By now, much has been made of Baby Reindeer‘s confessional nature. The series from Richard Gadd, which continues to hover around the top of the Netflix charts, recounts his experience of being stalked and sexually abused.
‘This is a true story’ types out at the start of the first episode, letting us know the people involved are all real, from the woman who relentlessly stalked him to the older male comedian who raped him and the trans woman he had a loving but doomed relationship with. In the series, that woman, Teri, is played by Nava Mau. “I was transfixed by the writing because I had never read anything like it before,” Mau tells GQ. “There’s this character that almost felt like, in a parallel universe, someone was writing about me. It makes you almost jittery to see a character that speaks to you in that way.”
Teri and Donny (Gadd’s name in the series) meet on a trans dating site. While Donny is battling his own internalised homophobia and shame, Teri is wholly confident in herself. “Teri has no question about who she is,” says Mau. “She almost is not even going to entertain any sort of attack on that.” After roadblocks at the start of their relationship that stem from Donny concealing his real identity, the pair end up falling into a loving and patient relationship. But as Donny’s stalker Martha (Jessica Gunning) ramps up her delusion and forcefulness, cracks begin to show and the pair start to fall apart, with Donny’s own propensity for self-sabotage catalysing their breakdown.
Here, Mau chats with GQ about learning about the real Teri, Baby Reindeer‘s radical approach to trans characterisation and whether audiences should be trying to track down the real people involved in Gadd’s story.
GQ: Teri is based on a real trans woman Richard had a relationship with. Did he talk to you at all about her?
Nava Mau: Richard shared a lot with me. Richard was very generous with sharing, you know, pieces of his own experience and the real-life relationship that inspired this. This relationship between Teri and Donny, I almost don’t even know how to convey how incredible it is for an actor to be able to go to the writer and be like, ‘Hey, just tell me what it was like’.
How does Teri square up to the kinds of trans representation we usually see in mainstream TV and film?
Well, I think that everyone should watch the documentary Disclosure, directed by Sam Feder. It’s required education for everyone and I think it does a fantastic job of laying out the way that, historically, trans people have been represented on screen from a place of imagination and conjecture. And we see how that imagined characterisation of trans people has often been violent and demeaning and dehumanising. What felt very different to me about Baby Reindeer is that Teri is a trans character who’s written from a starting point of reality. She’s based on a real person, Richard had a relationship with a trans woman that inspired the story and so I think that allowed for a level of nuance and intricacy that still feels groundbreaking.
