Best Of: Novelist Douglas Stuart / ‘Half Man’ Actor Richard Gadd

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From the UHY and Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, writer Douglas Stewart, like the main character in his book of prize-winning novel called "Shuggie Bane," Stewart Corrup and Glasgow, working class, queer, and with a mother addicted to alcohol. His first career was designing for Calvin Klein and Banana Republic, from Outerware to Underwear.

Sometimes when I'm in an audience now and I sort of look out and feel a little bit nervous, I have a joke to myself.

“I think, how many people in this audience have worn the underwear that you designed?”

Stewart has a new novel. Later, Richard Gad, creator and star of Baby Rain Deer, his new series Half Man is about two boys who become brothers when their mothers fall in love. They spend the next 30 years trying to survive each other, and David B. and Cooley reviews the latest adaptation of Lord of the Flies.

That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. You may have read my guest books. You may have worn the closely designed.

Douglas Stewart's first novel "Shuggie Bane" won the Book of Prize, which is one of the world's top literary awards. Much of it was written when Stewart was working in the fashion industry, designing clothes for popular brands like Calvin Klein and Banana Republic. Stewart wouldn't have predicted any of this from what his life was like growing up in

a working-class neighborhood in Glasgow, Scotland in the 80s. He was raised by a single mother who was addicted to alcohol. Things weren't much better at school where he was relentlessly bullied. When he came to understand that he was gay, he didn't know anyone else who was. The novel "Shuggie Bane" tells a story very similar to Stewart's own childhood.

Stewart has described his second novel "Young Mungo" as a story about the dangers of first love between two young working-class men in Glasgow and about masculinity, conformity, and falling in love. In our Book Critic Marine Caragans Reviews, she wrote, "It's hard to imagine a more

disquieting and powerful work-efficient will be published anytime soon about the perils

of being different." Douglas Stewart has a new novel called "John of John" that explores things of faith, obligation, and how isolating secrets can be. It's said on a fictional island in Scotland's Heberties, in a very old-fashioned conservative community of weavers.

There were two John's in the story, a father and his son, the son is known as Cal. Cal is just graduated textile school in Glasgow, and reluctantly returned home when his father insists he needs Cal's help to take care of Cal's sick grandmother.

“Cal is gay and keeps it a secret from everyone, including his father.”

As we learned early in the story, the father, who is the deacon of his church, is also secretly gay, father and son are keeping the same secret from each other. Douglas Stewart, welcome to Fresh Air and Congratulations on your new book. Can you describe how you landed on the premise that both the father and son are gay, and they're not only keeping it a secret from everyone else, they're keeping it a secret

from each other.

Yes, I mean, I am a Scotsman who grew up in Glasgow, but I had never been to the outer

Heberties before, you know, they're quite far from the mainland and it takes some effort to get there. But in 2019 when I was thinking about writing a new novel, I decided I was going to go to the archipelago of islands and just explore it and see if a story emerged. And I realized that every little settlement I went to, that when I was talking to someone

I would sit at a kitchen table and have tea and pancakes or whatever they baked for me. It was, you know, all the islanders were very hospitable. But I was hearing about their settlement and the people in the village and there was always a bachelor or some spinsters who had never, who had never married and for quite a conservative Christian place that seemed a little unusual.

“And I asked everybody, you know, well, why did so and so not marry?”

Why didn't they ever sort of take a partner? And the answer was often, will the miss their moment was what was said and, and it came to learn in rural places, you know, the window to find someone to love could be quite short, quite narrow and that just really sparked my imagination and I said just very casually one day, well, and of course some of them might be gay and that makes it harder to find

love. And the woman I said it to said sort of reared back and said, "Oh, no, no, no, that's not so. That's not possible." And of course I just knew historically that some of them must have been maybe not

the people we were talking about, but some of these people that had never found love.

I had gone thinking it was about the return of a prodigal son and then I realized it wasn't about that at all. It was about the people he had left behind.

What does being gay mean to the father, who is a weaver, who has never left the island

and doesn't even want to leave, he's the deacon of his church and often quotes the Bible, compared to the son who left the island for art school and returns reluctantly to the island when his father calls him back.

