direction, from Niall to Ruben. Their relationship wasn’t homosexual, but it was definitely homosocial. Yet a lot of the show is about how queerness gets used as a weapon between men in “straight” culture. Where does that come from?
With Niall, he is going through a sexuality struggle, but really it goes beyond that to an identity struggle. I think he’s a man who just has a desire to fit into a box that he can understand and that society can understand. It’s why, at the very end of the scene, he says, “I’m gay. No, hold a minute, I’m bi. No, actually, I’m gay. It’s cleaner.” He has this whole thing where he’s never sat down with the one person he fears the most, whose judgment he cares about the most, and said these two words, and then even when he says it, it doesn’t sit right with him. It doesn’t feel right. What Niall really wants is a sense of belonging, of blending in, of almost being invisible. I think he displaces a lot of things into sexuality. It’s why Ruben says to him, “You’ve spent your whole life dancing to other people’s tunes, but you’ve never had the rhythm.” What he’s saying is, “You’ve always been different. You’ve always been an individual, and you should have embraced that rather than trying to force yourself into all these other things.”
Ultimately, the show is about male violence, male difficulty of expression, and male repression. These guys soak up these prejudices and learn behaviors that are wrong, but it does alter their brain chemistry to the point where they feel like they have to not be their true selves.
That scene that you’ve just referenced—when Ruben tells Niall, “It’s your own homophobia that’s kept you in this prison, not mine”—I’m curious what you make of that, given your own journey of sexuality in your life. To what extent do you feel that the closet was something that you were building for yourself versus it having been built for you?
Hmm, that’s a good question. To speak about Niall and then speak personally, to separate things out a bit, I think what Ruben says is true. I spent ages working with the composers on that one bit of score that’s in the background when Ruben says that, because I wanted the sense of this dawning realization that it is Niall. I think instead of facing the difficulty of freedom and self-acceptance, Niall displaced it everywhere. He finds any reason to keep himself in a stasis he can’t get out of.
For me, personally, it’s a tough question to answer. In terms of masculinity, we grow up in society, don’t we? I always remember at school there were the fables where the prince climbs up the beanstalk to rescue the princess. Men have to be brave, and all that. On top of that, you have a culture where things are very casually thrown out, and that does impact people’s development. Obviously, society is progressing, but I think it can make somebody repress themselves in a closet that’s created by society.
I started to say that I’m bisexual because I think it’s the easiest way of having people interpret me. But I feel like bisexuality is movable and changeable, and still confusing. I still just feel generally quite confused around it as a person, but accepting that confusion has offered me a bit of freedom. There were times in my life where I would be like, I’m saying I’m this or I’m that. But part of the problem was that I was trying to put myself in a box in order to break free of the prison that I created for myself. I realized that quite a lot of people spend their life being confused and going one way and another way. I think once I realized that actually some people—sexually, spiritually, even from an identity point of view—live in a state of sort of flux and movement, that to me was peace enough.
In a piece I wrote the other week, I called this show “Heated Rivalry for sickos.” And indeed, there has been a big, thirsty reaction online to this deadly, damaging love affair. Before we got on the call today, I saw HBO tweet that there were more than 120 pieces of fan fiction about Half Man on one site alone. What do you make of all that?
Well, I haven’t seen Heated Rivalry yet. I’ve heard amazing things and need to get around to it, but when I do a TV show, I don’t watch other shows, because I need to stay in my own understanding of my world and my characters. But fan-fiction-wise? That’s news to me! I’ve long ago learned that the worst thing you can do is read about yourself online … so I actually didn’t know that. You’ve piqued my interest! I’m going to ask about it. People have done some amazing art and pictures and cartoons. I love that stuff.
When I wrote that piece, I also used the word ogreish to describe Ruben, but in this finale, Ruben’s partner Mona (Amy Manson) uses it to describe Niall. She calls him “a nasty little ogre of a man.” I’m wondering to what extent you see them both as monstrous creatures.
