By Kilian Melloy

When a journalist at HBO’s Half Man press event opined that the show’s graphic violence made it hard to feel empathy for the characters, creator and star Richard Gadd didn’t flinch. “I think if you’re going to really get to the grips with male rage, male violence, why men have such a very uneasy relationship with society right now, you’d be doing disservice to anyone who’s been affected by male violence by not showing the extremities of where it can get to,” the creator-writer-producer-actor replied. “I would say that’s a minority response on the whole,” he added, with a trace of British understatement.

Comparisons to Adolescence, another Britain-set miniseries about male misdeeds, recurred throughout the panel discussion. Half Man, Gadd’s six-part follow-up to the juggernaut that was Baby Reindeer, pushes viewers even harder than Baby Reindeer did. The show chronicles two stepbrothers (their mothers are a lesbian couple) throughout their lives and features two sets of actors to play them. Violent, charismatic Ruben (played by Gadd as an adult and Stuart Campbell as a teen) and the meek Niall (Jamie Bell as an adult, Mitchell Robertson as a teen) have a complicated relationship from their early years. An incident of youthful assault lands Ruben in a juvenile detention facility, and as the show begins he returns to the household, where he promptly dominates Niall. The boys’ fraternal bond extends to Ruben teaching a hard lesson to the schoolyard bully who delights in tormenting Niall, and the two become inseparable. There are layers of complication to their relationship, varying from borderline erotic to proprietary; one gets the impression that Ruben won’t countenance anybody else picking on Niall, because Niall is his to bully. But protection eventually curdles into betrayal when Ruben, paying a visit to Niall at university, misreads a situation between Niall and a male classmate who’s on the verge of becoming Niall’s boyfriend. Trauma, struggle, and reversals of fortune for both brothers unfold in the wake of that crucial turn of events, but underneath everything there remains a constant of deep love and connection.

The panel discussion, moderated by Jessica Shaw, featured Gadd alongside director Alexandra Brodski, executive producer Sophie Gardiner, Neve McIntosh (who plays Niall’s mother Lori), and Campbell and Robertson, whose performances anchor the series’ emotional core.

Gadd wrote the first episode in 2019, then shelved it for four years while making Baby Reindeer. By the time Baby Reindeer exploded globally, he’d already committed to Half Man as his next project. As soon as he looked at the script again, he knew he’d made the right choice. “I’d love a four-year gap between every script,” Gadd joked. “You go back and you’re like, you know exactly what to do.”

Gadd described Half Man as character-driven storytelling rather than a project dedicated to a moral message. “I’m never too motivated by themes or world events,” he explained. “I usually need a creative idea to take me. I think I must have thought to take two men that are kind of broken in their adult life and go back to their childhood in a more unaccepting time as a UK society and show all that learned behavior and the repression that they soak up and the trauma that they experience.”

Shaw praised Robertson’s and Campbell’s performances as “extraordinary,” and the young actors spoke about their real-life friendship. “We kind of feel like we’re really good mates anyway,” Robertson said. “When we did our first chemistry read, we really got on kind of as soon as we met each other…. I think it felt a little more, instead of like building the chemistry, just kind of nurturing it and letting it grow. The more we got to know each other, the more it kind of just naturally happened, I guess, eh?”

“I guess the darkness, the hostility, the rage, speaking from Ruben’s perspective, is there on the page,” Campbell mused. “It was there from the first reading. But then we did work in the rehearsal process, and on set, to make sure that we kept the lightness every day consciously, making sure that we continued to see this sort of unspoken connection between us.

 “But I think it certainly helps that we are just really close anyway,” he added. “I don’t know what it would have been like if we didn’t like each other.

“I loved these guys from the start,” Gadd put in, before disclosing that their chemistry read was “kind of a formality at that point, just to see what they were like together.” What set them apart from other talented prospectives for the roles was their understanding of the characters’ vulnerabilities beneath surface archetypes.

“A lot of people thought, ‘If Ruben’s [the] epitome of masculinity, I’m going to have to shout every line, I’m going to puff my chest,’” Gadd said of the actors who auditioned for the part. “But really, Ruben is vulnerable in his own way as well, and that’s what I thought Stuart captured in spades. And a lot of people played Niall kind of meek, like they had to be slight in their bodies, but he’s a guy shuffling through his own internal conflicts, and I thought Mitchell did that so beautifully.”

