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NPR Politics Host
This week on the NPR Politics podcast. President Trump has never been more unpopular, and the midterms are now less than six months away.
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David Biancooli
So the intensity of opposition that's waiting
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Douglas Stuart
for a lot of these Republican candidates
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Terry Gross
in a general election is very, very high.
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NPR Politics Host
The politics of a wartime economy this week on the NPR Politics podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts from.
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Terry Gross
WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with FRESH AIR WEEKEND today. Writer Douglas Stewart. Like the main character in his Booker Prize winning novel called Shuggie Bain, Stewart grew up in Glasgow, working class, queer and with a mother addicted to alcohol. His first career was designing for Calvin Klein and Banana Republic, from outerwear to underwear.
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Douglas Stuart
Sometimes when I'm in an audience now and I sort of look out and I feel a little bit nervous, I have a joke to myself, I think, how many people in this audience have worn the underwear that you designed?
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Terry Gross
Stuart has a new novel later, Richard Gad, creator and star of Baby Reindeer. His new series, Half man, is about two boys who become brothers when their mothers fall in love. They spend the next 30 years trying to survive each other. And David Biancooli reviews the latest adaptation of Lord of the Flies. That's coming up on FRESH AIR weekend. This is FRESH AIR weekend. I'm Terry Gross. You may have read my guest books. You you may have worn the clothes he designed. Douglas Stewart's first novel, shuggie Bain, won the Booker Prize, which is one of the world's top literary awards. Much of it was written when Stewart was working in the fashion industry, designing clothes for popular brands like Calvin Klein and Banana Republic. Stewart wouldn't have predicted any of this from what his life was like growing up in a working class neighborhood in Glasgow, Scotland, in the 80s. He was raised by a single mother who was addicted to alcohol. Things weren't much better at school, where he was relentlessly bullied. When he came to understand that he was gay, he didn't know anyone else who was. The novel Shuggie Bain tells a story very similar to Stewart's own childhood. Stewart has described his second novel, young Mungo, as a story about the dangers of first love between two young working class men in Glasgow and about masculinity, conformity and falling in love. In our book critic Marin Corrigan's review, she wrote, it's hard to imagine a more disquieting and powerful work of fiction will be published anytime soon about the perils of being different. Douglas Stuart has a new novel called John of John that explores themes of faith obligation and how isolating secrets can be. It's set on a fictional island in Scotland's Hebrides and in a very old fashioned conservative community of weavers. There are two Johns in the story, a father and his son. The son is known as Cal. Cal has just graduated textile school in Glasgow and reluctantly returns home when his father insists he needs Cal's help to take care of Cal's sick grandmother. Cal is gay and keeps it a secret from everyone, including his father. But as we learn early in the story, the father, who is the deacon of his church, is also secretly gay. Father and son are keeping the same secret from each other. Douglas Stewart, welcome to FRESH air. And congratulations on your new book. Can you describe how you landed on the premise that both the father and son are gay and they're not only keeping it a secret from everyone else, they're keeping it a secret from each other?
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Douglas Stuart
Yes. I mean, I am a Scotsman who grew up in Glasgow, but I had never been to the Outer Hebrides before. You know, they're quite far from the mainland and it takes some effort to get there. But in 2019, when I was thinking about writing a new novel, I decided I was going to go to the archipelago of islands and just explore it and see if a story emerged. And I realized that every little settlement I went to, that when I was talking to someone, I would sit at a kitchen table and have tea and pancakes or whatever they baked for me. It was, you know, all the islanders were very hospitable. But I was hearing about their settlement and the people in the village and there was always a bachelor or some spinsters who had never married. And for quite a conservative Christian place, that seemed a little unusual. And I asked everybody, you know, why did so and so not marry? Why didn't they ever sort of take a partner? And the answer was often, will they miss their moment was what was said. And I came to learn that in rural places, you know, the window to find someone to love could be quite short, quite narrow. And that just really sparked my imagination. And I said just very casually one day, well, and of course, some of them might be gay, and that makes it harder to find love. And the woman I said it to said sort of reared back, and she said, oh, no, no, no, that's not so. That's not possible. And of course, I just knew historically that some of them must have been maybe not the people we were talking about, but some of these people that had never found love. And that was really the moment that the novel Came to life. I had gone thinking it was about the return of a prodigal son. And then I realized wasn't about that at all. It was about the people he had left behind.
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Terry Gross
What does being gay mean to the father, who's a weaver, who's never left the island and doesn't even want to leave? He's the deacon of his church and often quotes the Bible. Compared to the son who left the island for art school and returns reluctantly to the island when his father calls him back.
