Richard Gadd’s visceral transformation from Baby Reindeer’s pub pushover Donny Dunn to alpha-male biker Ruben Pallister in the HBO/BBC follow-up series Half Man certainly proved to be a talking point as Emmy season started to gather steam. It’s arguable, however, that Gadd’s secret weapon was his choice of co-star; playing Ruben’s stepbrother Niall, Jamie Bell seems at first to be the innocent victim of Ruben’s pent-up rage. As the six-episode mini-series progresses, however, Niall reveals himself to be the real agent of chaos in this dark tale of men in crisis. Bell spoke to Deadline from Birmingham, where his playing the grown-up Duke Shelby in a new series of Peaky Blinders. The comparisons are not lost on the 40-year-old Northerner. “Complex men, yeah,” he laughs. “That seems to be the way of it at the minute.

DEADLINE: When did you first get involved with Half Man?

JAMIE BELL: A couple of years ago. It was called Lions at the time, and Richard wasn’t even in it. I forget how this worked, but I think I was sent episode six they sent to me first, which was probably smart because that’s the main one that I was going to be in. So, I was reading that and seeing this downward spiral of self-destruction that this man was in, and the combustible relationship that he shares with this man Ruben — all the shame and repression that is plaguing him, and the constant terrible decisions he keeps making for himself. I was so intrigued by it. I was just so intrigued by the oblivion of it all, of how these two men could possibly get to this point. And so, very avidly, I went back and read chronologically through the other episodes. Richard’s writing is just so incredibly visceral. On a sensory level, it really takes you to those places in your life that you’ve held onto but you hide away. It’s very personal writing and you can’t help but bring your own sense of personal memory to it and personal experience to it as well.

Then I met Richard in LA, and he told me that he wrote the part with me in mind, which, obviously, I was very flattered by. I mean, incredibly, that’s never happened to me before. And then when I heard that he was going to be in it, I was like, OK, this is definitely, we could be onto something here. When people asked me, “What’s it about?” I was like, “It’s about these two men and their relationships over three decades.” And I love things like that, because it’s an opportunity for an actor to flex, it really is.

DEADLINE: What do you think tipped the scales to make him want to be in it?

BELL: I didn’t have a lot of conversations with him about it. I did, on our first meeting, very plainly say, “Why aren’t you doing it?” I just think it was not something that he had considered. He conceived it very differently in his brain. So, I think it took a second for him to warm up to it. I don’t want to speak for him, but I’ll say this. When I told him he should be in it, what I then didn’t consider was that he was going to have to put on 60-70lbs — he was going to have to morph into this almost animalistic creature.

It’s a lot of work on his part; it’s not an easy part. There’s a lot that he has to do to transform. And I think maybe more than anything, he saw that as an opportunity for himself to really do something wildly different after Baby Reindeer. He’s wearing so many hats in this; he’s playing the part, he’s the showrunner. He does have a lot of opinions about performance and how things are run, all that stuff. And I think he only just got done with it a couple of weeks before it started airing. So, it’s been an odyssey for him for sure.

DEADLINE: Had you seen Baby Reindeer before you committed to it?

BELL: I knew about it because everyone was watching it, but I didn’t know what it was, just that the title was so odd. My wife was watching it at the time and I think I then put two and two together and went, “Oh, I think I’m meeting him next week.” She was like, “What?” And as she was watching it, I stumbled into the room while his character was doing this kind of monologue on stage, and he’s dressed in his standup outfit and he’s going through all the gamut of emotions. He’s hilarious and he’s broken, all these things, just the whole gamut of emotions. And I was like, “Oh my God, wow.”

I mean, he’s also an unbelievable performer. He not only wrote this, but he’s got this incredible power as a performer. And so, I knew after that, especially that him lending himself to Ruben in that way, that he would understand what’s underneath Ruben. It’s not just a hulking mass. There’s a lot going on underneath it. Yeah, I thought if he could bring even an ounce of that to Half Man, it would be something.

DEADLINE: So how many scripts did you see? How secretive was Richard about the process?

