After mining his own personal history to great acclaim in Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd joked that for his next project, he “kind of ran out of a few things to draw upon.” But while Half Man is wholly fictional, there a lot of him in it.

“I wanted to sort of challenge myself in a different realm,” he explained during the Deadline Contenders TV panel for the HBO six-part limited series. “I think every piece of work is sort of autobiographical to a certain extent, because it’s always borrowed from a writer’s sort of view of the world or how they see characters, the human traits, human behaviors.”

Gadd definitely was looking for an opportunity that was as immersive as Baby Reindeer, and similarly he wrote, produced and starred in Half Man. “I like to be across everything. I mean, it’s all-consuming. When I do a show, I’ve done two shows back-to-back in the space of like six years. And as a showrunner, I like to be across every creative decision — everything from the look, tone, feel, the way it’s shot, all the way to the shoes the character wears.

“It can be very kind of all-consuming,” Gadd admitted. “I kind of work day and night all the way through the weekends and everything. … I’ve got this thing in me where I never want to look back and think I didn’t give it everything, but it can also be this kind of self-perpetuating cycle where you work all the time. But I love it at the same time. I find it thrilling.”

That means not resting on the many laurels he received for his widely popular 2024 show.

“I talk about working all the time,” he admitted. “I remember I was in L.A. doing all the Emmy stuff, and I was laptop-on-my-knee kind of thing. I finished the sound mix of Baby Reindeer on the 13th of December 2023, I remember, and the very next day, 8 a.m., I got up and I started Half Man. And so it literally was back-to-back. I mean, it was a sleep in between and that was it. And then I guess here we are two years later, really. Baby Reindeer came out like two years and 15-odd days ago. And I don’t know what it was, I had to give it a shot. I didn’t want to sit and bask in it. I wanted to turn around quite quickly. I wanted to do it again.”

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While the plotlines of his series are radically different, they’re similarly intense in tone and theme. “People will say [Half Man] is a show about masculinity or male violence, but to me it’s about the struggle of expression in men, the struggle of vulnerability,” he said. “I think in a lot of ways, I think it’s about two men struggling to love themselves and struggling to love one another in a lot of ways, and the difficulty of vulnerability.”

He promised that eventually he’ll get to a story that will put actual smiles on people’s faces. “I’ve got to do a studio sitcom next. Yeah, like one of those family sitcoms,” he chuckled. “We’ll see. It’s a journey, isn’t it? It’s a journey. So one day you’ll get a really happy show out of me, I promise.”

Check back Monday for the panel video.