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Douglas Stuart
Yeah, I think they're definitely men of a different generation. Although tradition is very strong in the setting of the novel. And for John, because he is very close to scripture, he is part of a church that believes in a very traditional, conservative viewpoint. Any sex outside of one man, one woman, inside of a marriage is absolutely taboo. And so he has come up in that environment and has remained in the fictional settlement of Fallaby his whole life. And so he's never really seen any evidence of. Of anything outside. Another way to live, another way to be. And also, in many ways, gay is a social identity. It is about a community and an outlook in the world. It's not just about a sexual identity. And so for John, he has no way to access a social identity. All he is is he has homosexual desires, he is attracted to other men. Whereas Cal is a youth in the 90s and he went to the mainland, he managed to go to college for four years. He is finding a country. Scotland at the time would be transforming utterly. You know, it had been very working class, heavy industry, patriarchy for centuries, probably. And now we're finding it's de. Industrializing, it is changing, it's becoming incredibly liberal very quickly. And so he sees much more hope in the world as a young gay man and much more acceptance. But the problem is in that wonderful moment where we all leave home for the first time and we think we're going to get to step out into the world and become our own people far from our families. He is called home to take care of his sick grandmother. And he finds himself exactly back where he started.
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Terry Gross
So you grew up in a neighborhood in Glasgow where it was working class, like, very masculine. You were an outsider because you were seen as gay, even though you hadn't told anybody that you were gay. There were no gay bars, there was no gay culture, there were no gay publications. What did it mean to you or what lack of meaning did you find growing up so isolated?
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Douglas Stuart
Yeah, I mean, in fact, I didn't have any understanding that I was gay for most of my young life, I was sort of pointed out as being different to the other boys around me because masculinity was expressed in a very narrow way. You know, we were all sons of hard working fathers who did very difficult, dangerous jobs. And so men were meant to be a very specific sort of way. You know, very brave, very strong, hard working, but also quite emotionally distant. Because I think if you were going to start talking about your feelings, one of the very first feelings you would have is this job is dangerous and underpaid and I don't want to do it anymore. And so as a way of sort of coping with whether it was coal mining or shipbuilding, men became quite cut off even to themselves. And, you know, at 5 or 6, I was quite an expressive young boy. I had too much to say for myself. I probably always have had. And the other boys just sort of turned at me en masse and said, what is wrong with you? Why are you like that? And so I was just deemed as being too effeminate, very, very young. And that was before I had any sexual notions at all. But that sort of followed me all the way through my youth and made me feel very lonely in the only place I think I ever felt like I belonged, which has been a sort of through line in all of my work.
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Terry Gross
So you went to art school. You had shown some artistic talent, but you needed work. So your teacher who had taken you under her wing, advised you to go to art school and study textiles and then you could have a trade, basically, or a craft. So did you go to art school to become a weaver? Like, what was the meaning of studying textiles when you went?
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Douglas Stuart
In fact, when I was 16 and I was guided towards textiles, I couldn't quite tell you what the word textile meant. You know, I was a. I'm often asked as a writer, what was your favorite childhood book? What did you read as a kid? And the answer to that is, I didn't read books as a kid. We didn't have any books at home. We didn't have access to them. It wasn't quite such an unusual thing because I think if I looked at the boys I grew up around, many of them also weren't reading either. But, you know, children also need a huge amount of peace in their lives in order to read. You know, both peace inside themselves and peace at home and also at school, to be honest. And I didn't have any of that because I was dealing with a single mother who was suffering with addiction. And then at school I was being bullied for being Gay. But two things happened when I was 16. The first thing that happened was my mother died very suddenly one morning. Her addiction finally got the better of her. And when I left for school in the morning, she was fine. When I came home at lunchtime, she was dead. And also at 16, school becomes optional for Scottish children. You can leave if you want to. And so my year of about 300 kids went down to only 12 kids. And I found myself one of only 12 kids remaining in my year who were going to finish high school, who were then going to go on to college, hopefully. And I found myself in an English class where I was the only student. It was just me and two English teachers, Mr. Arthur and Mr. Archibald. And suddenly they had eight hours a week with a student who was trying to pay attention, who was trying to understand how to read, not just get through the exams, but trying to learn how to digest books and how to take in all their meaning. And I tell you this because I suddenly realized at 16, 17, I would love to be a writer. I to study English literature. And that just wasn't going to be possible for me. I was a working class boy that grew up in a neighborhood of great deprivation. And I think my teachers, rather than turning me away from English, turned me towards something that I could make a living at.
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Terry Gross
That's an amazing story about being like one student with two teachers and just talking about just the three of you talking about literature. I could see how you could fall in love with books that way. But how did that lead to textiles?