“Yeah, I think they're definitely men of a different generation, although tradition is very”

strong in the setting of the novel. And for John, because he is very close to Scripture, he is part of a church that believes in a very traditional conservative viewpoint, any sex outside of one man, one woman inside of a marriage is absolutely taboo. And so he has come up in that environment and has remained in the fictional settlement of

the family his whole life, and so he's never really seen any evidence of anything outside another way to live another way to be. And also in many ways, gay is a social identity, it is about a community and an outlook in the world that's not just about a sexual identity. And so for John, he has no way to access a social identity.

All he is is he has homosexual desires, he is attracted to other men. But his cow is, you know, a youth in the 90s, and he went to the mainland, he managed to go to college for four years. He is finding a country Scotland at the time, would be transforming utterly. You know, it had been a very working class, heavy industry, patriarchy for centuries probably.

And now we're finding it's deindustrializing, it is changing, it's becoming incredibly liberal very quickly. And so he sees much more hope in the world as a young gay man and much more acceptance.

So the problem is is in that wonderful moment where we all leave home for the first time

and we think we're going to get to step out into the world and become our own people far from our families, he has called home to take care of his sick grandmother and he finds himself exactly back where he started. So you grew up in a neighborhood in Glasgow where it was, it was working class like very, like masculine, you were an outsider because you were seen as gay, even though you hadn't

told anybody that you were gay, there were no gay bars, there was no gay culture, there were no gay publications.

“What did it mean to you, or what lack of meaning did you find growing up so isolated?”

Yeah, I mean, in fact, I didn't have any understanding that I was gay for most of my young life. I was sort of pointed out as being different to the other boys around me because masculinity was expressed in a very narrow way. We were all sons of hardworking fathers who did very difficult dangerous jobs and so men

were meant to be a very specific sort of way, you know, very brave, very strong, hardworking, but also quite emotionally distant because I think if you were going to start talking about your feelings, one of the very first feelings you would have is this job as dangerous and underpaid and I don't want to do it anymore. And so as a way of sort of coping with whether it was coal mining or ship building men

became quite cut off even to themselves. And you know, at five or six, I was quite an expressive young boy.

I had too much to say for myself, I probably always have had and the other boys just sort

of turned at me on mass and said, "What is wrong with you? Why are you like that?" And so I was just deemed as being too feminine, very, very young and that was before I had any sexual notions at all, but that sort of followed me all the way through my youth.

“And maybe feel very lonely in the only place I think I ever felt like I belonged, which”

has been a sort of through line and all of my work. So you went to art school, you had shown some artistic talent, but you needed work. So you're a teacher who had taken you under her wing advised you to go to art school and study textiles and then you could have a trade, basically, or a craft. So did you go to art school to become a weaver like what was the meaning of studying textiles

when you went? In fact, when I was 16 and I was guided towards textiles, I couldn't quite tell you what the word textile meant. I was, I'm often asked as a writer, "What was your favorite childhood book? What did you read as a kid?"

And the answer to that is, I didn't read books as a kid. We didn't have any books at home, we didn't have access to them. It wasn't quite such an unusual thing because I think if I looked to the boys, I grew up around many of them, also weren't reading either, but children also need a huge amount of peace in their lives in order to read both peace inside themselves and peace at home.

And I didn't have any of that because I was dealing with a single mother who was suffering

“with addiction and then at school I was being bullied for being gay.”

But two things happened when I was 16.

The first thing that happened was my mother died very suddenly one morning her addiction

finally got the better over and when I left for school and the morning she was fine when I came home at lunchtime she was dead and also at 16 school becomes optional for Scottish children you can leave if you want to. And so my year of about 300 kids went down to only 12 kids and I found myself one of only 12 kids remaining in my year who were going to finish high school who were then going

to go on to college hopefully. And I found myself in an English class where I was the only student who was just me and two English teachers, Mr. Arthur and Mr. Archibald and suddenly they had eight hours a week with a student who was trying to pay attention, who was trying to understand how to read not just get through the exams but trying to learn how to digest books and how

to take in all their meaning and I tell you this because I suddenly realize that 1617 I would love to be a writer I would love to study English literature and that just wasn't going to be possible for me I was a working class boy the grew up in a neighborhood of

“great deprivation and I think my teachers rather than turning me away from English”

turn me towards something that I could make a living at.

