The ‘iCarly’ star was tormented by a stalked of her own — who in 2016 set himself on fire and fatally shot himself in her yard.
Baby Reindeer has gripped viewers around the world — Miranda Cosgrove included.
The Netflix series, which tells Richard Gadd’s real-life account with a stalker named Martha, whom he met while tending bar in London in 2013, hit home for the iCarly star, who had her own experience with a stalker eight years ago.
While Cosgrove’s real-life stalker ultimately set himself on fire and fatally shot himself in her yard, the incident still impacts the way she lives her life today.
“That’s another reason why I go back and forth to my parents’ house so much,” she told Bustle in a new interview with the outlet.
“I just don’t feel super safe in that house. For two years after it happened, I wouldn’t really stay there,” she added of the home where it happened — the home she still lives in to this day. “Then I got into a relationship and because that person was there with me, I was less scared. But I don’t really like being there on my own that much.”
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Cosgrove, now single and nearing her 31st birthday, is hoping to put that home and that chapter behind her, telling the outlet she’s looking for “a place that I feel really safe, to kind of start a new chapter.”
And though the show definitely had Cosgrove thinking back to her own stalking experience, she said she binged the show like the streamer’s many millions of viewers following its premiere last month.
“I didn’t think about it very much,” Cosgrove admitted, before sharing her admiration for Gadd’s candor in telling his story of stalking and abuse.
“I feel like if that were me,” she said, “having to go back through your most terrible experiences and then try to act them [out], that’d be so hard.”
Gadd, meanwhile, has said that telling his own personal truth — albeit dramatized for the screen — hasn’t been easy. And though Gadd altered the names and identities of the real-life people involved, there’s been some pushback, particularly from a woman that claims to be the real-life Martha, who labeled many of the allegations Gadd made about her on the series “untrue.”
Internet sleuths have also tried to dig up the identity of his abuser, despite the Scottish native urging against that. Despite it all, Gadd said he wanted the show to stay as true to his lived experience as possible.
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“I never wanted to kind of lie,” Gadd explained of the creative process, per The Hollywood Reporter. “I always had to constantly check myself to be like, does this feel truthful to me and to my experience all the way through? If it didn’t, I would have to bring it back. But it was a tightrope.”
He continued, “It was a constant process between what works for a TV show and not selling out on your own story, and that continued all the way from writing all the way to filming and all the way through the editing process in finding that right balance. I think we did in the end, but it was a hell of a process.”
As for why he feels Baby Reindeer has resonated with viewers so deeply, Gadd said that it reflects some of the more difficult things happening in the world right now.
“The world is maybe in a bit more pain than I think we realize, perhaps,” the actor-comedian reflected. “If you just look at the state of the world right now, everything just feels slightly wrong. I think Baby Reindeer has stood out so much because it goes back to something about the human condition, which is dark and difficult and challenging, and every human being is a mixture of good and bad.”
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