Warning: This story contains spoilers for Episode 2 of Half Man. Please proceed with caution!
A defining moment in the lives of the young Ruben Pallister (Stuart Campbell) and Niall Kennedy (Mitchell Robertson) occurs at the end of the second episode of Richard Gadd‘s latest limited series. While growing closer to Alby (Bilal Hasna), a confident gay man, at college, Niall starts questioning his own sexuality. However, before Niall can come out to Ruben, his half-brother, Ruben beats up Alby in one of the most violent fight scenes depicted on television in recent memory.
These events lead to the police arresting Ruben, while Niall is silently traumatized by what he witnesses. Decades later, Ruben and Niall (now played by Gadd and Jamie Bell, respectively) come into contact at a wedding, and it’s clear they are both still haunted by that moment.
Gold Derby checked in with Gadd (who wrote every episode), Campbell, and Robertson about the Half Man scene in question, which aired Thursday night on HBO. Also see their thoughts on last week’s premiere.
“I think Ruben’s best form of defense is attack,” Gadd tells us. “I’m not saying that’s right, but that’s what he’s learned. He’s felt great disempowerment in his life growing up. And he’s clearly made a pact with himself that if he feels at any point a sense of disempowerment, there’s just a switch in his head. He’s got a fierce, protective nature over Niall, but when Ruben snaps, it’s less about taking it out on the person in front of him. It goes to that river of pain he experienced when he was a child.”
Gadd isn’t worried that audiences might be turned off by violence, because “the story comes first,” he explains. “The violence in the show is always born out of character and plotting. It always reveals more and more about the characters. Where violence falls down in television is when it’s used almost cynically or gratuitously, just for violence’s sake, just to make people recoil. There’s something very realistic about the violence in the show.”
Campbell reveals that he and Gadd “collaborated together” on Ruben’s physicality during the rehearsal process for consistency’s sake. “Richard was really good at being, like, ‘You do your thing, be spontaneous, be free in the room, find the truth with Mitchell, don’t feel like there’s any boundaries, trust your instincts, and don’t let me inhibit your performance in any way,'” the young actor recalls.
Ruben attacks Alby because “he is trying to protect Niall,” Campbell theorizes. “He’s a walking contradiction, if I had to describe the character. I suppose there’s probably flavoring in some stuff to do with trauma that he’s had in his past, something to do with his dad. But in the immediacy of the moment, seeing Niall getting thrown by Alby, there’s a trigger that goes off in his head. He’s not really had the upbringing or education to be able to deal with his emotions. He just sees red. He doesn’t want to do it, but that’s what he knows.”
Robertson found himself in an “emotional” state witnessing the fight play out, particularly when he heard “the sound in Stuart’s face and that almost cry coming through in the scream.” He adds, “It was challenging in that sense. It was tough to watch.”
As for filming the scene on the day, Robertson remembers, “We had a really great stunt team and they were great at helping us. But it was still a really distressing thing to watch. Obviously, when we’re shooting it, we can see that it’s fake. But your body doesn’t know the difference. Your body’s feeling what it’s feeling while it’s going on.”
Gadd, who won three Emmys producing, writing, and starring in Baby Reindeer, concludes by saying, “Ultimately, Half Man is about male repression, male rage, male violence. To do a show exploring that and not show the extremity of said violence feels like it would cause the actual show to not fully work. To show the depths of male repression, you need to go to the extreme, in my opinion.”