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Douglas Stuart
Well, you know, it was wonderful to be around people who had this passion for a thing and they invested that passion in you. But they saw that I couldn't go on to compete and study English literature at university level. You know, I would have to be competing with children that would ultimately go to Oxford and Cambridge. And, you know, they had spent their whole lives, their whole, all their youth around books, and I just didn't have that. And so instead they guided me towards textiles without me really knowing what textiles was. But they saw a kid that wasn't really great academically, but that wanted to achieve something. Someone who was creative and artistic, but needed to do something that ultimately you could find employment on the far side of. And so I went to a very traditional textile school and I was a weaver for a year. They let you sample all kinds of textiles. And I was a printer. I was a weaver. And then ultimately I did my rotation into knitting, which sounds like a very sort of crafty thing where you sit with needles, but in Fact, it's a very industrial course. You do all your knitting on these huge screaming knitting machines that are often computer operated. And I found knitting just to be really inspiring. It was, you know, you made this cloth. Anything you could imagine in 3D you could make. And we made really diverse things. We made fashion, we made clothing, we made interiors. But we also made things like car interiors or automobile interiors. And we made sacks and vessels for inside the body with sort of microscopic knitting machines. And so it was a wonderful education. But my whole life I felt like a writer that couldn't be a writer.
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Terry Gross
In your new novel, John of John the son studies textiles and becomes a weaver on this kind of isolated island in the Hebrides of Scotland. And at the time, and this is happening to so many people now, the thing that he studied in college has just become basically out of date. You know, the textile mills are closing. People aren't wearing the tweeds they used to wear. So he can't find a job either on the islands or, you know, where he went to school. So he joins his father on the one loom that they're allowed, which is interesting right there. There was this like one loom per family rule in the Outer Hebrides at the time, or at least on this island. Would you explain why?
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Douglas Stuart
Yeah, you're right. Everything at this time moves to the Far east, and nothing is made in the West. And textiles as an industry is on its knees. But there's a wonderful tradition on the Outer Hebrides of making something called Harris Tweed. And it was established as a sort of almost a socialist project, I would say, where each of the homes would have a loom behind the house in a shed. And when the crofters, when the, when the islanders couldn't rely on the sea or the land to support themselves, they would be able to make some cloth. You know, it is still made in that exact same way even today. And now today it feels like such a rare thing to have something made by hand in place. And it's just the most remarkable thing. But Cal returns from art school, as you say, and his father has always been a weaver, and so he's almost gone to textile college, couldn't find work, and finds himself back working for his father.
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Terry Gross
Anyway, if you're just joining us, we're listening to my conversation with Booker Prize winning writer Douglas Stewart. His new novel is called John of John. We'll hear more after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR weekend. You grew up keeping a lot of secrets. I mean, I Think you didn't want everybody to know that your mother was alcoholic, what life was like at home, how confusing and sometimes dangerous it could be. You had to keep a secret that you were gay and she kept secrets from you. Even like, you know, hiding the alcohol, hiding half used bottles of beer and alcohol. What would you do if you found those partially used bottles and cans?
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Douglas Stuart
I mean, I think my whole childhood was about secrets on all sorts of levels. But, you know, my mother's drinking was a difficult thing to manage. I was sort of thrust into a caregiving role about the age of four where I realized that my mother wouldn't always be able to take care of me and I had to look after her. And when you would find sort of drink, I learned sometimes that the best thing to do was to dispose of it or to get rid of it. But sometimes if you did that, it just caused more trouble. And so you had to almost just let her get on with it. And so it very much depended on where I could judge where she was emotionally and what would come from those actions. But, yeah, sort of addiction was a central part of my childhood. And I mean, this is the point, what I should say. My mother was a wonderful woman and she was a wonderful mother. She was incredibly kind, incredibly generous. And I often say that addiction killed my mother. But I don't think as I age that that is true. I think what killed my mother was first of all poverty. And then the second thing was she was a woman who had made a very traditional bargain that said you don't need an education if you leave school and you should marry the first man that you fall in love with and you have children and you will build a life together. She eventually married my father and when the sort of the country went into 25% unemployment under Margaret Thatcher, and when my father left her, you know, she found herself in a very desperate place. And so it was that sort of, you know, that upbringing and then also the poverty that we found ourselves in that led to the addiction. And that's really the thing that killed her.
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Terry Gross
So you lived in the fashion. You worked in the fashion world for about 10 years.
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Douglas Stuart
20 years.
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Terry Gross
Sorry, 20 years. Oh, wow. Longer than I thought. So I think it was when you were in textile school that various companies and industries came to the school to scout for talent. And I think that's how the Calvin Klein company found you.
