Richard Gadd, whose semi-autobiographical 2024 series Baby Reindeer earned six Emmys and countless appearances on best of lists, roared back to television this spring with HBO’s Half Man. It’s a project he started writing in 2019, before he made Baby Reindeer.
Half Man fits immaculately into a recent wave of television that examines modern masculinity, like Adolescence, Lord of the Flies, and even the documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (though Gadd wrote Half Man before the manosphere was a well-known term).
Here, Gadd breaks down the explosive ending of Half Man and how the show’s tense final fifteen minutes deliver the fates of Niall and Ruben, finally revealing what happens at Niall’s wedding to Alby (Charlie de Melo).
Before he can answer, the show goes back in time to reveal that Niall, who previously slept with Ruben's wife Mona (Amy Manson), is actually the biological father of Ruben's son Baird. Throughout the finale, Niall continues to struggle with his identity, using chemsex parties as a crutch that are slowly but surely derailing his life. At a sexual health clinic, Niall spots Alby, who’s working as a nurse. Niall hasn’t seen Alby since Ruben brutally attacked him when they were teenagers. But now, their chemistry is undeniable, and they start seeing each other. Niall’s life starts to turn around.
Charlie de Melo and Jamie Bell —Anne Binckebanck—HBO“There’s a human capacity to repress yourself and create a prison of your own making, to the point where it feels like the world is against you,” says Gadd. “What Reuben 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.”
Despite the tension that’s been festering between them over the years, there’s a sense of calm between them, as Niall has finally revealed a big part of his life to Ruben. It encourages Ruben to be vulnerable, too. He reveals to Niall that when he was young, his father sexually abused him. Male sexual abuse is a topic Gadd also deals with in Baby Reindeer, with an equally brilliant sensitivity that he does in Half Man. He tells Niall with tears streaming down his face, “In a lot of ways, it’s the closest I’ve ever been with someone.”
“Until he breaks down with Niall, he’d never allowed himself to feel vulnerable. His best form of defense 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.”
“What would save them is shaking off these ideas that being sexually confused is a dent to their masculinity, or that being sexually abused is a dent to their masculinity,” says Gadd. “But in their prism of maledom, that's how they feel, and it blights their life to the absolute extreme. If only they found vulnerability and communication and acceptance sooner—things might have been okay.”
But this rare moment of joy between the pair is undercut with tension as Niall reveals his biggest secret: that he slept with Mona and Baird is his son.
How Half Man ends
“There are certainly subliminals to their relationship, which I intentionally wrote,” says Gadd, though he adds, “the love they do have, before it is anything sexual, is sort of heartfelt and kind of overwhelming. As if they shouldn’t feel this way for each other as men, which also stifles them.”
When Ruben turns up uninvited to Niall’s wedding, he is feeling completely emasculated by Niall’s actions. “His only way to get his power back is to kill him with his bare hands,” says Gadd. “It’s a display of physical dominance, and that’s all Ruben knows in times of huge disempowerment and crisis.”
Richard Gadd —Anne Binckebanck—HBO
Gadd is protective of the ending, preferring that people take what they want from it, and he left things intentionally ambiguous. “In a roundabout way, the show has asked you to fill in the gaps between episodes—the years that go by, the things that have happened. Therefore, it felt fitting in a lot of ways, that for a fundamentally contorted and complicated relationship, that there was an ending that was left open to interpretation,” says Gadd.
“There's also a switch of perspectives,” says Gadd. “We've been with Niall the whole time, and the first time we ever see anything from Ruben's point of view is right after Niall's death. It felt fitting to just give you a little snapshot of that before we bring the show to a close.” Perhaps this is Gadd’s hint supporting my theory that when Niall is no longer alive, Ruben cannot be, either. Thus, the cut to black as soon as we finally reach Ruben’s point of view. There is no Ruben without Niall, and no Niall without Ruben.
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