'Baby Reindeer' Just Made Emmy Award History For All The Right Reasons
It was the small screen runaway success that started life as an Edinburgh Fringe show and last night learned of its nomination for 11 Emmys ahead of this year's ceremony. If there's one thing Richard Gadd, the creator of limited series Baby Reindeer, wasn't expecting when he began serialising a traumatic chapter of his life, it was likely this.
The hit show, which was based on a true story and subsequently unleashed a debate about who has the right to tell another’s story, follows Richard Gadd’s Donny Dunn, a struggling comedian who encounters a lonely woman at the bar where he works. The lonely woman, Martha, played by Jessica Gunning, turns out to be a serial stalker and begins terrorising Donny and his girlfriend Teri, played by Nava Mau, who gets caught up in the mess.
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Baby Reindeer is the story of a stalker and their victim, but not as you’ve seen it before. It’s a tale that begins earnestly with a cup of tea and ends three years later after several breakdowns, 41,000 emails and hundreds of hours worth of voice messages. But your average stalking story this is not; if there’s one thing that Gadd’s seven-episode creation manages to do with aplomb it’s show the horror of stalking in its entirety.
Gadd and his team have been rightfully rewarded for their work. The show has been nominated for Best Limited Series, while its two female stars, Gunning and Mau, received nods for Best Supporting Actress, and it's here that Baby Reindeer really made history as Mau's nomination marks the first time a Latina trans person has been acknowledged in this category.
Speaking to Deadline soon after her nomination, Mau laughed that she had been crying for 45 minutes with 'overwhelming joy.' She added that it was proof that trans actors can surpass all expectations when given the right opportunities.
'For trans actors we just don’t get a lot of opportunities to develop our craft, grow as artists, and to be recognised for all that we are and all that we can be,' she said.
That's not to say that, despite it being incremental, progress isn't being made. There are more trans characters on the small screen than ever before – a 2022 GLAAD study found that of the 775 series regular characters, there were 42 regular and recurring transgender characters, up from 29 the year before.
Mau is also not the first trans woman to be nominated in a performing category at the Emmys; Laverne Cox was recognised for her work in Orange Is the New Black in 2014, but the fact that it took a decade for the work of another trans woman to be acknowledged highlights the chasm in the small screen's representation of trans actors.
Now that history has been made with Baby Reindeer, we simply need more nominations for trans actors to receive, awards for them to win and space for them to shine.
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