BELL: Again, he can probably speak to this better than I can, but I think he writes in a way where… [Pauses.] If it’s coming to him, he writes that stuff first, which means he doesn’t write in order. I think he was more confident about how it would end than what was going to happen in the middle. So that’s why, I think, six was delivered to me first. Five was never ready for a long time — a long, long time — so I had, like, one, two, three, four and six and this kind of missing middle bit of five. By the way, I also got to see all the assemblies of all the work that the actors playing the younger versions of us had done — that Mitchell [Robertson] and Stuart [Campbell] had done. So, before I had even started, I had seen a lot of the show. Honestly. I knew what it was.

DEADLINE: I’m only using the word secretive in the way that Ken Loach keeps his scripts from actors. It’s not about being secretive as such; it’s just he doesn’t want you to be exposed to the storyline just yet. If that makes sense.

BELL: Yeah, of course. But I also don’t like that approach — I need to know. I get very antsy. I need to chart and start imagining and thinking and developing things. So, I wouldn’t have liked that anyway. I think it was more that he was just up against it, and Baby Reindeer had taken up so much of his bandwidth. And then when we started shooting, he was like, “I have to get the show finished.” I mean, he was still writing up until days before we were filming as well. It was kind of constantly evolving, constantly changing.

DEADLINE: How much time were you able to spend with Mitchell, who plays the younger you?

BELL: Well, this is what’s funny about that. It’s like when I read those early episodes, especially one and two, I was reaching out to Richard, saying, “Listen, I would love a Zoom meeting with Mitchell. I’d love to talk with him. I’d love to just be on the same page with him. I’d love to get a sense of him, just see him, show my face, introduce myself and all that stuff. Do you think Mitchell would be OK with that? Is that all right? I don’t want to make it weird for Mitchell or anything. If Mitchell’s OK.”

And they were like, “Yeah, Mitchell would probably be fine with that. I don’t really see any problem with it.” Because, in my mind, I thought he was going to be a 15-or 16-year-old kid and what we actually had was someone in their late 20s who was going to pretend to be 15 or 16. So anyway, I had all this sensitivity about this young actor who hadn’t done a lot and I didn’t want to overwhelm him or whatever. And the reality is, he’s almost 30 years old, I think he can handle a Zoom call. So, that was kind of quite weird. But like I said, we did Zoom, we talked for a little bit, not very long, emailed a little bit throughout, but more than anything, I just watched his work. Which was great because you have this living, breathing, emoting backstory to draw from, to pull from as you’re doing it. So that was really helpful.

DEADLINE: How did you find the character? What’s great about the show is we think that Ruben is the monster — but is maybe Niall the monster. He is the more unmoored, the more unhinged, the more dangerous person.

BELL: Frankly, there’s a little bit of Patricia Highsmith there, a little bit of Ripley. I mean, I do see him as someone who’s wearing many faces. He’s someone who’s pretending to be someone he’s not. He’s a hundred people a day and he doesn’t like any of them, and none of them are truly who he is. In the end — much to your point — I think he does become the much more malevolent person. Someone who presents as meek and mild-mannered and not threatening and not intimidating, but, really, underneath it all is incredibly calculating.

I find that to be much more transgressive than someone who’s hulking and dominant and intimidating and physically capable. I like that the character starts off as this innocent boy who’s obviously experienced familial dysfunction and all these things that are kind of going to plague him throughout his life, but he’s not knowingly cruel. I think Niall is someone who in the end does become kind of quite knowingly cruel to people, because he will not deal with himself on any real terms whatsoever.

DEADLINE: Why was Episode 5 so tricky?

BELL: I don’t know. I just think it wasn’t written. I think he literally just hadn’t gotten around to it. I don’t think it was anything more than that. In a way, it’s kind of a bridge episode to get you to the finale, because once you’ve had the big coming together, they finally meet each other. And what I like about Episode 4, in the hospital, is that at the end of this scene, it doesn’t end with them killing each other. It ends with them hugging each other. You think when they come together again, all that history is just going to come to the fore and they’re going to be at each other’s throats, but it’s not that way at all. So, what happens next? I find that, actually, Episode 5 is where the real Ripley-esque, Patricia Highsmithy stuff does come out. It really is very unpleasant, quite reprehensible behavior. I mean, this is the lede of the show, but the complexity of it, I love. The duality of [the brothers’ relationship], I really like a lot.