That's an amazing story about being like one student with two teachers and just talking

about you know just the theory talking about literature I could see how you could fall in love with books that way but how do that lead to textiles? Well you know it was wonderful to be around people who had this passion for a thing in the invested that passion in you but they saw that I couldn't go on to compete and study English literature at a university level they you know I would have to be competing with

children that would ultimately go to Oxford and Cambridge and you know that it spent their whole life that whole other youth around books and I just didn't have that and so instead they guided me towards textiles without me really knowing what textiles was but

“they saw a kid that wasn't really great academically but that wanted to achieve something”

someone who was creative and artistic but needed to do something that ultimately could find

you could find employment on the far side of and so I went to a very traditional textiles school and I was a weaver for a year they let you sample all kinds of textiles and as a printer I was a weaver and then ultimately I did my rotation into knitting which sounds like a very sort of crafty thing where you sit with needles but in fact as a very industrial course you you do all you're knitting on these huge screaming knitting machines there often computer

operated and I found knitting just to be really inspiring it was you know you made this cloth anything you could imagine in 3D you could make and we made really diverse things we made fashion we made clothing we made interiors but we also made things like car interiors or automobile interiors and we made sacks and vessels for inside the body with sort of microscopic knitting machines and so it was a wonderful education but my whole life I felt like a writer that

couldn't be a writer in your new novel John of John the son studies textiles and becomes a weaver on this kind of isolated island and the Heberties of Scotland and at the time this and this is happening to so many people now the thing that he studied in college has just become basically out of date you know the textiles mills are closing people aren't wearing the tweeds they used to wear so he can't find a job either on the islands or you know where he went to school so

he joins his father on the one loom that they're allowed which is interesting right there there was this like one loom per family rule in the outer heberties at the time or at least on this island would you explain why yeah you're right everything at this time moves to the far east and nothing is made in the west and textiles as an industry is on its knees but there's a wonderful tradition on the outer heberties of making something called Harris tweed and it was established as a sort of

almost a socialist project I would say where each of the homes would have a loom behind the house in a shed and when the crofters when the islanders couldn't rely on the sea or the land for to support themselves they would be able to make some cloth you know it is still made in that exact same way even today and now today it feels like such a rare thing to have something made by hand in place and it's just the most remarkable thing but cow returns from art school as you say and

and finds himself back working for his father anyway if you're just joining us we're listening to my conversation with Book of Prize winning writer Douglas Stewart his new novel is called John of John will hear more after a break I'm Terry Gross and this is fresh air weekend you go up keeping a lot of secrets I mean I think you didn't want everybody to know that your mother was alcoholic what life was like at home how confusing and sometimes dangerous it could be

you had to keep a secret that you were gay and she kept secrets from you and even like you know hiding the alcohol hiding have used bottles of beer and alcohol what would you do if you found those partially used bottles and cans I mean I think my whole childhood was about secrets on all sorts of levels but you know my mother's drinking was a difficult thing to manage you know I was sort

of thrust into a caregiving role about the age of four what I realized that my mother wasn't always

able to take care of me and I had to look after her and and when you would find sort of drink I

“learned sometimes that the best thing to do was to dispose of it or to get rid of it but sometimes”

if you did that it just caused more trouble and so you had to almost just let her get on with it and so very much depended on where I could judge where she was emotionally and what would come from those actions but yeah sort of addiction was a was a central part of my childhood and I mean this is the point what I should say my mother was a wonderful woman and she was a wonderful mother she was incredibly kind and incredibly generous and I and I often say the addiction killed my

mother but I don't think as I age that that is true I think what killed my mother was first of all poverty and then the second thing was is she was a woman who'd made a very traditional bargain that said you don't need an education if you leave school and you should marry the first man that you that you fall in love with and you should have children and you will build a life together she eventually married my father and when the sort of the country went into 25% unemployment

under market thatcher and when my father left her you know she found herself in a very desperate place and and so it was that sort of you know that upbringing and then also the poverty that we found ourselves in that led to the addiction and that's really the thing that killed her so you you lived in the fashion you worked in the fashion world for about 10 years in 20 years sorry 20 years oh oh longer than I thought so when I think it was when you were in textile school that you know

