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Because the Netflix collection continues to dominate TikTok, followers have a concept about Sean Foley and Child Reindeer. The present is a couple of struggling Scottish comic and a girl who obsessively stalks him, and naturally, has audiences buzzing about the actual identities of a few of the characters.
Actor and author Richard Gadd conceptualized Child Reindeer after a girl despatched him 41,071 emails, 350 hours’ value of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Fb messages, 106 pages of letters, and a wide range of bizarre presents, together with a reindeer toy, sleeping drugs, a woolly hat and boxer shorts over 4 years. It started as a one-man present on the Edinburgh Fringe and acquired picked up by Netflix, that includes Gadd as a fictionalized model of himself named Donny Dunn. The present explores his traumas and the way the scenario affected his profession and private life.
“Stalking on tv tends to be very sexed-up. It has a mystique,” Gadd informed Netflix’s Tudum. It’s any person in a darkish alleyway. It’s any person who’s actually horny, who’s very regular, however then they go unusual little by little,” Gadd explains. “However stalking is a psychological sickness. I actually wished to point out the layers of stalking with a human high quality I hadn’t seen on tv earlier than. It’s a stalker story turned on its head. It takes a trope and turns it on its head.”
Now, followers on TikTok have a concept in regards to the true identities of Gadd’s stalker, and a Sean Foley, Child Reindeer concept—with no proof by any means, we might add, that is pure hypothesis—has emerged regarding the true identification of the highly effective English TV author/producer who sexually abuses Donny.
Sean Foley & Child Reindeer
The true identification of Darrien (performed by Tom Goodman-Hill) stays a thriller, nevertheless, followers on TikTok and Reddit have theorized (with no proof, FYI) that it could possibly be Sean Foley, a British director, author, comic, and actor. In 2019, he was appointed the Creative Director of Birmingham however in 2024, he stepped down. It’s vital to notice that no expenses have been laid, and resulting from defamation legal guidelines, the identification of Gadd’s abuser might by no means change into public information until police change into concerned.
“When it got here to the purpose of going to the police, I simply couldn’t stand the irony of reporting her however not him,” Donny says within the present. “There was at all times a way that she was unwell, that she couldn’t assist it, whereas he was a pernicious, manipulative groomer. To confess to her was to confess to him, and I hadn’t admitted him to anybody but.”
On a Reddit thread speculating who the stalker Martha is, one person wrote: “Can we fairly please put this power into discovering the real-life Darrien? As a result of until all of that was fictionalized, he’s doubtless nonetheless working within the trade and has a protracted listing of victims outdoors of Gadd.”
One other noticed: “I’m advantageous with not understanding who Martha is, perhaps as a result of her portrayal was fairly sympathetic at instances. But additionally she a minimum of needed to reply for her points in some unspecified time in the future. Darrien mainly acquired away with it and will nonetheless be doing that shit.”
Equally, Gadd has not disclosed the identification of the real-life Martha resulting from privateness and authorized causes. “We’ve gone to such nice lengths to disguise her to the purpose that I don’t suppose she would acknowledge herself,” he defined to GQ. “What’s been borrowed is an emotional fact, not a fact-by-fact profile of somebody.”
Gadd himself doesn’t know her whereabouts both. He had a restraining order towards her however didn’t need her to go to jail. Based on an interview with The Occasions UK, he “didn’t wish to throw somebody who was that stage of mentally unwell in jail.” He felt “combined emotions about it” however that the scenario was now “resolved.”
On why he felt a way of empathy for the real-life Martha, he informed GQ UK, “Somebody is available in who appears very regular, they appear good, however little by little they get weirder and weirder. Stalking is a psychological dysfunction, it’s an sickness and I wasn’t coping with somebody who felt calculated or insidious. I felt I used to be coping with somebody who was susceptible, any person who was mentally unwell, somebody who couldn’t cease as a result of they believed what was of their head.”
For extra on Child Reindeer, try Richard Gadd’s guide
and play that impressed the Netflix collection. The script, which gained an Olivier Award in 2020, “is described as a chilling story about obsession, delusion and the terrifying ramifications of a fleeting mistake.” Gadd writes in Child Reindeer, “I checked out her, wanting her to giggle. Wanting her to share within the joke. However she didn’t. She simply stared. I knew then, in that second – that she had taken it actually…”