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Douglas Stuart
That's right, yeah. I was just wrapping up my education and I thought I was going to go into the mill system. I thought I was going to go into a very traditional employment and make cloth and make textiles. And I had done this really wonderful thing where I had spent a summer with the last remaining Shakers on Earth up in Sabbath Day Lake, Maine. And I had access to all their archives and their clothes. This is 1998, and I based my degree show, my graduate show, on it. And at fashion school, all students sort of, they're very outre. You know, they use lots of colour and pattern and feathers, and if they can sequin a thing, they sequin it.
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Actor/Character in Lord of the Flies Clip
And.
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Douglas Stuart
And I had created this collection that was incredibly sombre, very respectful of the Shakers. It was quite monastic. It was very simple. And I watched all these companies come through my college and start to hire graduates. They would go to Prada, they would go to Gucci, and I thought, oh, I'm never going to get a job because I'm maybe a little too melancholy. And suddenly the Calvin Klein team came through and they said, this is minimalism. I remember it's the end of the 90s. And they said, would you like to come to New York? And I had no family home, I had nothing to go back to Scotland for. And so I said, yeah. And I've been here now almost 30 years.
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Terry Gross
You said that you liked fashion. And I assume this means, like, designing fashion that's both revealing and. Or concealing. Can you talk about that a little?
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Douglas Stuart
Yeah, I think, you know, starting in my childhood, I realized that clothes are always deeply psychological and we're always projecting something, who we want to be and at the same time, maybe concealing who we are or what's really going on in our lives. I've written actually in the past about my character seeing someone at university or in college who is wearing very shabby clothes, things they've bought in a secondhand store or, you know, old tweeds or old wax jackets. And as a working class kid, my character says, you know, it's a dream altogether to be able to wear clothes that look like you don't care, because, you know, in the working class, you're always sort of projecting an aura, I think. And so clothes I've always found to be deeply psychological. And when I start writing a character, I think about, what don't they like about themselves? What are they trying to hide? What is ill fitting? Because my own relationship with clothing has always been emotional. It's not just get dressed in the morning and go out. It's always about, what am I trying to project?
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Terry Gross
What. What do you consider to be one of the things that you designed when you were Working with Calvin Klein, that most speaks to either how you see masculinity or how you see yourself or what you think a garment should do.
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Douglas Stuart
Actually, the thing I'm most proud of comes after Calvin Klein. I actually was one of the heads of menswear design at banana Republic for 15 years.
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Terry Gross
Oh, I didn't know that.
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Richard Gad
Yeah.
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Douglas Stuart
In the early 2000s, when everybody was wearing Banana Republic. And I gotta tell you, as a sort of a young working class boy from a socialist country, it was such a thrill to come off the subway in the morning and see, like, you know, 12 pairs of your chinos before you even got to the office. And suddenly realizing the power of clothing and democracy, where everybody wears something, what is part of a culture. And I really loved that. That used to give me such a thrill when I would see my things everywhere. And sometimes when I'm in an audience now and I sort of look out and I feel a little bit nervous. I have a joke to myself. I think, how many people in this audience have worn the underwear that you designed? And that sort of is a bit like my version of picturing people naked.
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Terry Gross
You designed underwear?
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Douglas Stuart
I designed everything. As a knitwear expert, I want to
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Terry Gross
hear about the underwear.
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Douglas Stuart
Yeah, I designed. Yeah, lots and lots of underwear. And one of the very funny things is when you're fitting underwear on a model, you know, you've got to essentially make the garment fit as well as you can, but you've also got to do it without ever approaching or touching the model. And so a lot of my sort of early design days was just pointing at people's crotches and asking someone to take an inch out of it or, you know, to make it fit a little bit better around the high waist. But, yeah, I've designed everything.
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Terry Gross
You're part of the art world now, too, because your husband is the curator of a gallery in New York. So I'm sure you've gone to your share of openings. You have a new story in the New Yorker about the opening of an art show. It's a totally different world from the world you grew up in. And you've said you've written that the boy you were wouldn't recognize the man you've become. What would be most unrecognizable?
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Douglas Stuart
Oh, I think this is why I write everything is because I feel like two very disconnected people. I don't think the boy that I was could imagine that this kind of life I'm living now as possible, that I can spend all day with books and then have a husband who talks about art all night and just the real sort of privilege of that is something that, you know, younger me couldn't have even dreamt of in his wildest dreams. I'm often asked, what would you say to your younger self? And my answer to that is I wouldn't because he would sort of look at me as though I was an alien that had landed from another planet. And so, so much of my writing is trying to connect those parts of my life because they feel like they belong to two different people.
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Terry Gross
Douglas Stuart, it's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much.
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Douglas Stuart
Thank you, Terry. It's been an honor.