“various companies and industries came to the school to scout for talent and I think that's how”

the Calvin Klein company found you that's right yeah I was just wrapping up my education and I thought I was going to go into the mill system I thought I was going to go into a very traditional employment and make cloth and make textiles and I had done this really wonderful thing where I had spent a summer with the last remaining shakers on earth up in Sabbath day Lake Maine and I had access to all their archives and their clothes this is 1998 and I based my degree show my graduate show

on it and at fashion school all students sort of their very utre you know the use lots of color and pattern and feathers and if they can sequence nothing they sequence it and I had created this collection that was incredibly somber very respectful of the shakers it was quite monastic it was very simple and I watched all these companies come through my college and start to hire graduates they would

go to Prada they would go to Gucci and I thought oh I'm never going to get a job because I'm

maybe a little too melancholy and suddenly the Calvin Klein team came through and they said this is minimalism I remember it's the end of the 90s and they said would you like to come to New York and I had no family home I had nothing to go back to Scotland for and so I said yeah and I've been here now almost 30 years you said that you liked fashion and I just some this means like designing fashion that's both revealing and or concealing can you talk about that a little

“yeah I think you know starting in my childhood I realized that clothes are always deeply psychological”

and we're always projecting something who we want to be and at the same time maybe concealing who we are or what's really going on in our lives. I've written actually in the past about my characters seeing someone at university or in college who is waiting very shabby clothes things they've bought in a second hand store or you know old tweets are old um old wax jackets and as a working class kid my character says you know it's a dream all together to be able to wear clothes that

look like you don't care because you know in the working class you're always sort of projecting

projecting an aura I think and so clothes I've always found to be deeply psychological and when I

to hide what what is ill fitting because my own relationship with clothing has always been a

“emotional it's not just get dressed in the morning and go out it's it's always about what am I”

trying to project. What do you consider to be one of the things that you design when you're working with Calvin Klein that most speaks to either how you see masculinity or how you see yourself or what you think a garment should do? Actually the thing I'm most proud of comes after Calvin Klein I actually was one of the heads of menswear design at banana republic for 15 years. Oh I didn't know that. Yeah in the early 2000s when everybody was wearing banana republic and

I got to tell you as a sort of a young working class boy from a socialist country it was such a

thrill to come off the subway in the morning and see like you know 12 pairs of your chinos before

you even got to the office and it's only realizing the power of clothing and democracy wherever everybody wears something would it would is part of a culture and and I really love that that used to give me such a thrill when I would when I would see my things everywhere and sometimes when I'm in an audience now and I sort of look out and I feel a little bit nervous I have a joke to

“myself I think how many people in this audience have worn the underwear that you designed and that”

sort of is a bit like my version of pituring people naked. You designed underwear. I designed everything as a knitwear X. What I want you're about the underwear. Yeah I designed yeah lots and lots of underwear and one of the very funny things is when you're fitting underwear on a model you know you've got to essentially make the garment fit as well as you can but you've also got to do without ever approaching or touching the model and so a lot of my sort of early design days was just pointing at

people's crutches and asking someone to take an inch out of it or you know to make it fit a little bit better around the high waist but yeah it's I've designed everything. You're a part of the art world now too because your husband is the curator of a gallery in New York so I'm sure you've gone to your share of openings you have a new story in the New Yorker about the opening of an art show it's a totally different world from the world you grew up in and you've said you've written

that the boy you were wouldn't recognize the man you've become what would be most unrecognizable.

“Oh I think this is why I write everything is because I feel like too very disconnected people.”

