Richard Gadd says he's left comedy and the Edinburgh Fringe behind
Richard Gadd will not be returning to the Edinburgh Fringe he has revealed, as the Baby Reindeer star keeps his comedy career in "the background" to focus on dramatic work.
Speaking to US comic Marc Maron on his WTF podcast, with their interview briefly interrupted by an emergency alarm for wildfires threatening parts of Los Angeles, Gadd explained that he still felt part of the comedy community.
"I've made some of the best friends I've ever had from comedy, in so many ways" he said. "But I don't really do comedy very much anymore. When the theatre piece happened, it set me on the path to writing the Netflix show and then I've been doing some serious acting jobs. And kind of, the comedy's slightly in the background now."
Gadd's breakout hit Netflix series Baby Reindeer, based upon the experiences he dramatised in his 2019 Fringe theatre show of the same name and his 2016 Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning show Monkey See Monkey Do, won six Emmy Awards in September, including outstanding lead actor for the Scottish actor-comedian and outstanding supporting actress for Jessica Gunning.
"I think I'd love to write theatre again, I'm definitely going to do live stuff again, 100%" Gadd told Maron. "But I think comedy circuit stuff, doing Edinburgh shows ... I think that's probably a thing of the past. Right now, I'm just happy following the trajectory of where it's going."
Gadd begins filming the BBC drama Half Man in Glasgow shortly, written by and starring himself alongside Jamie Bell, with the two playing brothers who fall out. The series was originally called Lions and the commission pre-existed Netflix ordering Baby Reindeer, he told Maron.
Elsewhere in the interview, Gadd pointed to The Office and US comedy series Arrested Development as two of his most formative comedy influences and said that making his version of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's comedy had been his ambition before he arrived at Glasgow University to study English Literature and theatre.
"I remember watching that and I just became obsessed with it" he said. "I thought was the funniest thing. I thought was the most moving thing. I still do. To this day I think it's one of the greatest things that's ever been made."
As a teenager, he thought, "this is what I would love to do.
"I'd love to have my own version of the UK Office, right? And that was always my goal, which really kind of got all the way to Baby Reindeer. In a way, it's just my life took these dramatic turns that meant I wasn't really doing workplace comedy."