From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend.
Today, writer Douglas Stewart, like the main character in his Booker Prize winning novel called Shuggy Bane.
Stewart grew up in Glasgow, working class queer and with a mother addicted to alcohol.
His first career was designing for Calvin Klein and Banana Republic, from outerwear to underwear.
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?
Stewart has a new novel.
Later, Richard Gad, creator and star of Baby Reindeers.
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 Bianculli 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 clothes he designed.
Douglas Stewart's first novel, Shuggy Bane, won the Booker 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 Bain 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 Maureen Corrigan's review, she wrote it's hard to imagine a more disquieting and powerful work of fiction will be published anytime soon about the perils of being different.
Douglas Stewart has a new novel called John of John that explores themes of faith, obligation and how isolating secrets can be.
It's set on a fictional island in Scotland's Hebrides in a very old-fashioned conservative community of weavers.
There are two Johns in the story, a father and his son.
The son is known as Cal.
Cal has just graduated textile school in Glasgow and reluctantly returns 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.
But as we learn 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 Hebrides 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 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, well, they missed their moment was what was said.
And I came to learn that 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 she said oh no no no that's, 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.
And that was really the moment that the novel came to life.
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's a weaver, who's 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 Fallaby 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, you know, gay is a social identity.
It is about a community and an outlook in the world.
It'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.
Whereas Cal 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.
But 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 working class, very 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 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 is 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 shipbuilding, 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 en masse and said, what is wrong with you?
Why are you like that?
And so I was just deemed as being too effeminate 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 made me feel very lonely in the only place I think I ever felt like I belonged, which has been a sort of through line in all of my work.
So you went to art school.
You had shown some artistic talent, but you needed work.
So your 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?
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.
You know, I'm often asked as a writer, what was your favourite 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 at the boys I grew up around, many of them also weren't reading either.
But you know, children also need a huge amount of peace in their lives in order to read, you know both peace inside themselves and peace at home and also at school, to be honest.
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 of her.
And when I left for school in 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.
It 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 English, how to digest books and how to take in all their meaning.
And I tell you this because I suddenly realized at 16, 17, 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 that grew up in a neighborhood of great deprivation.
And I think my teachers, rather than turning me away from English, turned 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 three of you talking about literature.
I could see how you could fall in love with books that way.
But how did that lead to textiles?
Well, you know, it was wonderful to be around people who had this passion for a thing and they invested that passion in you.
But they saw that I couldn't go on to compete and study English literature at university level.
They.
You know I would have to be competing with children that would ultimately go to Oxford and Cambridge.
And, you know, they had spent their whole lives, their whole all their 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 you could find employment on the far side of.
And so I went to a very traditional textile school and I was a weaver for a year.
They let you sample all kinds of textiles.
And I was 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, it's a very industrial course.
You do all your knitting on these huge screaming knitting machines that are 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 in the Hebrides of Scotland.
And at the time and this is happening to so many people now the thing that he studied in college has just become basically out of date.
The textile 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 where he went to school.
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 Hebrides 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 Hebrides 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 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 Cal returns from art school, as you say, and his father has always been a weaver.
And so he's almost gone to textile college, couldn't find work and finds himself back working for his father anyway.
If you're just joining us, we're listening to my conversation with Booker Prize winning writer Douglas Stewart.
His new novel is called John of John.
We'll hear more after a break.
I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
You grew 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 sex.
Half-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.
I was sort of thrust into a caregiving role about the age of four when I realized that that my mother wouldn't always be able to take care of me and I had to look after her.
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 it 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 central part of my childhood.
And I mean, this is the point where I should say my mother was a wonderful woman and she was a wonderful mother.
She was incredibly kind, incredibly generous.
And I often say that addiction killed my mother, but I don't think as I age that that is true.
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 fall in love with and you should have children and you will build a life together.
She eventually married my father and died.
When the sort of the country went into 25 percent unemployment under Margaret 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 lived in the fashion – you worked in the fashion world for about 10 years.
20 years, sorry.
20 years.
Oh, longer than I thought.
So I think it was when you were in textile school that 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, they're very outre.
You know, they use lots of colour and pattern and feathers.
And if they can sequin a thing, they sequin it.
And I had created this collection that was incredibly sombre, 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 assume 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 character seeing someone at university or in college who is wearing very shabby clothes, things they've bought in a secondhand store, or old tweeds or old wax jackets.
And as a working class kid...
My character says you know, it's a dream altogether 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 an aura, I think.
And so clothes I've always found to be deeply psychological.
And when I start writing a character, I think about what don't they like about themselves?
What are they trying to hide?
What what is ill fitting?
