Half Man FYC panel
Richard Gadd being asked on the homoeroticism between Ruben and Niall (with captions and transcript added)
Many thanks to @we-are-all-in-the-gutter for original video here. 🧡
Transcript:
Interviewer: And I think that that is part of what makes the tension between them so electric and the love between them so electric is that it has this something else that feels really uncomfortable as part of this relationship. Was that something that was sort of like IN the script? Was that something that you found in, sort of, the process of making it together? And I'm curious for the other actors like how Richard kind of explained these dynamics or talked through these dynamics with you or how you understood them.
Richard: Yeah. Well, it was certainly intentional that their relationship existed on a kind of subliminal plane of kind of… Homoeroticism may be too strong a word. It is homoerotic for sure. I think really, like the show… in a lot of ways is two men struggling to articulate their love for one another and their love for themselves. And I think one of the biggest things they're repressing, apart from… along with their past and their own sense of identity and sexuality, is the profound, like, adoration for one another and profound love. And it veers into a very strange place for the both of them. And I think that sometimes like if we look back on all the relationships we've had in life and we think about the defining relationships we've had, it's not always the relationships we've had that are pure and beautiful and giving. The relationships we look back on are the ones that are fraught and complicated and you feel deeply for someone and you don't really know why. There are people, you know, that time in my life that I haven't spoken to in 10 years that years that I still… in there somewhere. And I don't really know why.
And these two people form a sort of primal bond where like the best psychiatrists in the world couldn't get to the heart of what they feel for one another. And I think it does veer into, certainly for Niall, a sort of sexual lust. And for Ruben, it's a sort of like a… something similar, but a need to sort of dominate this innocence, this kind of almost like… to envelop this man. So it certainly veers into like a primal place. But I think as human beings, like I think sometimes like my biggest issue with sometimes television and storytelling sometimes in general is that all the relationships are so clear and defined. You know human life and human behaviour is complicated. Even like the whole being here and the whole existence of life is so confusing. And I always try to bring that to the screen. I think that the most powerful relationships we have exist in the sphere of the unexplainable, and that's what I always try to get to with that. Ultimately their love for one another is… breaches a transcendental place that they're not even remotely capable of expressing.