DEADLINE: I mentioned John Steinbeck, which Richard liked.

BELL: [Laughs.] I bet he did!

DEADLINE: But there’s such a tension between your characters, even though you two obviously get on very well. As an actor, how do you foster that sense of unease?

BELL: I think it was born out of the way we started the show. We started our work together in that barn. Literally, the first thing we did was try to kill each other, and that kind of work is not just stunt work. I do find it as intimate as love scenes, because the other guy’s body is physically on top of you. There’s spit and sweat and closeness, and I’m in a state as an actor where I’m fighting for my life. You know what I mean? That’s what I’m replicating.

I burst a blood vessel in my eye that day, and it was there for two weeks afterwards. If you look, there’s a burst blood vessel in one of my eyes — that’s because of him strangling me, or rather it’s me holding my breath, simulating being strangled. So, in that sense, what we shared together, what we went through in that barn, it really did feel like we’d been through 10 rounds with each other. He was sweating, I was sweating at the end of it.

We were exhausted. It was like a baptism of fire, honestly, but this is where these characters exist, in this space of brutality but also closeness and intimacy. Unpleasantness, but real, genuine care. That was the North Star for the whole thing. But Richard’s very funny, and he’s very self-effacing, and obviously very clever, and a lot of the time we’d be laughing when we weren’t supposed to be. I’m sure they had to cut around that a lot.

DEADLINE: Did you have fight training? I mean, because it looks pretty-

BELL: No, none of that stuff. I mean, it was vaguely plotted out, vaguely planned out. But no, in the end, you just throw yourself in the dirt and you just start doing it. It was intense.

DEADLINE: You’ve since done press for the show. What do people talk to you about, and what questions do they have for you?

BELL: I’m obviously working on something else at the minute, so I actually haven’t done a lot of press on it, simply because I just haven’t been available to do it. So, I’ve been seeing from afar everyone else do it, which is great. But what has been nice is just the kind of unsolicited messages that you get, which is mostly people going, “Holy shit, this show is so intense. How did you get through it?” I got something from my mother the other day, which was just like, “I hope you’re OK.” I’m not going to lie; it was difficult to make.

It was hard. It was easily one of the more challenging things I’ve ever done. Richard writes so much dialogue. A lot of the scenes are just two people talking, five-page scenes, 15-page scenes, and the schedule for me was — as it probably was for Mitchell as well at the beginning — just unforgiving. We had no money to make the show. A lot of the time there was no overtime, actors would be speaking and the lights would come on. They’d be like, “Sorry, that’s it.” And be like, “Do I get to finish the take?” They’d be like, “No.” At times it was unpleasant to go to work. I was like, “I don’t want to be in this physical space anymore. It’s not a pleasant place to be.”

DEADLINE: Did the character stay with you?

BELL: Only to the point where I definitely saw certain elements of the character that are me, for sure. I have a lot of self-loathing. I really do. And especially in my job, especially in my work, I’m always like, “That’s shit. Why are you wasting everyone’s time?” Stuff like that. So, that I fully understand. I really understand that on a microbial level. I’m trying to be better at that because I know it’s not helpful and I know that it puts you in this negative mindset. But that’s the process for me; like, “It’s not good enough, it’s not good enough, it’s not good enough.” And it’s always been that way. I don’t know how to do it any different to be honest. So, I’d like to say it was very easy to leave Niall at the door, but I also know that a lot of him is also me. That said, I’m never the best person to say whether I leave it at the door. The best people to tell you are your friends and your family. They’ll tell you if you’ve left it or not. They’re the ones who tell you, like, “You’re bringing all that energy back home, and we don’t want any of that.” I was alone in Glasgow making this for however long it was — three months or whatever — so I didn’t see them all that much. But yeah, it was definitely intense. It was intense for sure.