Because my own relationship with clothing has always been 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 designed when you were 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 suddenly realizing the power of clothing and democracy, where everybody wears something with it.
What is part of a culture?
And I really loved that.
That used to give me such a thrill 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 picturing people naked.
You designed underwear?
I designed everything.
As a knitwear expert… Wait, I want to hear 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 it without ever approaching or touching the model.
And so a lot of my sort of early design days was just pointing at people's crotches 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 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 two 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 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 had landed from another planet.
And so so much of my writing is trying to connect those parts of my life because they feel like they belong to two different people.
Douglas Stewart, it's 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 schoolboys 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 Bianculli has this review.
All four episodes of this new Lord of the Flies miniseries come from the same creative team.
Mark Munden 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 Munden 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 in 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.
In Lord of the Flies there's just as disturbing a descent into violence and murder, 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 Sawyer's.
The soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and others relies greatly on angelic 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'm sorry.
What do I call 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 won't laugh?
Yes.
Piggy.
Piggy?
Piggy.
Ralph.
This is a funny name, though.
Not that funny.
Just as in Golding's novel, the two boys, basically representing intellect and bravery respectively, make their way to the beach.
Piggy finds a conch shell.
In this British show, they call it conch. and tells Ralph to blow in it.
The sound he makes summons 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 deference, but Piggy, even after being betrayed by Ralph, does not.
Lox Pratt plays Jack.
Were you all on the plane?
There's more than I remember.
Yes, we were.
And now we're trying to find some order 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's Piggy.
He's right, though.
We do need to make some key decisions.
It seems to me we ought to have a chief.
More important is to find out exactly where we are.
A chief will decide that.
I can be chief.
I'm chapter chorister and head boy.
I can sing high C sharp.
All that's in favour of me is, I think we should have more than one consideration if a chief is to be decided.
I can't sing C sharp, but yes, I'd 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 dons 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 Bianculli is Fresh Air's TV critic.
Coming up.
Richard Gadd, creator and star of the hit Netflix series Baby Reindeer, talks about his latest project, the HBO series Half-Man.
It's the story of two boys who become brothers when their mothers fall in love.
This is Fresh Air Weekend.
Our co-host Tanya Mosley has our next interview.
Here's Tanya.
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 Reindeer became an instant phenomenon in 2024.
It's an unsettling story of a struggling comedian who is being stalked by a woman while grappling with the sexual abuse he endured from an older man early in his career.
The series became one of the most watched Netflix 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 1980s 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 Gadd, 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 manosphere 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 manosphere 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, men, male violence.
But I didn't really set out with any social political aim.
I never really do 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 male relationships and the dangers of repression.
Yeah, you know the two characters, Niall and Ruben.
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 into 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 male and a beta male even though I think everyone's idea of an alpha and a beta is very different you know 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 muscly and you know terrifying looking and the other is 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 Niall, who was played by Mitchell Robertson, and young Ruben, 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.
Ruben has beat up Niles as bully.
Nile has helped Ruben pass an exam he needs to say in school.
And Ruben has also brought a girl over to help Niall lose his virginity.
And in this scene, they're lying on the bedroom floor talking about their mothers, who are a couple.
And then Ruben hands Niall a present, a boxing glove.
Let's listen.
Can I ask you something?
Do you want to?
Are our moms, you know?
Yeah.
Afraid so.
Does it bother you or something?
No.
Well, not really.
As long as they're happy, I guess.
Although they don't seem all that happy.
There's a lot you don't know about.
Here.
Got you something.
I'm going to train you.
Just in case something happens 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 from another lover.
Richard, that gift, a single boxing glove.
Ruben is genuinely trying to give Niall something he thinks will help him.
But what he is offering is kind of the only language he has, which is violence, a 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 Ruben reacts to the world and violence is all he understands, is his safety net against the kind of terrors of life.
And I think he knows fine well due to his nature that there might be a world where he's not always there.
And so he wants to toughen Niall up and, you know, make sure he's there.
I mean family means everything to Ruben.
You know, as the story unfolds we'll understand why, but um family means everything to him.
So, you know he, they're in this kind of very hybrid household, this kind of weirdly dysfunctional kind of way of coming together, and he, he wants now to not only learn to fend for himself because i think at this point he's genuinely really fond of now and loves him and sees him as family but he, he also wants there to be a masculine presence within the family household when he go goes, and so i think In a weird way it is Ruben's love language, giving him a pair of boxing gloves.
Can you describe the characters of Niles and Ruben and how their relationship progresses?
Niles and Ruben.
They form a kind of really close bond, like a really personal, you know, layered and complicated bond.