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Terry Gross
Douglas Stuart's new novel is called John of John. Since its publication in 1954, the William Golding novel Lord of the Flies has been one of the most popular books on many high school reading lists. It's about a group of British schoolboys who survive a plane crash on a remote island and are forced to figure out how to sustain themselves without any adult supervision. Two movies have been made from the story in 1963 and 1990, but now Netflix and the BBC present the first adaptation for television. Our TV critic David Biancooli has this review.
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David Biancooli
All four episodes of this new Lord of the Flies miniseries come from the same creative team. Mark Munden directed all four hours and Jack Thorne wrote them for television. Most of the show was filmed on location in the dense rainforest of Malaysia and Munden makes the most of it, so the series looks great. More than that, though, this TV Lord of the Flies is such a faithful rendering of the book and relies so much upon the acting and credibility of its fresh young cast that Jack Thorne deserves most of the credit for trusting the source material and his cast and writing such an unforgettable, sometimes haunting adaptation. The most unforgettable TV drama I've seen the past few years was another four part Netflix BBC offering the Emmy winning adolescence that was co written by Jack Thorne and Lord of the Flies can be seen as sort of a companion piece. Adolescence, about a young boy accused of murdering a classmate, was a stark emotional look at how social media can lead some young people towards hateful, even violent behavior. In Lord of the Flies, there's just as disturbing a descent into violence and murder, but in this case it's the absence of social influences, not the influences that result in savagery. This new Lord of the Flies begins like the TV series Lost, which started with a close up of a plane crash survivor waking up and making his way through the island jungle. In this case It's a rosy cheeked young boy played so unaffectedly by David McKenna, who wanders until he encounters another survivor played by Winston Sawyers. The soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and others relies greatly on angelic vocal arrangements because one group of young boys who survived the crash make up the school choir.
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Actor/Character in Lord of the Flies Clip
You're right. Just been going too fast. I'll smell. What do I call you? I don't care what you call me as long as you don't call me what day you still call me. What was that? Promise you won't last. Yes. Piggy. Oh my Piggy. Piggy. Ralph, you say it. This is a funny name though. That's not funny.
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David Biancooli
Just as in Golding's novel, the two boys, basically representing intellect and bravery respectively, make their way to the beach. Piggy finds a conch shell in this British show, they call it Conch and tells Ralph to blow in it. The sound he makes summons other kids from the rainforest and Ralph organizes a meeting. Then, making a dramatic entrance, comes the boys choir from the same school. Still dressed in robes and singing, they walk single file behind their young arrogant leader, Jack, who quickly challenges the other group. Ralph begins to show deference, but Piggy, even after being betrayed by Ralph, does not. Lox Pratt plays Jack.
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Actor/Character in Lord of the Flies Clip
Were you all on the plane? That's more than I remember. Yes, you were. And now we're trying to find some order so we can work out exactly what we know. You're talking too much. Shut up, fatty. He's not a fatty. His real name's Piggy. He's right though. We do need to make some key decisions, it seems to me we ought to have a chief. More important is to find out exactly where we are. A chief will decide that. I can be chief. From chapter chorister and head boy. I can see high C sharp almost in favor of me. I think we should have more than one consideration if a chief to be decided. I can't sing C sharp, but yes, I'd like to be Chief. Of course he would.
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David Biancooli
From that point on, the island descends into a sort of battlefield. Recently the TV series Yellowjackets offered a variation on that same theme. The variation being that the plane crash survivors were teen girls, not young boys. As Lord of the Flies progresses, one group is responsible and civilized, building shelters and gathering fruit and water, while the other hunts for wild game and dons face paint like native warriors in old movies they've seen. Jack Thorne is stunningly faithful to Golding's original text, except for allowing one ill fated child to live little longer than in the book. Some sequences, like the first wild boar hunt, are filmed by Munden in a way that puts you right there with the boys. And as the boys transform from frightened to feral, it's hard to shake and to forget adolescence was that way too. Lord of the Flies is a bit easier to watch, but both of them are bold dramas featuring amazingly good young actors that will grab your heart as well as your mind.
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Terry Gross
David Biancooli is FRESH air's TV critic. Coming up, Richard Gad, creator and star of the hit Netflix series Baby Reindeer, talks about his latest project, the HBO series Half Man. It's the story of two boys who become brothers when their mothers fall in love. This is FRESH AIR weekend. Our co host Tonya Moseley has our next interview. Here's Tonya.
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Tonya Moseley
My guest today, Emmy Award winning actor, writer and comedian Richard Gad writes complex stories about the parts of being human most of us hide. His Netflix series Baby Reindeer 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. The series became one of the most watched Netflix shows ever, winning six Emmys, and made Gad, almost overnight one of the most scrutinized writers in television. Well, now he's back with half man, a six part HBO limited series set in 1980 Scotland. It's about two boys who become brothers after their mothers fall in love. One is volatile, just out of juvenile detention. The other is quiet, sensitive and afraid. Over 30 years, the show traces what happens to them and to each other. Critics have already been calling Half Man a show about toxic masculinity, and Gad has pushed back on that. He says it's more about repression and what happens to boys who learn early that the parts of themselves they need most are the parts they often feel forced to bury. Richard Gad, welcome to FRESH air.
