Richard Gadd speaks about how similar Baby Reindeer’s Martha actually is to his real stalker

If you’ve not watched Baby Reindeer yet then you’ve definitely heard of it and been intrigued by its unusual name. Aside from its dark humour, brilliant acting and generally all round captivating production, what makes the show even more interesting is that it’s actually based on real life. The whole show is based on actual events that happened in the life of Richard Gadd who not only wrote the show but also stars in it as the main character, Donny.

But did the sequence of events in the show happen exactly as they take place and is Martha’s character true to the actual stalker she is based on? Well according to Richard, it seems a lot of Martha’s story and the details of her past that Donny finds out from a quick Google search are actually fabricated for the show.

A huge part of the plot centres around the countless emails Martha sends Donny and Richard has already revealed that this was all indeed true to real life with his actual stalker sending him 41,071 emails, 46 Facebook messages, 744 tweets, 106 pages of letters and 350 hours of voicemails.

via Netflix

Aside from this however, Richard confirmed in an interview with GQ that he went to “great lengths to disguise” his actual stalker and it’s not a “fact-by-fact” relay of who she was or what she did.

He said: “I honestly couldn’t speak as to whether she would watch it. Her reactions to things varied so much that I almost couldn’t predict how she’d react to anything. She was quite an idiosyncratic person.

“We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognise herself. What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.”

The show ends with Martha being sentenced for her stalking and harassment of Donny and his parents but whether his actual stalker faced any punishment is currently unclear. Aside from the crumbs Baby Reindeer leaves us with, we’ll probably never know where the real Martha is now.

Baby Reindeer is available on Netflix now. For more like this and all the latest Netflix news, drops, quizzes and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

Related articles recommended by this author:

• So, here’s the real reason why Martha calls Donny Baby Reindeer

• Okay, we finally know whether Martha’s emails in Baby Reindeer were actually real

• Inside Baby Reindeer star Richard Gadd’s life: The real man who the show is also based on

Featured image via Netflix.