Richard Gadd has said he will never speak about the identities of the real people the characters in Baby Reindeer are based on.
His Netflix series is based on his real-life experience of being stalked by a woman he met while working at a pub.
Donny (played by Gadd) is terrorised by Martha (Jessica Gunning), who becomes obsessed after one act of kindness. Soon, his whole life is dominated by this unhealthy infatuation, as he’s followed in real life and is constantly inundated with messages.
In total, he receives 41,000 emails, 744 tweets, 100 pages of letters and 350 hours of voicemails.
Since the success of the show, fans have been trying to decipher who inspired the characters in the show, and last week, Piers Morgan interviewed ‘the real Martha’ Fiona Harvey.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever comment on it ever again,’ he told Hollywood Reporter, days before the sit-down chat was aired.
The comedian continued: ‘The Internet’s always going to do its thing. I can’t really comment on that.’
‘I’m called Donny Dunn. It exists in a sort of fictional realm; even though it’s based on truth, it exists in a fictional realm. Let’s enjoy the world that I’ve created,’ Gadd, 35, remarked.
‘If I wanted the real-life people to be found, I would’ve made it a documentary.
‘I’ve spoken publicly about how I don’t want people to do it and if I start playing a game of whack-a-mole, then I’m almost adding to it.’
He previously urged viewers not to try and uncover Martha’s real identity. ‘People I love, have worked with, and admire … are unfairly getting caught up in speculation,’ he wrote on Instagram.
His friend Sean Foley contacted the police after being wrongly accused of being an abuser depicted in the series. In the series, Gadd is also groomed and raped by a TV comedy writer Darrien (played by Tom Goodman-Hill).
‘I know for every single part, there’s been about five or six people who have been sort of named as each part, even all the way down to the pub manager,’ he told the publication. He added that he’s been sent a video of someone claiming to be Donny’s former partner Teri (played by Nava Mau), but he’s never met the person.
Morgan, 59, has since defended his Uncensored interview with Harvey, 58, after Internet sleuths connected her to the show.
In the interview, she told Morgan that the show was ‘a work of fiction, a work of hyperbole’, and said: ‘I wanted to rebut that completely on this show – I am not a stalker, I have not been to jail, I’ve not got injunctions – it is complete nonsense.’
Some viewers questioned if Morgan should have sat down with Harvey.
‘Obviously, we gave it a lot of thought before we interviewed Fiona Harvey, because I, like many millions of people around the world had watched the Netflix series, and it was a very harrowing series, very funny in parts,’ he explained.
He went on to say that the ‘real issue’ was Harvey’s identity being known after Netflix ‘chose an actress who looked like her, and they made her sound like her, they revealed it was a North London pub she had been in and they revealed all the choice of messages which could be easily tracked back to her own social media.’
‘She was furious at what she saw as an unwarranted invasion of her privacy,’ Morgan added.
Baby Reindeer is available to stream on Netflix and Piers Morgan Uncensored airs on YouTube weekdays at 8pm.
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