The Emmy winner explains his decision for [SPOILER] to die in the HBO limited series.

Half Man star/co-creator Richard Gadd on that final scene and why he doesn’t ‘wanna say truly what I meant’

The Emmy winner explains his decision for [SPOILER] to die in the HBO limited series.

By Gerrad Hall

Gerrad Hall

Gerrad Hall is an editorial director at **, overseeing movie, awards, and music coverage. He is also host of The Awardist podcast, and has cohosted EW’s live Oscars, Emmys, SAG, and Grammys red carpet shows. He has appeared on Good Morning America, The Talk, Access Hollywood, Extra!, and other talk shows, delivering the latest news on pop culture and entertainment.

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June 21, 2026 5:52 p.m. ET

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'Half Man' star and creator Richard Gadd. Credit:

Anne Binckebanck/HBO

- Half Man creator Richard Gadd explains his eventual decision to star in the HBO limited series.

- The show centers on two men whose toxic relationship drives them to violent extremes.

- Gadd says he doesn't want to explain his decision to not show how [SPOILER] dies in the finale.

**This article contains spoilers about *Half Man*. **

Richard Gadd wasn't sure that audiences would buy into him playing the brash, violent, and manipulative Ruben, who he plays in the latest series he created, HBO's *Half Man*, after supporting his journey as the stalked and sexually abused Donny Dunn in his autobiographical Emmy-winning series *Baby Reindeer*.

It's why he didn't intend to play the role when he wrote it. But after a lot of thought — and, perhaps most importantly, a big nudge from Jamie Bell, who had been cast to play Ruben's brother, Niall, he reconsidered.

"It was so tough to act in something that you're also showrunning. It's innate split focus. You're in front of camera, you're behind camera, you're performing in a scene, but you're also analyzing how the scene's going from the outside," he recalls of his time making *Baby Reindeer*, on **'s *The Awardist* podcast. His solution? Just be showrunner; don't act in it. "The more and more it went on, the more and more I felt like I could feel like the acts are creeping back into me to a certain degree. And I remember thinking, *Oh, I'll be a policeman*. I remember that was my plan. My grand plan was to be one of the policemen in one of the episodes."

But after the success of *Baby Reindeer*, for which he won three Emmys, his star was on the rise.

"I was suddenly, like, a saleable product, I suppose, in a lot of ways. And at that point, I'd started to think, *Maybe I'd like to be in this in a more meaningful way.* But Jamie really suggested it. He just really wanted me to do it, and I remember thinking it was quite a bold suggestion by him because nobody looks [at] Donny Dunn in the comedy suit and immediately thinks Ruben Pallister."

Richard Gadd and Jamie Bell in 'Half Man'.

After executives at HBO and elsewhere also expressed their desire for him to be in the series, he couldn't ignore it any longer. "It was staring me in the face, but I was terrified. I was like, "This is so far from anything I've ever done, it's so far from Donny Dunn. I'm a comedian coming into an acting space, still being a student of the game in a lot of ways, and I love that, but it felt like such a risk."

Gadd, of course, knew the material well, having written all six episodes. In fact, he had written one episode prior to pivoting to *Baby Reindeer*. When he circled back four years later, he admits being nervous about whether he'd "like it as much as I remembered liking it."

"There was certainly lines and scenes or whatever [that] I was like, *oh, this needs a lot of work*. But I think what was poking through for me was, *there's potential here*.," he recalls. "Although episode 1 stayed very similar to what it was, I remember making some cuts and there was maybe one too many jokes... There was characters maybe speaking slightly to get a punchline, maybe a bit of a comedian in me still existing at that point."

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In the first three episodes, we meet Ruben and Niall as teenagers (played by Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robertson, respectively), but the episodes are bookended by scenes set a couple decades in the future, where Ruben unexpectedly shows up at Niall's wedding, setting the scene for what seems to be building to a tense confrontation. But even before then, we see the depths of their toxic dependency on each other and how that plays a poisonous role in their relationship.

In episode 4, the two have an explosive argument in the hospital — the first time they've seen each other in well over a decade — after Niall is involved in an accident. They each have a chance to air their grievances: Ruben about Niall's betrayal, which landed him in prison, and Niall about his reasons for refusing to lie during Ruben's trial.

"I had to get myself into pretty brutal headspace for it. I remember listening to really challenging music and dredging up a lot of thoughts and feelings I hadn't visited in a while, but by the time I sat down, I was in a very sort of emotional place," Gadd explains. "Same with Jamie. It's funny because I think once you cry, you feel better. So even though like in other takes, we got to the crying, the raw takes were all the first ones, I realized. It was tightly scripted — we never veered from the script, that's pretty much the entire script as it was written — but it was one of those things where we just had to go for it, take a big deep breath in."

Years later, when Ruben lands in jail again, the two have another cathartic moment together, when Ruben finally admits the abuses committed against him when he was a child, trauma that impacted him and his behavior his entire life.

"*Half Man* is a lot about the difficulty of expression as a man — or as an alpha male, as Ruben prized himself on," he says. 'It's the difficulty of expression and vulnerability. Ruben clearly felt very vulnerable as a child for obvious reasons, and then, and then, in my mind, when I wrote him, he decided that through his life he was never gonna feel disempowered ever again like that. So anytime there was a tiny little thing to go against him, he would kick back as hard as possible and he would take no prisoners and he wouldn't care about what anyone thought but himself."

Jamie Bell and Richard Gadd in 'Half Man'.

Anne Binckebanck/HBO

But in this one moment, "It's almost the first time that they ever are honest with each other in the whole show. There's times where they sit and they lie and they ask each other questions and they say things to one another and they think they're being honest, but in a lot of ways, they're still not admitting the absolute truth of what's going on," he says. "They truly, I think, love one another for better, for worse, but they express it in the worst possible ways. But this is the conversation they should have maybe had when they were younger, and then who knows what [would've] happened — maybe it would've saved them a whole lot of problems."

It's what makes the end of the series all the more tragic. During a flash-forward in episode 4, we already know that Ruben dies at the wedding. But in the finale, we also see Niall die, strangled to death by Ruben.

"In a lot of ways, they had to die together, and that was kind of the idea," he says, acknowledging the unintended Shakespearean nature of the story. "There were many different thoughts about the ending, and I never really wanna say truly what I meant, especially that last bit with the way Ruben reacts. I never wanna say. I know what my artistic intentions were, but I always think it's important for people to take what they need from the ending in a lot of ways."

Among those thoughts are whether Ruben takes his own life or succumbs to being stabbed by Niall as he fights for his own life.

"Those are the two most common responses, I'd say. But then you get people saying all kinds of other stuff as well, which I'm like, *oh, interesting*. And I think that that's what excites me so much about the ending, that people land on different things," Gadd says.

***Check out more from EW's *****The Awardist*****, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best in TV, movies, and more.***

Listen to Gadd's full interview on *The Awardist*, below, where he also looks back on his brief appearance on *Outlander*, his time interviewing actors about their upcoming TV and film projects, and more.

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