9 min readThe following story contains spoilers for the entire season of Half Man.
IT MAY SEEM as though Half Man, the latest drama from writer and actor Richard Gadd, was made in direct response to the perilous state masculinity finds itself in today. But in truth, Gadd had written a draft of its first episode years ago, back in 2019, before he’d even begun adapting the stage show of Baby Reindeer into the hit Netflix series it would later become in 2024. For years, Half Man had been itching the back of Gadd’s brain, and he must have sensed a certain kind of urgency because he returned to the project in December of 2023, bright and early the next morning right after finishing the sound mix for Baby Reindeer’s final episode.
The final product is a gripping, and perhaps even more emotionally brutal, follow-up to the unflinching Baby Reindeer. The show, which just aired its finale last night, follows two characters—Niall (Jamie Bell) and Ruben (Gadd)—who grew up as brothers, and whose powder keg of a relationship becomes more volatile over the course of decades. Both Niall and Ruben struggle to live up to the standards and pressures of masculinity that both society has imposed on them and that they’ve imposed on themselves. Niall grapples with his sexuality and long-simmering feelings of inferiority while Ruben tries to wrestle his own insecurities into submission by building himself up into an imposing alpha male. Their lives diverge and converge until they finally collide one last, bloody time in the show’s final moments.
Timely as the show’s themes are, they’re deeply personal too. Gadd has been open about dealing with the trauma of being sexually abused, of trying to make sense of his own sexuality in adulthood, and of the ways he uses art as a means of self-exploration. In the wake of the show’s dramatic conclusion, we spoke to Gadd about what he learned about himself in making the series, what he learned about his body when he bulked up to play Ruben, and why the show could only end the way it did.
MEN’S HEALTH: Half Man is a particularly timely series, but it’s been percolating far longer than audiences might assume. How did it all start?
RICHARD GADD: I wrote episode 1 before I started the Baby Reindeer TV show. I was doing the Baby Reindeer live show, and there was just a lot of conversation about male violence, male behavior, and an idea just sparked. I started thinking, you take two broken men in the present and contextualize how they got to that point. Let's go back to their childhood, let's show the things they learn as kids, the repression, the prejudices, the violence, and see how that shaped their lives over the course of a few decades.
That was the idea. And I just wanted to provide an interesting backdrop to their story. Niall and Ruben are part of an ever-changing city and ever-changing society, and you see the different attitudes in the background as they move through their lives. Niall is bullied in school and put upon because people see him a certain way, and then later on, people are telling him he shouldn't feel that way anymore because of the way things have progressed. But what I was interested in exploring is the feeling of being left behind, that the world is progressing around you. I wanted to write the show for the people who feel left behind, or feel adrift, or feel outside of things.
MH: We see both Niall and Ruben often take two steps forward and one step back when it comes to their personal evolution. Often, they circle a self-revelation but can’t quite get a grasp on it.
RG: I think it's just true to life. In a lot of TV shows and films, there is a very neat character arc. They go on a journey, and then they change, everything's fine, and it's all wrapped up in a neat little bow at the end. But that's not life to me. In life, even if we have realizations along the way, they don’t necessarily lead to clarity. I think one of the mistakes television and film make is this idea of a happy ending. Most human beings struggle through life, and they experience happiness, and they experience moments of calm, and they experience, at least once in their life, extreme challenge. I think that my shows try to capture the fluctuating state of life.
MH: At one point, Niall refers to his sexuality offhandedly as “whatever I am.” In that moment, I felt like he got so close to a breakthrough—that it’s okay if he doesn’t put a label on it, that he can just be whoever he is—but he couldn’t quite make it. Do you think that a person can comfortably just exist in a state of confusion if you accept it?
RG: It's a very interesting question. I mean, I exist in a state of confusion, and I do feel a certain acceptance that I might not find clarity over certain parts of my life and myself—but I’m still living with confusion nonetheless. You can acknowledge a pain, and it can lessen the pain, but it doesn't get rid of the pain. We live in a very prescriptive culture in the U.K., and I'm assuming it's kind of similar to the U.S. Everyone has to fit into a box. Even if we just take sexuality as an example for now—there are multiple different categories, but in the broad, mainstream sense, you've got straight, gay, and bisexual. Some people don't fit into that. Some people I know, they change with the tide. Some people I know feel comfortable with one [category], and then feel restless for another. And then other people don't feel like they want any at all. I think that what a lot of people do when they go through an identity crisis or sexuality crisis is they try to force themselves into a box. The human condition chases external solutions for interior problems, and any exterior answer to an interior problem will never suffice.
MH: It’s interesting that people in his life keep telling him that times have changed and there isn’t so much shame tied up around sexuality. And yet, he insists on holding onto his shame.
RG: Niall is so scared of life, he's so scared of judgment that even he goes through life with all these signs around him saying that won't actually be that bad [to openly accept his sexuality], he still finds reasons to avoid the truth. The human capacity to repress itself has always just interested me.
MH: You've talked about using art to explore the hole you feel in your soul, the void we all have within ourselves to a certain extent. As you create more art, do you find that it fills the void, or does it actually expand the void because you're discovering even more questions to explore?