They just can't shake.
And no matter what happens in their life, no matter all the good and bad experiences they go through, they seem unable 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 throughout the 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 confusing, very complicated love that they seem incapable of expressing.
And the series kind of mutates through that and takes you through that feeling of can't live with someone, can't 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 See, 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 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 shorts and a t-shirt.
I mean, I was practically asking for it.
Am I right, ladies?
I'm joking.
I'm joking.
Mistake number one.
Mistake number one.
Tied me incidentally to this idea that I was no longer a man anymore.
This idea that I'd been feminized.
It's funny.
Out of all the things that bothered me, and trust me, there was a lot that bothered me.
There was a lot that bothered me.
The one thing that bothered me most and this seems ridiculous in retrospect the one thing that bothered me the most, the one thing that bothered my monkey the 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.
Am I allowed to bother me for six years?
And if masculinity does exist, then masculinity is the problem with everything.
It's the problem with my side in terms of not speaking out, but it's the problem with the other side as well in terms of doing something like this in the first place.
A lack of power in a man's head, driving him towards primal sexual monkey dominance.
Masculinity creates wars.
Femininity doesn't create wars.
What women do we know who created wars, invaded other countries?
Well, Thatcher in Argentina.
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 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 of you saying, 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.
Yeah, it was a case of kind of do or die almost.
I know that sounds extreme, but it's the truth.
Yeah, i couldn't keep it in anymore.
Uh yeah, i had, i was done thinking about it.
I 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 it on my own.
But i would just be synaptically firing the the kind of doubts and thoughts and around my head to the point where they actually got greater and greater and greater and it just got to the point where I just felt like I was done.
And I, I think I told my mom first, maybe one of my friends and it was like always painful.
I always remember like the adrenaline was kind of unbelievable.
Um, but then you would always feel like a weight had been lifted, you know?
Uh and um, 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 madcap jokes that were wacky humour.
But meanwhile, I was dying inside and it was just this juxtaposition.
You almost can't write it yourself.
This is what Baby Reindeer is all about, the kind of side clam thing.
But it was like that to the extreme.
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've watched 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 reindeer.
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, um, 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 you've only just laid eyes on.
But I did.
I felt sorry for her.
Fiver, please, Matt.
Thanks.
Can I get you something?
No, thanks.
Are you sure?
A cup of tea?
No, thanks.
You have to buy something.
Can't afford something.
Right, not even a cup of tea?
No.
Right, well, how about I give you a cup of tea on the house?
So what do you do?
I'm a lawyer.
How'd you get into that, then?
Well, trained in criminal law.
Moved to England retrained, opened up my own practice, won several awards, now a leading advisor to the government.
You own a law firm?
Amongst other things a flat in Pimlico overlooking a private garden, one in Bixley Heath, two in Belsize Park.
God doesn't like a bragger, but when you're the go-to for the biggest political minds in the game, you've earned a bragger too.
No, no, I'm not going to say who, so don't even go there.
Fine, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Alex Hammond, but you didn't hear that from me.
Wow, you must have amazing dinner parties.
She had this incredible laugh, this giddy, slightly disconcerting laugh.
Her name was martha, but all i could think was, if all of 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 Gad.
You know Richard, one of the things that makes Baby Reindeer different from almost any other story about stalking 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.
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 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 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 remember, you know, when I wrote the stage show which later became the TV show, I would trial it.
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 fore, like it wasn't working, and i think it wasn't working because i was avoiding the truth.
The truth is that, you know, i egged it on and i indulged in it, and i indulged in it because i was i was, you know, going through a lot and and i would take any attention wherever i got it, just because Anything that would take me out of the mire 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 worth watching.
Because I realized that I wasn't really writing the truth of what happened.
And 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 and age of kind of moral enlightenment.
And, oh, hey, look at all the mistakes I made.
Like it felt very daring and it felt very like vulnerable and exposing.
But really in a lot of ways I think therein lay the success of Baby Ranger, because I think people recognize something in that and in the flawed idea of human consistency.
I think a lot of people struggle.
One of Donnie's big struggles was his inability to put up boundaries, 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.
It's not that they're good liars.
It's that they struggle to not circumvent the pain of having honest conversations.
And I think that's why I think the Donny character resonated so much.
And I think people could just appreciate that honesty.
It was a radically honest show, and I think because of that, it was a success.
Well, Richard Gadd, it has been a pleasure to talk with you, and thank you so much.
No, thank you.
I really enjoyed that.
I really appreciate the great questions.
Thank you.
Richard Gadd 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 Teresa Madden.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
Our co-host is Tanya Mosley.
I'm Terry Gross.
