*Warning – contains full spoilers for Half Man episode 6.*
This article contains discussions of sexual assault that some readers may find distressing.
One of the final scenes of Richard Gadd‘s series Half Man was a hard-hitting sequence in which Niall and Ruben finally opened up about elements of their lives that had been repressing for a long time.
For Niall, this involved him finally coming out to Ruben, who did not react with the shock or horror that the former expected. Instead, he said he was “proud”, that he had always suspected Niall was gay, and that Niall himself was the homophobe in his life.
For Ruben, he revealed a dark trauma in his past, one which helped to explain his violent behaviour throughout his life – he was both physically and sexually abused by his father while he was growing up.
It’s a powerful, horrifying moment, one which, for some, will have been a complete shock, while others may have seen it coming. As it turns out, there were a number of hints towards this along the way.
“Ruben, you never see him scared, really,” Gadd said, while speaking exclusively with Radio Times about this reveal in the finale. “You see his empire start to crumble in episode 5 and you see, in a very different way… I don’t know whether it’s fear.
“But the only time I thought you see him as kind of scared of someone is when his dad’s outside the window [in episode 1] and it’s not a physical terror, it’s something much, much deeper.”
Another moment which hinted towards the abuse Ruben suffered came in episode 3, when Ruben told Niall that when someone gropes you “they attack your f***ing soul!”, becoming suddenly furious. This was a favourite moment for Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robertson, who played the younger versions of Ruben and Niall, to film.
“I definitely tried to sew it and hint at it,” Gadd said. “There’s a few lines. There’s the bit in the field, and then there’s the time where he says, ‘My father had a heart attack and that’s why I was crying.’ And Niall goes, ‘Oh god, well, that’s a good reason to cry,’ and he goes, ‘No, it was when I saw him walking up the path towards the house.'”
The scene Gadd refers to comes just moments after the earlier scene in the field he referenced.
“I was hinting at it in a lot of ways,” Gadd continued. “Like, in episode 5 in the cocktail bar, Mona says something like, ‘He wants a kid because his dad didn’t treat him so nice.’ So there were hints along the way.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, I think he’s been abused, I think there’s something wrong that’s gone down there,’ and then there’s other people who think it’s come out of nowhere. I quite like that. I quite like that some people spot it, and other people don’t.”
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