RG: I think it's an ongoing process. I think it both provides answers and throws up more questions. It's kind of addictive in that respect. When you’re writing, there are times when you feel like you've landed on a moment of clarity, either about yourself or about the human condition, but then it opens up the artistic desire to keep going and keep exploring new territory. It’s a complicated process where I can feel bouts of extreme euphoria but also extreme stress and pressure and isolation. I work all the time. I work day and night, weekends, everything. And there are times when I think, Okay, this is too much. I'm going to force myself to have an evening off. Then within two hours, I’m back to it.
MH: That sounds like a search for fulfillment.
RG: Absolutely. But I think fulfillment can straddle quite a close line with workaholism as well. It's funny, sometimes when I'm not creating, I feel like there's a part of me that's missing. And sometimes when I am creating, I feel like I’m neglecting another part of my life. It's this perpetual seesaw cycle, but I do love it.
MH: Right now, we’re all talking about the state of masculinity—whether it’s the pernicious effects of the so-called manosphere, the looksmaxxing movement gripping young men, the male loneliness epidemic, or any other number of issues facing men and boys. Half Man feels at once deeply personal and also incredibly timely.
RG: I suppose there's a serendipity to it. I first heard the word “manosphere” about two months ago. The beginnings of the show originated back in 2019, and it was never really meant to answer any particular social or political questions. I just thought that there's something going on here in the world of men. So let's try to dig deep inside the humanity of the situation, rather than the politics of it all. And it just so happened to come out at a time when the conversation is at a fever pitch.
MH: You gained 90 pounds to play Ruben, right?
RG: At my heaviest on Half Man, I was 109.8 kilograms [242 pounds]. On Baby Reindeer, I was 68.8 [151.7].
MH: How did you feel in your body during that process?
RG: It's funny because I started off dirty bulking, just getting weight on my body. I remember at the start thinking, Wow, so much of this is actually just eating. The working out can be an hour or two a day, but the eating takes all day, you know? And there's a real just science to it, which I didn't realize because I’d never really worked out so consistently before.
MH: Why was it important to you that Ruben present in this specific physical way?
RG: When I first sat down with the personal trainer and the nutritionist, one thing I said was that Ruben’s body had to look real—I never wanted him to have a Hollywood six-pack. I wanted him to look like a bruiser, like he didn't go to the gym but that whatever experiences he had in his life led him to the point where he was just burly, heavy within himself.
MH: During Ruben and Niall’s final showdown at the wedding, Ruben takes his shirt off. Meanwhile, Niall is still in his three-piece wedding suit. There's a visual dichotomy there. What was the motivation behind that choice?
RG: I suppose the motivation behind that is pure emasculation, isn't it? His top is off because he wants to display his masculinity and dominance.
MH: Speaking of masculinity and dominance, you explore both those themes in ways that aren’t just tied to the physical or the violent. Ruben’s sense of self becomes very much tied up in being a breadwinner. It’s important to him that he is the one providing for his family. He also quietly uses money as a form of dominance by secretly bailing out Niall whenever he goes to his mother for financial help. Then there’s the part of Ruben’s sense of self that’s tied up in being virile and becoming a father. Once you started digging into all the ways the pressure of masculinity rears its head, were you surprised by how all-consuming it was?
RG: Yeah, absolutely. I just didn't want the show to be just about violence. The way the show was written, leaping decades forward in time, I wanted to keep the exploration of masculinity nuanced. Men face different pressures at different stages of their lives. The pressure they feel as kids may be to be the strongest kid in the playground, which is very different to the pressure they might feel as adults, to be the breadwinner and main income-earner. With Reuben and Niall, I wanted to tap into that. If somebody's grown up and learned to live by the code of masculinity, then there’s a life that they envision for themselves later on, which is that they’re king of their own household. And if something gets in the way of that, then their whole world crumbles.
MH: It’s interesting how somebody so imposing can be so fragile.
RG: Yes, yes, exactly. I think at the heart of a lot of these men who do put a lot of stock in their body and a lot of stock in various markers of masculinity, there’s probably a fragility and a vulnerability.
MH: The ending of the show, particularly its final moments, are brutal. It’s really stayed with me.
RG: What part of it is staying with you?
MH: The bluntness of their both dying with very little denouement, I suppose. The finality of it.
RG: They couldn’t live together. They had to die, in a way, together.
MH: There is a horrifying kind of love between these two men. Is that something you wanted to explore as well—the way that men struggle to show love?
RG: Absolutely. To me, it's a show about love, the difficulty of communicating love to someone else, and the difficulty of communicating love for yourself. Perhaps the whole thing would have been avoided had they just been able to love one another.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nojan Aminosharei is the Entertainment Director of Men’s Health and the Special Projects Editor of Harper’s Bazaar. He was previously the Entertainment Director of Hearst Digital Media, and before that a Senior Editor at GQ. Raised in Vancouver, Canada, Nojan graduated from NYU with a master’s degree in magazine journalism. The late Elaine Stritch once told him, “What the fuck kind of name is Nojan? I’m 89 years old, I don’t have time for that shit.”
