Richard Gadd is looking at the ‘dangers of repression’
Fresh Air
NPR
4.3 • 36.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
Also, book critic Maureen Corrigan recommends three playful novels: ‘Yesteryear,’ ‘American Fantasy,’ and ‘Enormous Wings.’
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, Emmy Award-winning actor, writer, and comedian Richard Gadd writes complex stories about the parts of being human, most of us hide. |
| 0:12.4 | His Netflix series Baby Raneer 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. |
| 0:28.0 | The series became one of the most watched Netflix shows ever, winning six Emmys and made Gadd almost overnight one of the most scrutinized writers in television. |
| 0:39.2 | Well, now he's back with Halfman, a six-part HBO limited series set in 1980s, Scotland. It's about two boys who become |
| 0:46.4 | brothers after their mothers fall in love. One is volatile, just out of juvenile detention. |
| 0:52.6 | The other is quiet, sensitive, and afraid. Over 30 years, the show |
| 0:57.7 | traces what happens to them and to each other. Critics have already been calling half-man, |
| 1:03.9 | a show about toxic masculinity, and Gad has pushed back on that. He says it's more about |
| 1:09.6 | repression and what happens to boys who learn |
| 1:12.7 | early that the parts of themselves they need most are the parts they often feel forced to bury. |
| 1:18.9 | Richard Gad, welcome to fresh air. Thank you. That was a lovely introduction. I appreciate that. |
| 1:24.8 | Well, you know, I am sure that people are going to want to slot this series next to kind of this |
| 1:31.5 | Manosphere conversation. |
| 1:33.7 | And you have pushed back on that pretty firmly. |
| 1:37.0 | And I just want to know more about that. |
| 1:38.9 | What about really the themes that you're trying to explore? |
| 1:43.9 | Well, it's interesting because the Manosphere kind of was a word that I came across about three |
| 1:48.7 | months ago. And I actually wrote the script back in 2019. I wrote a kind of pilot script, |
| 1:54.4 | kind of exploring, I guess men, male violence. But I didn't really set out with any social |
| 1:59.9 | political aim. I never really do in my work. |
| 2:02.5 | I always just try and capture something that I believe to be hopefully interesting in human all at |
| 2:06.9 | once. And so it's about expression. It's about vulnerability. It's about the difficulty of male |
... |
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