‘Baby Reindeer’ star is struggling to find roles after hit series
This year, there have been few TV shows to enjoy the success of Baby Reindeer, which turned creator and lead actor Richard Gadd into a huge star. One might have thought that its co-star, Jessica Gunning, might have been experiencing a similarly skywards trajectory.
However, the truth appears to be that Gunning is struggling to find new roles after the success of Baby Reindeer. After playing the deranged stalker Martha in Gadd’s thriller, Gunning earned widespread acclaim, but that has not necessarily helped her career along.
Baby Reindeer has been viewed by nearly 100m people, and though Gadd has been met with several high-profile meetings surrounding his next plans and projects, the same cannot be said for Gunning, who seems to be in something of a career rut.
“Richard has got incredible meetings out of this, and everyone’s said to me, ‘What have you got?'” Gunning recently noted speaking with The Sun. Prior to Baby Reindeer, the West Yorkshire-born actor had performed in the likes of White Heat, What Remains, Back and The Outlaws.
Continuing to explain the kind of low-quality roles she has been offered since Baby Reindeer, Gunning added, “One was about sharks — Celebrity Infested Waters — where stars swim with sharks, the other was for an Australian touring production of Peter Pan to play Mr Smee. I was like, ‘the offers are flooding in.'”
While acting is not currently proving to be a positive avenue of creativity for Gunning, she has been enjoying more interest in her writing work. “I’ve been writing something for a million years that hopefully now is being a bit more made,” the actor had recently told the Perfect Day podcast.
She added, “It’s with Cate Blanchett’s production company, because I did a play with Cate five or six years ago, and I had this idea with my friend which was a pilot but things have now picked up with that.”
While Richard Gadd has been enjoying more success since Baby Reindeer, he’s also had to face a longstanding legal battle with the woman who inspired the character of Martha, who claimed that Gadd had not gained permission to write about her as a “true story”.
In his court filing, the writer and actor had written, “Fictionalised retelling of my emotional journey through several extremely traumatic real experiences. The series is a dramatic work. It is not a documentary or an attempt at realism.”