My intention as a writer was to actually ask which version of the men was more destructive. I really wanted, by the end, for the question to be, like, “Who is more insidious as a character? Who does more damage?” I don’t know how people are going to respond to it. They might be 50-50. I anticipate a very mixed reaction. I see comments where people say they can’t stand Ruben or he’s evil or makes them nervous. But other people kind of like him or think he’s cool. And then with Niall, even in the earlier episodes where he’s the purest version of himself, some people sensed there was something wrong about him or they didn’t like his dishonesty or they felt sorry for him.
I never wanted to paint them as ogres. I wanted for people to question which one was the worst by the end, but I still see the humanity in them. A lot of their behavior comes from an immense amount of pain. It doesn’t excuse it or justify it, but it does explain it. Even with all the awful things they’ve done to each other and to other people, when they have this conversation at the end, you feel the human suffering underneath everything.
Between this show and Baby Reindeer, you’re obviously very interested, as an artist, in work about masculinity, abuse, addiction, and obsession. These are all things you’ve been through in your own life and experienced one way or another. I’m curious, in a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario, did you get clarity on these things before you started making these works, or did the act of making art help you understand them better?
Without doubt, art has been the most powerful way of understanding things. It all started in 2016 when I did a show about being sexually abused, and that was called Monkey See Monkey Do. I suddenly started to talk about my life and my experiences, and not only did it kind of minimize the secrecy and the pain and all this stuff that I was carrying with me 24/7, I felt artistically that I was freed up a bit, that I was finally writing about something that I understood and I knew and I could speak to. It has been a phenomenal freedom. It’s so funny when I think about the person who was very sexually confused and had been through all that stuff, and I didn’t want anyone to know because I didn’t want anyone to judge me, then to go into a global platform like Netflix and HBO and put it at the forefront! It feels crazy to me when I think of just how much I would go from A to Z, keeping my life zipped up. It feels like progress, but I do owe a lot of that to art.
I want to talk about the women in Half Man, because they all have different relationships to this tortured masculinity around them. Some of them are making excuses for it, others are drawn to it, but it eventually poisons them all. I’m curious how you saw these women. Victims? Enablers? Both?
I suppose you would take each case individually. I think they’re all victims. They are growing up with the destructive behavior as well. They are managing it. But there are more clear-cut cases where they enable it, like the mothers.
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In Moira, I wanted to explore that version of a parent that can see no wrong in their kid. I know them only too well. I’m sure everyone does. The kid’s out of control, but they can’t see anything wrong. It’s a parenting failure.
I think, in a lot of TV shows, that home life is always the anchor point for the characters to go, somewhere functional where they can express themselves. But in a lot of families I know, it’s a very dysfunctional place. With Niall and [his mother] Lori, they love each other, but they don’t always necessarily do right by each other. Sometimes, she gives Niall tough love that he needs to hear and sometimes she does it wrong and doesn’t protect him enough. Her blindness for Moira means she does let an uncertain presence into Niall’s life at an early age.
So much of our culture today is focused on having to pay attention to terrible men, whether through our own choices or because they’ve grabbed the microphone and are yelling at us in politics or the manosphere or whatever. We’re about the same age. Do you think men have gotten worse in our lifetime? Or are we just paying more attention to this?
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I’m not sure. Even the word manosphere only came into my consciousness about five months ago. I know there’s a lot of conversations happening around it, and it’s very thorny. Ultimately, I think debate around something is always good, whether it’s difficult or not. Exploring it is always good.
Last question—and I can see the irony, given the scene in this episode where Niall gets asked about Ruben at the press conference—but have you known any real Rubens in your life?
It’s not based on anyone or drawn from anyone at all. But I certainly know what it’s like to fear someone in my life. I think if you ask anyone if they’ve known a Ruben, usually someone will say, “Oh my god, it’s like this guy at school that would terrify me.” But even if they don’t have one at school or have one in the family, or if they never dated one, I think most people have passed someone in the street and felt a primal sense of fear for a man that is carrying themselves in a way that is scary, dominant, slightly unhinged. I think most people recognize a Ruben.