I don't think the boy that I was could imagine that this kind of life I'm living now is possible that I can spend all day with books and then have a husband who talks about art all night and just the real sort of privilege of that is something that you know younger me couldn't have even dreamt of and is in his wildest dreams. I'm often asked what would you say to your younger self and my answer to that is I wouldn't because he would sort of look at me as though I was an alien

that landed from another planet and so so much my writing is trying to connect those parts of my life because they feel like they belong to two different people. Douglas Stewart has been such a pleasure to talk with you thank you so much thank you Terry it's been an honor Douglas Stewart's new novel is called John of John. Since its publication in 1954 the William Golding novel Lord of the Flies has been one of the most popular books on many high school reading lists.

It's about a group of British school boys who survive a plane crash on a remote island and are forced to figure out how to sustain themselves without any adult supervision. Two movies have been made from the story in 1963 and 1990 but now Netflix and the BBC

present the first adaptation for television. Our TV critic David Biancully has this review.

All four episodes of this new Lord of the Flies many series come from the same creative team Mark Mundon directed all four hours and Jack Thorne wrote them for television. Most of the show was filmed on location in the dense rainforest of Malaysia and Mundon makes the most of it so the series looks great. More than that though this TV Lord of the Flies is such a faithful rendering of the book and relies so much upon the acting and credibility of

its fresh young cast that Jack Thorne deserves most of the credit for trusting the source material and his cast and writing such an unforgettable sometimes haunting adaptation. The most unforgettable TV drama I've seen the past few years was another four part Netflix BBC offering the Emmy-winning adolescence. That was co-written by Jack Thorne and Lord of the Flies can be seen as sort of a companion piece.

adolescence about a young boy accused of murdering a classmate was a stark emotional look at how social media can lead some young people towards hateful, even violent behavior.

but in this case it's the absence of social influences not the influences that result in savagery.

This new Lord of the Flies begins like the TV series lost which started with a close-up of a plane crash survivor waking up and making his way through the island jungle. In this case it's a rosy cheeked young boy played so unaffectedly by David McKenna, who wanders until he encounters another survivor played by Winston Soyers. The soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and others relies greatly on him jelly-vocal arrangements because one group of young boys who survived the crash make up the

“school choir. You're right. I've just been going too fast. I was wrong. What am I calling you?”

I don't care what you call me. As long as you don't call me what they used to call me. What was that? Promise you were black. Yes. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, Ralph, it's just a funny name though.

Look that for me. Just as in Golden's novel, the two boys basically representing

intellect and bravery respectively make their way to the beach. Piggy finds a conkshell in this British show they call it conch. And tells Ralph to blow in it. The sound he makes someone's other kids from the rainforest and Ralph organizes a meeting. Then making a dramatic

“entrance comes the boys choir from the same school still dressed in robes and singing. They walk”

single file behind their young arrogant leader Jack, who quickly challenges the other group. Ralph begins to show difference, but Piggy, even after being betrayed by Ralph, does not. Lock's Pratt plays Jack. We all will play as more than ever. And now I were trying to find some orders so we can work out exactly what we know. You're talking too much. Shut up, fatty. He's not a fatty. His real name is Piggy.

He's right though. We do need to make some key decisions. It seems to me we all have a cheat. More important. It's to find out exactly where we are. A cheat will decide that. I can be chief. I'm trapped a chorus to her and head boy. I can sing high sea shot.

“Almost in favor of me. I think we should have more than one consideration if a cheat is to be decided.”

I can't sing sea shot, but yes, I like to be chief. Of course he would. From that point on, the island descends into a sort of battlefield. Recently, the TV series Yellow Jackets offered a variation on that same theme. The variation, being that the plane crash survivors were teen girls, not young boys. As Lord of the Flies progresses, one group is responsible and civilized, building shelters and

gathering fruit and water, while the other hunts for wild game and dawn's face paint like native warriors in old movies they've seen. Jack Thorne is stunningly faithful to Golding's original text, except for allowing one ill-fated child to live a little longer than in the book.

Some sequences, like the first wild boar hunt, are filmed by Munden in a way that puts you right

there with the boys. And as the boys transform from frightened to feral, it's hard to shake and to forget. Adolescence was that way, too. Lord of the Flies is a bit easier to watch, but both of them are bold dramas, featuring amazingly good young actors that will grab your heart as well as your mind. David Biancoli is fresh airs TV critic. Coming up, Richard Gad, creator and star of the hit Netflix series Baby Rain Deer, talks about his latest project, the HBO series Half Man.

