Scary amount of messages. During the period he was persecuted, he received 41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages and 106 pages of letters. Among gifts, he received sleeping pills, a wool hat, boxer shorts and a reindeer toy — a nickname he got from the stalker.
At first, everyone in the bar thought it was funny that I had an admirer. Then she started invading my life, following me, showing up at my shows, waiting outside my house.
Richard Gadd, to The Times
Mixed feelings
Gadd believes his actions made the situation worse. In his script, Gadd sought to avoid clichés, revealing the moral confusion involved in the relationship between the two real-life characters. He didn’t want the plot to be Manichaean. “It would be unfair to say she was a horrible person and I was a victim. That didn’t seem true,” he said in 2019.
Series causes mixed feelings. One of the comedian’s objectives was to portray a realistic case of persecution, which did not resort to common stereotypes. To achieve this result, the series mixes genres: comedy, suspense and drama. It has layers and does not dehumanize either side.
Crime became the subject of a play. At the time of the crime, Richard was trying to make a living as a comedian. In 2019, he launched a play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe reporting stalking and its consequences on his life. In the Netflix series, he sought to deconstruct the crime.