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Richard Gad
Thank you. That was a lovely introduction. I appreciate that.
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Tonya Moseley
Well, you know, I am sure that people are going to want to slot this series next to kind of this manosphere conversation. And you have pushed back on that pretty firmly. And I just want to know more about that. What about really the themes that you're trying to explore?
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Richard Gad
Well, it's interesting because the manosphere kind of was a word that I came across about three months ago and I actually wrote the script back in 2019. I wrote a kind of pilot script kind of exploring, I guess, men, male violence. But I didn't really set out with any social, political aim. I never really do my work. I always just try and capture something that I believe to be, hopefully interesting and human all at once. And so it's about expression, it's about vulnerability, it's about the difficulty of male relationships and the dangers of repression.
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Tonya Moseley
Yeah. You know, the two characters, Niall and Ruben, to me, I felt like they both kind of represent two sides of how to be a man. They're, like, on two sides of the spectrum. Is that how you saw them? And what did you need to imagine into existence to write them?
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Richard Gad
Well, I thought the most interesting thing is you do take two archetypes of. I don't like these words because these words are subjective. But if you take an alpha male and a beta male, even though I think everyone's idea of an alpha and a beta is very different, you know, person to person, if you take the stereotypical alpha and beta and you put them in a two shot opposite each other, you know, one's kind of muscly and, you know, terrifying looking, and the other is kind of well dressed up and timid, and you start to kind of deconstruct that from there. I thought that was an interesting starting point, but I like to think as the show progresses, the boxes in which we meet them in become a bit more blurred and a bit more complicated.
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Terry Gross
Mm.
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Tonya Moseley
I actually wanna play a clip that gives us a deeper lens into the two of them. So in this scene that I'm gonna play young Niall, who is played by Mitchell Robertson, and young Ruben, who is played by Stuart Campbell. They are together in the room that they share together. And by this point, they have earned each other's trust. Ruben has beat up Niall's bully. Niall has helped Ruben pass an exam he needs to stay in school. And he's also. Ruben has also brought a girl over to help Niall lose his virginity. And in this scene, they're lying on the bedroom floor talking about their mothers, who are a couple. And then Reuben hands Niall a present, a boxing glove. Let's listen.
- [33:57]
Actor/Character in Half Man Clip
Can I ask you something? You know, are our mums, you know? Yeah, afraid so. Does it bother you or something? No, I don't really. As long as they're happy, I guess. I know they don't seem all that happy. There's a lot you don't know about.
- [34:40]
Richard Gad
Here.
- [34:42]
Actor/Character in Half Man Clip
Got you something. Not gonna train you. Just in case something happens to me, I need to know you'll look after yourself. Why do you care? We're family now. It's the most important thing My brother from another lover,
- [35:12]
Tonya Moseley
Richard, that gift, a single boxing glove. Ruben is genuinely trying to give Niles something he thinks will help him. But what he is offering is kind of the only language he has, which is violence. A boxing glove. Tell me about that scene. What were you trying to do in that moment?
- [35:30]
Richard Gad
Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head there with this kind of offering. I think Ruben reacts to the world in violence. It's all he understands is his safety net against the kind of terrors of life. And I think he knows fine well, due to his nature, that there might be a world where he's not always there. And so he wants to toughen Niall up and, you know, make sure he's there. I mean, family means everything to Ruben. You know, as the story unfolds, we'll understand why, but family means everything to him. So, you know, he. They're in this kind of very hybrid household, this kind of weirdly dysfunctional kind of way of coming together. And he wants Niall to be not only learned to fend for himself because I think at this point he's genuinely really fond of Niall and loves him and sees him as family, but he also wants there to be a masculine presence within the family household when he goes. And so I think in a weird way it is Ruben's love language giving him a pair of boxing gloves.
- [36:31]
Tonya Moseley
Can you describe the characters of Niles and Ruben and how their relationship progresses?
- [36:38]
Richard Gad
Niall and Ruben, they form a kind of really close bond, like a really, you know, layered and complicated bond that they just can't shake. And no matter what happens in their life, no matter all the good and bad experiences they go through, they seem unable to shake having each other in their lives. I think as they move through lives and as they change and the characters go through all kinds of different changes throughout the series, one thing that they cannot escape is that feeling they had for each other when they were in their youth, which is this very confusing, very complicated love that they seem incapable of expressing. And the series kind of mutates through that and takes you through that feeling of can't live with someone, can't live without them, that forms the very basis of their relationship.
