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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 few struggling Scottish comic and a lady 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 items, 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 state of affairs 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 someone in a darkish alleyway. It’s someone 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 indicate 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 in any respect, we could add, that is pure hypothesis—has emerged in regards to 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 might 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 necessary to notice that no fees have been laid, and as a result of defamation legal guidelines, the identification of Gadd’s abuser could by no means develop into public information except police develop 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 ailing, 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 consumer wrote: “Can we fairly please put this vitality into discovering the real-life Darrien? As a result of except all of that was fictionalized, he’s probably nonetheless working within the business and has an extended checklist of victims exterior of Gadd.”
One other noticed: “I’m high quality with not understanding who Martha is, possibly as a result of her portrayal was relatively sympathetic at occasions. But additionally she a minimum of needed to reply for her points in some unspecified time in the future. Darrien principally acquired away with it and will nonetheless be doing that shit.”
Equally, Gadd has not disclosed the identification of the real-life Martha as a result of 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 in opposition to her however didn’t need her to go to jail. In line with an interview with The Instances UK, he “didn’t need to throw somebody who was that stage of mentally unwell in jail.” He felt “blended emotions about it” however that the state of affairs 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 weak, someone who was mentally ailing, somebody who couldn’t cease as a result of they believed what was of their head.”
For extra on Child Reindeer, take a look at Richard Gadd’s e book
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 chuckle. 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…”
