If you’ve clocked that Richard Gadd looks almost unrecognisable in his new HBO series Half Man then you’re not alone. The man who played the slight, nervous, endlessly sympathetic Donny Dunn in Baby Reindeer has shown up to his next project looking like a completely different person, and that was entirely the point. Gadd, who won two Emmys for Baby Reindeer in 2024, has now created, written, and starred in yet another series that’s already being called one of the most anticipated TV follow-ups in recent memory. But before a single frame aired, his body was doing a lot of the storytelling.
Playing Ruben in Half Man required Gadd to essentially rebuild himself from scratch. The character is described as fierce, volatile, and physically imposing, which is about as far from Donny Dunn as you can get. To make that distance feel real on screen, Gadd put on over 50 pounds of muscle, grew out his beard, changed his hair, and even reworked his voice.
Talking about it on Variety’s Awards Circuit Podcast, Gadd stated,
“I knew I needed to change everything about myself. I knew, in a way, I had to do the exact opposite of Donny Dunn [his Baby Reindeer character]. In order for people to buy this, I needed to change physically, hair, beard, voice, everything I knew in order to do Ruben. I needed to almost become unrecognizable.”
Gadd also almost didn’t act in the show at all. After the intensity of Baby Reindeer, he’d planned to step back from performing and focus purely on writing and producing but then Bell suggested he play Ruben. Speaking about that he added,
“I remember after Baby Reindeer, being in every single scene and everything, I just remember thinking, ‘I need to take one of these things off my plate, so acting felt like the thing that I could take off,’
Everything we know about Half Man
Half Man is a six-part limited series that premiered on HBO on 24 April, with new episodes releasing weekly on Thursdays. It’s a co-production between BBC and HBO, set across three decades in Glasgow, following two men called Ruben and Niall who grew up together after their mothers entered a relationship, making them something close to brothers without the blood tie.
Gadd plays adult Ruben, with Stuart Campbell taking on the younger version, while Jamie Bell plays Niall. The series opens on Niall’s wedding day, where Ruben has shown up seemingly determined to force some kind of reckoning.
Half Man is streaming on HBO Max.
Edited by Nibir Konwar