- [37:26]
Tonya Moseley
Okay, Richard, I want to go back to 10 years ago on a stage in Scotland, your one man show called Monkey See, Monkey Do.
- [37:35]
Richard Gad
And.
- [37:36]
Tonya Moseley
And in the show you talk candidly about a very devastating thing that happened to you, that you were raped. And in this clip I'm going to play, you describe one of the three mistakes you made after this. This thing happened to you and I just want to note that it's kind of a bit of comedy and a bit of seriousness all in one. Let's listen.
- [38:00]
Richard Gad (performing one-man show)
Mistake number one. Wearing shorts and a T shirt. I mean I was practically asking for it. Am I right, lad?
- [38:07]
Actor/Character in Lord of the Flies Clip
Please.
- [38:12]
Richard Gad
I'm joking.
- [38:15]
Richard Gad (performing one-man show)
Mistake number one. Mistake number one time. The incident into this idea that I was no longer a man anymore, this idea that I'd been feminized. It's funny. Out of all the things that bothered me, and trust me, there was a lot that bothered me, there was a lot that bothered me. The one thing that bothered me most, and it seems ridiculous, ridiculous in retrospect, the one thing that bothered me the most, the one thing that bothered my monkey the most, this idea that I was no longer a man. This idea that I'd been feminized. And six years on. What is masculinity? What does that really mean? It's just a word, just a box
- [38:55]
Richard Gad
for people to put things in.
- [38:56]
Richard Gad (performing one-man show)
It doesn't exist. And I look it bother me for six years. And if masculinity does exist, then masculinity
- [39:03]
Richard Gad
is the problem with everything.
- [39:04]
Richard Gad (performing one-man show)
It's the problem on my side in terms of not speaking out, but it's the problem on the other side as well in terms of doing something like this in the first place. A lack of power in a man's head driving him towards primal sexual monkey dominance. Masculinity creates wars. Femininity doesn't create wars. What women do we know created wars, invaded other countries? Well, Thatcher in Argentina.
- [39:27]
Tonya Moseley
Richard, first off, I watched that clip with my brother and my cousins and they were all really moved about it and it just started a conversation. And what I wanted to talk with you about is this idea of being a victim of sexual violence somehow disqualifying you from manhood. I think it's a common experience. I think it's a common experience to feel shame and to repress and not want to tell. And so I think it's pretty remarkable that not only did you speak about it, you spoke about it on stage, you wrote a one man show wrapped around it. I want to know that moment of you saying, the only way out of this for me is to talk about it because so many men and people in general will go to their grave with it because they don't want that on them. They don't want to be associated with maybe the worst thing that has happened to them.
- [40:23]
Richard Gad
Yeah, it was, it was a case of kind of do or die almost. I know that sounds Extreme, but it's the truth. I, I, I couldn't keep it in anymore. I had, I was done thinking about it. I, I, I think I believed, maybe naively, that I could think my way out of it, that I could sort of land on a thought or a sense of clarity on it on my own, but I would just be synaptically firing the, the kind of doubts and thoughts around my head to the point where they actually got greater and greater and greater. And it just got to a point where I just felt like I was done. And I, I think I told my mom first, maybe one of my friends, and it was like, always painful. I always remember, like, the adrenaline was kind of unbelievable. But then you would always feel like a weight had been lifted, you know, and, and then I suppose, meanwhile, I was, I was going up to the Edinburgh fringe and all of this stuff, and I was, I was putting on wigs and wearing daft teeth and doing anti jokes and doing these kind of really madcap jokes that were wacky humor and, and, but meanwhile I was sort of dying inside and it was just this juxtaposition. You almost can't write it. You almost. This is what Baby Ranger is all about, the kind of Cyclam thing. But it was like that to the extreme. It was, I was sort of, you know, I was going through all that, trying to come to terms with all that, while simultaneously going on stage and trying to make people laugh in the most kind of wacky way.
- [41:53]
Tonya Moseley
I watch Baby Reindeer three times. I really, really, I was really moved by it. And there's something very specific I was moved by, and I want to play a clip to kind of get to it. So in this clip, it's from the first episode of Baby Reindeer, and this is the very first time Donnie, which is a fictionalized version of yourself played by you, meets Martha, the woman who will go on to stalk you for years. And she walks into the pub where you work. She's overweight, she looks upset. And your character tries to be kind to her. You give her a cup of tea, on the house. Let's listen.
- [42:31]
Richard Gad
I felt sorry for her. That's the first feeling I felt. It's a patronizing, arrogant feeling, feeling sorry for someone you've only just laid eyes on. But I did. I felt sorry for her. Fiverr, please, mate. Okay.
- [42:48]
Douglas Stuart
Thank you, Max.
