Richard Gadd Calls Half Man Scene The Best Thing He's Ever Written

This article contains spoilers for Half Man.

It might have seemed like an impossible feat to top the award-winning Baby Reindeer, but Richard Gadd believes he’s done it with Half Man.

Speaking to the Radio Times in the lead-up to the release of his latest TV offering earlier this year, Richard was asked what he thought was the best scene he’d ever written.

Initially, he admitted that due to his “self flagellating” personality, his instinct is to praise the “scenes that had to be cut”.

“I sometimes go to them because I think I’ve convinced myself that they were sort of ‘the one’,” he claimed.

But, out of everything that did make the final cut, he settled on one scene in particular as his favourite.

“Potentially the best one I’ve ever written, although it’s so hard to say that, because it’s all kind of speculative and contextual, is maybe the final scene between the two of them when they’re talking face to face,” he explained. 

In Half Man, Richard plays the violent yet loyal Ruben, a man who has a toxic relationship with his “brother”, the meek and mild-mannered Niall, played by Jamie Bell.

In a brutal final scene between the two pseudo-brothers, Niall visits Ruben in jail, and finally comes out to him.

Ruben is surprisingly accepting of the revelation, admitting he had been anticipating the conversation.

“You’ve wasted your whole life dancing to other people’s tunes, but you’ve never had the rhythm,” Richard’s character says.

The moment is notable because it finally lets Niall see Ruben for who he really is, beneath his anger, and helps Niall realise that much of the homophobia in his life had been internal, and not due to his surroundings.

Last month, Richard broke the scene down to Time magazine, claiming: “What Ruben essentially says to him there is, ‘you’ve always been an individual, and you should have been proud of that. You’ve wasted your whole life trying to be a sheep, trying to blend in with the nine-to-fivers, the straight guys, and the heterosexual couples, but you’ve never had the rhythm. You’ve always been separate from that’.”

During that emotional final showdown between the two men, Ruben also discloses that he had been sexually abused as a child by his father, telling Niall that “in a lot of ways, it’s the closest I’ve ever been with someone”.

Richard told Time: “That line speaks to the way he felt he was too innocent to know any better, and ever since that moment, he’s built this kind of prison of defensiveness around himself. 

“There was a freedom taken from him in that moment, and his life changed.”

He added: “Until he breaks down with Niall, he’d never allowed himself to feel vulnerable. His best form of defence is always attack. He’s built a life around trying to make up for this thing that happened to him, which he sees, wrongly, as a dent to his character.”

Elsewhere in his Radio Times interview, Richard also revealed he came up with the idea for Half Man before making Baby Reindeer, admitting he couldn’t “shake” off the concept.

“It stayed with me,” he recalled. “And it stayed with me all the way through Baby Reindeer and I would always be, ‘Oh, please, can it still be there the other side?’ Because I knew the BBC was interested, and I really wanted to do it with the Beeb. And I just would always hope and pray it was still there. And, luckily, it was.”

Half Man is available to watch on BBC iPlayer now.