It's a story of two boys who become brothers when their mothers fall in love. This is fresh air weekend. Our co-host Tonya Mosley has our next interview. Here's Tonya. My guest today, Emmy Award-winning actor, writer, and comedian Richard Gad, writes complex stories about the parts of being human, most of us hide. His Netflix series Baby Rain Deer became an instant phenomenon in 2024. It's an unsettling story of a struggling comedian

early in his career. The series became one of the most watchnet flick shows ever, winning six

“Emmys and made Gad almost overnight, one of the most scrutinized writers in television.”

Well, now he's back with Half Man, a six-part HBO Limited series set in 1980 Scotland. It's about two boys who become brothers after their mothers fall in love. One is volatile, just out of juvenile detention. The other is quiet, sensitive and afraid. Over 30 years, the show traces what happens to them and to each other. Critics have already been calling Half Man a show about toxic masculinity. And Gad has pushed back on that. He says it's more about

repression and what happens to boys who learn early that the parts of themselves they need most are the parts they often feel forced to bury. Richard Gad, welcome to fresh air. Thank you. That was a lovely introduction. I appreciate that. Well, you know, I am sure that people are going to want to slot this series next to kind of this Manisfier conversation. And you have pushed back on that pretty firmly. And I just want to know more about that. What

about really the themes that you're trying to explore? Well, it's interesting because the Manisfier kind of was a word that I came across about three months ago. And I actually wrote the script back in 2019. I wrote a kind of pilot script, kind of exploring. I guess Man mail violence. But I didn't

really set out with any social political aim. I never really do it my work. I always just try and

capture something that I believe to be hopefully interesting and human all at once. And so it's about expression. It's about vulnerability. It's about the difficulty of mail relationships and the dangers of repression. Yeah, you know, the two characters, Nile and Rubin. To me, I felt like they both kind of represent two sides of how to be a man. They're like on two sides of the

“spectrum. Is that how you saw them? And what did you need to imagine and to existence to write them?”

Well, I thought the most interesting thing is you do take two archetypes of, I don't like these words because these words are subjective. But if you take an alpha mail and a beta mail even though I think everyone's idea of an alpha and a beta is very different, you know, a person to person. If you take the stereotypical alpha and beta and you put them in a two-shot opposite each other, you know, one's kind of mussely and, you know, terrifying looking in the other kind of

well dressed up and timid and you start to kind of deconstruct that from there. I thought that was an interesting starting point. But I like to think as the show progresses, the boxes in which we meet them in become a bit more blurred and a bit more complicated. I actually want to play a clip that gives us a deeper lens into the two of them. So in this scene that I'm going to play, young Nile was played by Mitchell Robertson and young Rubin who was played by Stuart Campbell.

They are together in the room that they share together and by this point, they have earned each other's trust. Rubin has beat up Nile's bully. Nile has helped Rubin pass an exam. He needs to say in school and he's also Rubin has also brought a girl over to help Nile lose his virginity. And in this scene, they're lying on the bedroom floor talking about their mothers who are a couple and then Rubin

“hands Nile a present, a boxing glove. Let's listen. Can I see something?”

I don't want to, you know. Yeah, great sir. Does it bother you or something? No, why not really? As long as they're happy, I guess. I don't really don't see more than happy. There's a lot of you don't know about. Yeah, got you some. I'm gonna train you. Just in case I'm honest to me, I need to know you'll look after yourself.

Why do you care? We're family now.

It's the most important thing.

My brother, some another lover. Richard, that gift, a single boxing glove. Rubin is genuinely trying to give Nile something he

boxing glove. Tell me about that scene. What were you trying to do in that moment?

“Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head there with this kind of offering. I think”

Rubin reacts to the world and violence. It's all the understands. It's his safety net against the kind of terrorist of life. I think he knows, fine, well, due to his nature,

that there might be a world where he's not always there. So he wants the tough and Nile up and

make sure he's there. Family means everything to Rubin. As the story unfolds, we'll understand why. Family means everything to him. They're in this kind of very hybrid household. This weirdly dysfunctional kind of way of coming together. He wants now to not only learn to defend from himself, because I think at this point, he's genuinely really fond of Nile and love Simmons, he's a misfamily, but he also wants there to be a mask of the presence within the

family household when he goes. And so I think in a weird way, it is Rubin's love language, given him a pair of boxing gloves. Can you describe the characters of Nile's and Rubin and how

their relationship progresses? Nile and Rubin, they form a kind of really close bond like a really

layered and complicated bond. They just can't shake. And no matter what happens in the life, no matter all the good and bad experiences, they go through, they see one able to shake having

“each other in their lives. I think as they move through lives and as they change and the characters”

go through all kinds of different changes for other series. One thing that they cannot escape is that feeling they had for each other when they were in their youth, which is this very confused, very complicated love that they seem incapable of expressing. And the series kind of mutates through that and takes you through that feeling of cant live with someone cant live without them, that forms the very basis of their relationship. Okay Richard, I want to go back to 10 years

ago on a stage in Scotland, your one-man show called monkey sea monkey do. And in the show, you talk candidly about a very devastating thing that happened to you that you were raped. And in this clip, I'm going to play, you describe one of the three mistakes you made after this this thing happened to you. And I just want to note that it's kind of a bit of comedy and a bit of seriousness all in one, let's listen. Mistake number one, wearing a shorts and a t-shirt,

I mean, I was practically asking for it. Am I right lady? Good joke, Richard. Mistake number one. Mistake number one. Time means to do this idea that was no longer a man anymore. This idea that I'd been feminized. It's funny, all the things that bothered me, it trust me, there was a lot that bothered me, there was a lot that bothered me, the one thing that bothered me most and it seems ridiculous

in retrospect, the one thing that bothered me the most, the one thing that bothered my monkey but most, this idea that I was no longer a man, this idea that I'd been feminized. And six years on, what is masculinity? What does that really mean? It's just a word, it's just a box for people to put things in, it doesn't exist. And I let it bother me for six years and if masculinity does exist, the masculinity is the problem with everything, is the problem with my side, in terms of not speaking

out, but is the problem with the other side as well in terms of doing something like this in the first place,

like a power and a man's head driving into a primal sexual monkey dominance. "Masculinity Grace War was feminine, it doesn't create wars, what women do we not create wars invaded other countries?" Well, that's your an Argentina for me. Richard, first off, I watched that clip with my brother and my cousins and they were all really moved about it and it just started a conversation. And what I wanted to talk with you about is this

idea of being a victim of sexual violence, somehow disqualifying you from manhood. I think it's a common experience, I think it's a common experience to feel shame and do repress and not want to tell. And so I think it's pretty remarkable that not only did you speak about it, you spoke about it on stage, you wrote a one-man show, wrapped around it.

“I want to know that moment, if you sang, the only way out of this for me is to talk about it,”

because so many men and people in general will go to their grave with it because they don't want that on them, they don't want to be associated with maybe the worst thing that has happened to them.

I couldn't keep it in anymore. I was done thinking about it. I think I believed maybe naively that I could think my way out of it, that I could sort of land on a thought or a sense of clarity on my own, but I would just be synaptically firing the kind of doubts and thoughts in around my head to the point where I actually got greater and greater and it just got to point where I just felt like I was done and I think I took my mum first, maybe one of my friends and

it was like always painful. I was remember like the adrenaline was kind of unbelievable.

But then you would always feel like a way it'd been lifted. And then I suppose meanwhile I was going up to the Edinburgh Fringe and all of this stuff and I was putting on wigs and wearing daft teeth and doing anti jokes and doing these kind of really mad cap jokes. There were wacky humor and but meanwhile I was sort of dying inside and it was just this juxtaposition. You almost kind of right to yours is baby rain is all about the kind of sad clam thing but it was like that

to the extreme. I was sort of you know I was going through all that trying to come to terms with all that while simultaneously going on stage and trying to make people laugh in the most kind of wacky way. I watch baby reindeer three times. I really really I was really moved by it and there's something very specific. I was moved by and I want to play a clip to kind of get to it. So in this clip

it's from the first episode of Baby Rain Deer and this is the very first time Donnie which is a

fictionalized version of yourself played by you meets Martha the woman who will go on to stalk you for years and she walks into the pub where you work. She's overweight. She looks upset and your character tries to be kind to her. You give her a cup of tea on the house. Let's listen. I felt sorry for her. That's the first feeling I felt. It's a patronizing arrogant feeling feeling sorry for someone who only just laid eyes on but I did. I felt sorry for her.