- [42:52]
Richard Gad
Can I get you something?
- [42:54]
Actor/Character in Lord of the Flies Clip
No, thanks.
- [42:55]
Richard Gad
Are you sure? Cup of tea?
- [42:58]
Actor/Character in Lord of the Flies Clip
No, thanks.
- [42:59]
Richard Gad
You have to buy something.
- [43:00]
Actor/Character in Lord of the Flies Clip
Can't afford something, right?
- [43:02]
Richard Gad
Not even a cup of tea?
- [43:04]
Actor/Character in Lord of the Flies Clip
No.
- [43:05]
Richard Gad
All right, well, how about I Give you a cup of tea on the house. So what do you do?
- [43:13]
J
I'm a lawyer.
- [43:15]
Richard Gad
How'd you get into that, then?
- [43:16]
J
Trained in criminal law, moved to England, retrained, opened up my own practice, won several awards. Now a leading advisor to the government.
- [43:25]
Richard Gad
You own a law firm?
- [43:26]
J
Amongst other things. A flat in Pimlico overlooking a private garden. One in Bexley Heath, two in Belsize Park. God doesn't like a bragger. But when you're the go to for the biggest political minds in the game, you've earned a brag or two. No, no, I'm not gonna say who, so don't even go there. Fine. David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Alex Hammond. But you didn't hear that from me.
- [43:46]
Richard Gad
Wow, you must have amazing dinner, Paul. She had this incredible laugh. This giddy, slightly disconcerting laugh. Her name was Martha. But all I could think was, if all of this is true, then why can't you afford a cup of tea?
- [44:08]
Tonya Moseley
That's a clip from the first episode of the Netflix series Baby Reindeer, created by my guest today, Richard Gadget. You know, Richard, one of the things that makes Baby Reindeer different from almost any other story about stalking that I have ever seen is that you don't let yourself off the hook as the victim of being stalked. So you write Donnie as someone who on some level was kind of flattered by this lady, by being seen, even by someone you knew was unwell. And I felt like that seems to be a very uncomfortable thing to admit publicly. So why was it important to you that you show that. That you hold both things at once, that you were a victim and that you were also someone who liked being wanted?
- [44:53]
Richard Gad
Well, I just thought there was like a fundamental human truth to it. Like, I. I always try and dig into, like, the complicated stuff. Like, I think. I think in a lot of times, like on tv, it's. It's too obvious who the good guy and the bad person is, you know, and it's just like life is not like that. I think. And I think that we're all made up of good qualities and bad qualities and mistakes and successes and all these kinds of things. And I just dug into it and it kind of goes all the way back to the stage show. Because I remember, you know, when I was. I wrote the stage show, which later became the TV show, I would trial it and the story went, you know, I offered this person a cup of tea and look at what happened. My one act of kindness. My God. And I remember just feeling like it wasn't Coming to the fore. Like, it wasn't working. And I think it wasn't working because I was avoiding the truth. And the truth is that, you know, I egged it on and I indulged in it. And I indulged in it because I was, you know, going through a lot and I would take any attention wherever I got it, just because anything that would take me out of the mire of what I was feeling and experiencing. And that to me was the heart of Baby Reindeer. And that was what I was avoiding when I was trying to workshop the live show into something that was worth watching because I realized that I wasn't really writing the truth of what happened. And truth is the fundamental key to writing something, you know, authentic and interesting. But Baby Reindeer, you know, it was tough because it was like, you know, not many people would do that, especially in this day and age of kind of moral enlightenment and, oh, hey, look at all the mistakes I made. Like, it felt very daring and, and it felt very like vulnerable and exposing. But really, in a lot of ways, I think, I think therein lied lay the success of Baby Reindeer because I think, I think people recognize something in that and in the flawed idea of human consistency. Like, I think a lot of people struggle. Like one of Donny's, like, big struggles was his inability to put up boundaries, like his inability to say no or inability to hurt someone's feelings. I think a lot of people relate to. I think a lot of people struggle to be honest. It's not that they're good liars. It's that they struggle to not circumvent the pain of having honest conversations. And I think that's what Donny. Why I think the Donny character resonated so much. And I think people could just appreciate that honesty, you know, like, it was a radically honest show and I think because of that, it was a success.
- [47:30]
Tonya Moseley
Well, Richard Gad, it has been a pleasure to talk with you and thank you so much.
- [47:36]
Richard Gad
No, thank you. I really enjoyed that. I really appreciate the great questions. Thank you.
- [47:40]
Terry Gross
Richard Gad is an Emmy winning actor, writer and comedian. His new HBO Limited series is called Half Man. He spoke with our co host, Tanya Mosley. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our co host is Tanya Moseley. I'm Terry Grand.