The hit Netflix series Baby Reindeer began as a one-man play starring Richard Gadd, in which he told his traumatic true story of being stalked by a woman named Martha (played by Jessica Gunning) when he was in his 20s. He performed the show at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and it became a success.
“It’s a true story,” Gadd told Tudum on April 15. “In a weird way, I first started feeling like this could be a good story during the whole ordeal itself. It was one of the most intense periods, when I was listening to these voicemails. I’d go to sleep at night and these voicemails—her words would bounce around my eyelids. I remember thinking, ‘God, if I was ever to speak about this onstage, I’d fire the words around. Put the voicemails in a big cacophony and fire it.’ That’s how the play was born.”
Gadd, who named his fictionalized character Donny Dunn, worked as a bartender where he met Martha one night and gave her a free cup of tea.
“That one act of kindness changes Donny’s life forever, because for the next three years, Martha stalks him,” Gunning said. “She sends him 41,000 emails and hundreds of hours worth of voice messages. But it’s not your conventional stalker storyline.”
“Stalking on television tends to be very sexed-up. It has a mystique. It’s somebody in a dark alley way. It’s somebody who’s really sexy, who’s very normal, but then they go strange bit by bit,” Gadd explained. “But stalking is a mental illness. I really wanted to show the layers of stalking with a human quality I hadn’t seen on television before. It’s a stalker story turned on its head. It takes a trope and turns it on its head.”
So, will fans get to see more of Baby Reindeer on Netflix? Here’s what we know.
Has Baby Reindeer been renewed for a season 2?
While the great success of the show has fans calling for a second season, Baby Reindeer is a limited series, meaning it was created with the intent of only ever having one season. However, that doesn’t mean that the team doesn’t have the chance to extend past the first season.
As of April 2024, Netflix has not renewed Baby Reindeer for a second season, and Gadd has not made any comments alluding to the idea. In March 2024, he told Netflix, “All I ever wanted to do was capture something complicated about the human condition. That we all make mistakes. That no person is ever good or bad. That we are all lost souls looking for love in our own weird way.”