Five o'clock please mate. Thanks. Can I get you something? No thanks. Are you sure?

“Cup of tea? No thanks. You have to buy something. Can you afford something?”

I may have no cup of tea. No. I have no. How about give your cup of tea on the house? That's what do you do? I'm a lawyer. How'd you get into that then? Well, training criminal law moved to England. We trained opened up my own practice one several awards. Now I'll lead an advisor to the government. You won't allow for. Mucks to the things flattened him the cup over the kind of private garden one in Bexie to

in bell-sized park. God doesn't like a bragher but when you go to for the biggest political minds in the game you've earned a bragher too. No no I'm not going to say who. So don't even go there. Fine. David Cameron Nickleg Alex Hammond, but you didn't hear that for me.

“Well you must have amazing dinner parties. She had this incredible laugh. This guitty slightly”

disconcerting laugh. Her name was Martha. But all I could think was before this is true. Then why can't you afford a cup of tea? That's a clip from the first episode of the Netflix series baby reindeer created by my guest today, Richard Gadd. You know, Richard, one of the things that makes baby reindeer different from almost any other story about stocking that I have ever seen is that you don't let yourself off the hook as the victim of being stalked. So you

write Donnie as someone who on some level was kind of flattered by this lady by being seen even by someone you knew was unwell. And I felt like that seems to be a very uncomfortable thing to admit publicly. So why was it important to you that you show that that you hold both things at once that you were a victim and that you were also someone who's liked being wanted? Well I just thought

there was like a fundamental human truth to it. Like I always try and dig into like the complicated

stuff. Like I think I think in a lot of times like on TV it's too obvious who the good guy and

“the bad person is you know and it's just like life is not like that I think and I think that”

we're all made up of good qualities and bad qualities and mistakes and successes and all these kinds of things and I just dug into it and it kind of goes all the way back to the stage show because I

it and and the story went you know I offered this person a cup of tea and look at what happened

my one act of kindness my god and I remember just feeling like it wasn't coming to the forward

“like it wasn't working and I think it wasn't working because I was avoiding the truth of the truth”

is that you know I acted on and I indulged in it and I indulged in it because I was you know going

through a lot and I would take any potential wherever I got it just because I anything that would

take me out the mirror of what I was feeling and experiencing and that to me was the heart of baby reindeer and that was what I was avoiding when I was trying to workshop the live show into something that was worthwhile watching because I I realized that I wasn't really right in the truth of

what happened in truth is the fundamental key to writing something you know authentic and interesting

but baby reindeer you know it was tough because it was like you know not many people would do that especially in this day in age or kind of moral enlightenment and oh hey look at all the mistakes I made it like it felt very daring and it felt very like vulnerable and exposing but really in a

“lot of ways I think I think they're in light that lay the success of baby reindeer because I think”

I think people recognize something in that and in the flawed idea of human consistency like I think a lot of people struggle like one of the donkeys like big struggles was his inability to put up boundaries like his inability to say no or inability to hurt someone's feelings I think a lot of people relate to I think a lot of people struggle to be honest there's not that they're good liars is that they struggle to not circumvent the pain of having honest conversations

“and I think that's what donnie the way I think the donnie character resonated so much”

and I think people could just appreciate that honesty you know like it was a radically honest show and I think because of that it it was a success or Richard Gad it has been a pleasure to talk with you and thank you so much no thank you everything tried that really appreciate the great questions thank you Richard Gad is an Emmy-winning actor writer and comedian his new HBO limited series is called Half-Man he spoke with our co-host Tanya Mosley

Fresh air weekend is produced by Theresa Madden fresh air is executive producer is Sam Burger our technical director and engineer is Archie Bentham our co-host is Tanya Mosley I'm Terry Gross