Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd’s Netflix series about a budding comedian’s experience with a stalker, is — as we wrote in our review on Mashable — one of the most upsetting and brilliant shows of the year. And the fact it’s based on Gadd’s own experiences makes it all the more disturbing.
As the show has quickly grown in popularity, though, the armchair detectives have come out in force. Despite real names being changed in the show, people on TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) have been trying to work out the real identities behind the characters.
On Tuesday, Gadd took to Instagram to tell people to stop.
“People I love, have worked with, and admire (including Sean Foley) are unfairly getting caught up in speculation,” wrote Gadd. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”
Sean Foley, a theatre director who previously worked with Gadd on Urban Myths and who has been the subject of some of this online speculation, shared Gadd’s post on X. He also shared a separate post saying that he’d been in touch with police.
“Police have been informed and are investigating all defamatory abusive and threatening posts against me,” reads Foley’s tweet.
Although Baby Reindeer is based on Gadd’s life, he previously told The Guardian that some events have been “tweaked slightly to create dramatic climaxes”. But the two most disturbing elements of the show — the stalking, and the sexual abuse Gadd suffers at the hands of an older man in the entertainment business — are real.
“It’s very emotionally true, obviously: I was severely stalked and severely abused,” Gadd said. “But we wanted it to exist in the sphere of art, as well as protect the people it’s based on.”
How to watch: Baby Reindeer is now streaming on Netflix.