“I had never seen someone write words for a character that felt like they could also have come from my brain.” Photo: Netflix

While the escalating tension between Donny (Richard Gadd) and his stalker Martha (Jessica Gunning) serves as the engine for Netflix’s surprise hit series Baby Reindeer, it’s Nava Mau’s Teri, a trans therapist with whom Donny falls in love, who holds the key to the show’s themes of empathy and compassion. Donny’s life may be unraveling, but it is his attraction to Teri — and the knotted feelings about his sexuality he’s forced to reckon with as a result — that serves as a kind of salve in his darkest hours. Mau herself views Teri as a “pillar” amidst the maelstrom Martha unleashes with her endless emails and not-so-empty threats. Like much of the rest of the show, Teri is loosely based on a real-life person who left an imprint on Gadd, but Mau’s tender performance elevates her to a wholly original character. As she describes it, “I had never seen someone write words for a character that felt like they could also have come from my life and my brain.”

The show’s become a huge word-of-mouth hit since it premiered in April. How has the experience been on your end?
It has been overwhelming. The sheer amount of people who have watched the show and reached out and are talking about it in their own language with their own people is beyond anything I could have imagined. Yesterday I was having dinner with a friend, and they started telling me about how the show made them reckon with sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and how it’s affected them on a cellular level. They’d never shared that with anybody before. People are seeing what it looks like for somebody like Richard to break the silence about his own experience as a survivor and how it affects everyone else in the story. It’s given people permission to break the silence about their own experiences.

The show definitely encourages discussion and a raw kind of openness. What was that like on the page, on first read-through?
It was like I got to read Richard’s diary. He is so searingly honest in what he says about himself and what he’s experienced with other people. I also felt overwhelmed by how alive and how compelling Teri was — and a little unnerved, to be honest. I had never seen someone write words for a character that felt like they could also have come from my life and my brain. It was a little uncanny.

How much of Teri was crafted whole cloth, and how much does she owe to a real person out there in the world?
We’ve really tried to maintain the privacy of the people that inspired the show. Richard and I talked at length over many months about the person who inspired Teri and their relationship. His eyes would light up. It was like he was remembering a warmth that had left him. It was clear their connection was electric and genuine.

What did you find yourself bringing to Teri?
At a certain point, we all accepted that Teri was becoming her own character, independent of the person who inspired her. I always try to find the physicality of a character early, sometimes even before accent. How does this character stand, walk, sit, lay, speak, dance? Where I landed, almost subconsciously, was that Teri is like a pillar. That was not exactly what we all thought the character was going to be. She was written with a lot of that electricity — what I call the “Teri fire” — and I had to find the balance of her core, which actually is very stable and still. There’s so much going on around her. There is pure chaos in Donny’s life. That chaos comes at Teri, too, but it makes her kind of unshakable.

There is a moment when Teri is shaken, when Martha comes at her, pointing out Teri’s immigrant status and telling her she looks like a man. Talk to me about shooting that scene, when both of those identities are laid bare and weaponized against Teri.
The attack from Martha was so painful and harrowing, and it was so much more because of the xenophobic rhetoric Martha was using. I allowed myself to emotionally lose myself in the moment. I genuinely felt that kind of hate coming at me. I was surprised it affected me so much. I guess I have this idea that I’m, like, above it all, you know? Racism can’t touch me. Transphobia can’t touch me. But at that moment, you realize it doesn’t matter how strong you are. That violence is hurtful. It was the hardest thing I had to do for this role.

This is a story about shame — how it can shape and warp us — and it excavates all sorts of trauma in and around the LGBTQ community. What does it feel like to be part of something that, as you mentioned earlier, seems to be resonating with so many and for so many different reasons?
It makes me emotional to think about filming this project. I deeply value the stories of survivors. I deeply value queer people coming together in creative collaboration. That’s what this was for me. I related to Richard. I didn’t see Richard as some stranger peering into my world trying to figure it out. It felt like we belong to the same world. That is not typical. In a lot of the scripts I read, characters that are written as trans feel as if we’re so alien, when in reality, we have full lives with friends and careers — and love and pain and joy. I could tell Richard understood that deeply.

That speaks to the notion of Baby Reindeer being about empathy in all its messiness. Because feeling for another can sometimes make you quite vulnerable.
It’s also a show about belonging. Donny so desperately wants to belong. Teri wants to belong. Shame prevents you from being truly seen. In order to belong, you have to be truly seen. It’s a cautionary tale about what gets in the way of belonging. But at the heart of it I see a need we all share — and Martha shares as well.

Have you seen the show all the way through? How was that experience different from, say, reading the script or shooting your own scenes?
I actually watched parts of it several times because I had to do ADR, and then I did the Spanish dub. Recently I finally watched all the way through the last couple episodes. I was sobbing even more than I did when I read the script, because now I know Richard; I’m watching a story about somebody I now know. It was painful to have to see Richard relive these really harrowing and violent experiences. The part I actually sobbed at was the comedy-show breakdown. I could feel all the years of emotion coming out at that moment.

Doing the Spanish dub must have been quite an odd experience. It’s like bringing a character to life in a whole new, different way.
Yes, because language is culture. We have different personalities in different cultures. It was a challenge to dive back into the story from this new perspective — a year later, too! I was in a booth in a studio on Zoom with everybody. It was so different than when we filmed, and I was with Richard and our directors, Weronika Tofilska and Josephine Bornebusch, and the intimacy coordinator. I really got to live in the story when we were filming, and it was very different to dub that. It was sort of like painting something from memory. I also feel like it gave me this sense of closure. When we finally got to the end, I really felt like, Now I can let her go. Now the story does not belong to me anymore.