The show’s focus on physicality was another talking point. Gadd frequently has the opportunity to show off his unexpectedly ripped physique, which, in true actorly style, contributes in a major way to the character’s mix of sexual magnetism and terrifying brutality.

In a crafty move, Gadd withheld episodes four, five, and six from the young actors during filming so as not to let the series’ later twists and surprises influence their performances. “I didn’t want them to be influenced by this idea that their soul becomes corrupted in some way,” he explained. “I wanted them to retain everything they were bringing, which was the hope of life that you have when you’re a teenager: That anything is possible, and life is difficult and confusing and adolescent, but, at the same time, the world’s your oyster.”

Director Alexandra Brodski’s approach complemented Gadd’s philosophy. Her most frequent direction to Robertson, she revealed, was “Zombie apocalypse” — shorthand developed when Robertson was searching for mailboxes in an ultimately deleted pub scene and she told him he came across “as if you’re in a zombie apocalypse, looking out for zombies.” The phrase became their signal for when his performance needed toning down. “It even got to the point where before I did something, I’d be like, ‘Alex is this to [be] a zombie apocalypse?’” Robertson recalled, laughing, before going on to emphasize creating “life” over psychological backstory. “I don’t find it super useful to know how this character felt as an embryo,” she said. Instead, rehearsals focused on immediate reactions: “Maybe you’re normally a loud guy, but maybe you are quiet in the scene. How do you react to each other?”

Among Gadd’s creations, Lori — Niall’s widowed mother, navigating queer identity in an unaccepting era — ranks as one of his favorites, he said, “maybe second only to Martha” from Baby Reindeer. Neve McIntosh brought depth to a character Gadd intentionally wrote against type. “I think families love each other, but, my God, is it a difficult sort of place to navigate,” Gadd said. “I never wanted Lori to be this storyline where [she advises Niall] ‘Now you’ve got to accept yourself because I learned to accept myself.’ Lori’s repressed in her own way. And she carries her own prejudices even within her own queerdom; that comes out with Niall.”

McIntosh described Lori as someone who “sees herself as quite the heroine at times, weirdly, because she’s done a lot to try and bring this kid up and point him in the right direction.”

Perhaps the most fascinating revelation came when discussing audience responses. “It’s quite remarkable how people come away liking who they like more” between the charismatic Ruben and the milder Niall, Gadd observed. “People always, always say, ‘Oh, I prefer this brother to that one,’ and, ‘I agreed with that brother way more,’ and, ‘Oh my god, that brother’s way more justified.’ It’s amazing, actually, how varied the response is.”

Gadd built that ambiguity into the script. “I wanted to see how far these guys could push you as audiences and still see if you retained some bit of sympathy for them at the end,” he said. “And then I wanted, by the of it, to not really know who was the one who brought the more damage into each other’s life, and who brought more love into each other’s lives. I wanted it to be the kind of internal question that exists beyond the series.”

None of the characters, Gadd added, are heroes or villains. “I can acknowledge that people are more good than bad, but I don’t see life that way,” he said. “Everyone’s a mixture of good and bad, and everyone’s done things they regret and things that they are proud of. I think for all of Ruben’s faults, he runs on a river of pain, and I think pain makes people do crazy things.”

Executive producer Sophie Gardiner identified victimhood as a through-line, citing “Moments when they feel like they’re victims, and decisions that they make on the back of that. It’s a very different way Ruben reacts to such things from Niall.”

Throughout the discussion, Gadd returned repeatedly to a guiding philosophy that sets Half Man apart from much contemporary television: Crediting viewers with intelligence. “I think there’s maybe been, in my opinion, a wrongful opinion that, in order to keep the most viewers, you have to appeal to the most people and broaden things out and explain things as much as possible,” he said. “But I think if Baby Reindeer and Adolescence has proved anything, it’s that we like to be challenged, and we like to face our own demons and see it back on television.”

Gadd just as forcefully pushed back against what he sees as television’s tendency toward emotional manipulation. “Too often now, television shows and films [tell us] ‘You need to feel this way.’ Half Man doesn’t offer answers; it offers a situation. It offers characters in a world that is for people to take what they want from it.”

“At the end of the day,” Gadd went on to summarize, “I just hope people like it and enjoy it.”

Half Man airs Thursdays at 9pm on HBO. Episodes are available for viewing on HBO Max.

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