Jessica Gunning has said she won’t watch interviews with the woman her Baby Reindeer character is allegedly based on because of her relationship with the show’s creator, Richard Gadd.
Gadd plays a fictionalised version of himself in the series who gets stalked by a lonely and mentally ill woman called Martha after meeting her in the pub where he works.
Gunning said she has intentionally avoided engaging with any content that may “upset” Gadd as controversy over fans “unmasking” the real life Martha continues.
Speaking to the Radio Times, Gunning claimed fans uncovering the identities of the people who inspired the Netflix show “almost undermines” Gadd’s experience of stalking and sexual assault.
She said: “Me and Richard have this close connection and I’m very concerned about anything that might upset him. He’s a survivor of sexual assault, and he was stalked, and I think that any search for real people almost undermines that slightly.”
She added: “He said in the past that he didn’t want any internet sleuths to go out and try and find the identities of these real people. He deliberately changed identities for a reason. But of course, in this day and age, it’s inevitable, especially with a show this big, that people are intrigued by who the real people are.
“I think he was incredibly brave to bare all. He really did put everything in that show, warts and all, errors, mistakes that were made,” she said.
“I’m always fiercely protective of him and I want to make sure that none of this is upsetting for him, really, so I try and keep out of any of that stuff.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Gunning admitted she found the experience of playing Martha Scott mentally and physically draining.
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Gunning said portraying Gadd’s stalker was the first time in her 17 year career where a role has haunted her after filming for the series has finished.
The actor revealed she struggled to “shift the feeling of the role” of Martha and the “feeling of the experience” after Baby Reindeer wrapped.
“Especially on those high-intensity scenes, like at the bus stop, or when Donny [Gadd] takes Martha back to her house, those were emotionally heavy days,” she said.
“Your body doesn’t really know sometimes that you’re pretending. There was an adrenaline for all of us that felt like we had been in that experience.
“You were left in that charged place.”
Scottish lawyer Fiona Harvey, 58, who claims she is the ‘real’ Martha – appeared on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored this month to “set the record straight” after fans of the show “unmasked” her by matching social media posts featured in the series with her own.
During the interview, which has amassed over 10 million views,Harvey denied that she had any criminal convictions during her interview and said the Netflix show’s suggestion that she did was “defamatory”. She has threatened to sue the streaming service.
In Baby Reindeer, which has been watched by 65 million people and makes the statement ‘this is a true story’, it is suggested that stalker ‘Martha’ goes to prison. However, there has been little evidence found to prove this.
Scottish MP John Nicolson has since written to Netflix to substantiate what it told a Parliamentary committee in regards to the accuracy of the TV show.
Netflix executive Benjamin King told the Culture Media and Sport Committee: “obviously a true story of the horrific abuse that the writer and protagonist Richard Gadd suffered at the hands of a convicted stalker”.
However, Nicolson said it is clear this evidence is “disputed” and said he would be writing to the company to “ask them to substantiate the claim they made”.
The Independent has contacted Netflix for a comment.