Baby Reindeer and fat representation on TV

I know I’m a little late to the conversation, but I want to talk a bit about Netflix’s latest hit series, Baby Reindeer. I have a feeling quite a few of you have seen it since Netflix is the most popular streaming service by far. The show is a dramatization of a stalking experience that the creator and star, Richard Gadd, went through. What I like about it is that first, that it’s not a stereotypical depiction of stalking: Donny (Gadd’s fictionalized self) makes some pretty terrible decisions along the way that enable Martha (his stalker) to continue pursuing him. Second, the show gradually reveals itself to be about much more than stalking. It’s really about how trauma fucks with us psychologically and leads us to make bad decisions. The show is a hard watch in a lot of ways (major trigger warning for sexual assault in ep 4), but I think it’s doing something novel by displaying Donny’s own complicity in the stalking. The story has been written about from many angles — including the way it takes on Gadd’s queerness and relationship with a trans woman — but it’s the casting of a fat actress (Jessica Gunning) as Martha that I want to talk about.

The first episode or two in particular are pretty rough in terms of fat representation. Martha is pathetic, delusional, gluttonous, and eventually violent. She is a lawyer but doesn’t seem educated or employed, and she has the most horrendous spelling you’ve ever seen (as shown in the many texts we see her sending to Donny). The depiction reinforces many negative stereotypes we have about fat women: we’re undesirable, pitiful, and will glom onto any man who offers us even an ounce of attention or compassion. The philosopher Kate Manne, who has written an incredible book called Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia that I highly recommend, published a Substack post recently critiquing the decision to cast a fat actress in this role.

First, I want to say that I agree with everything Kate says in this post. It felt shitty to see this character reinforce tropes about people who look like me. If I never see another onscreen portrayal of a fat woman like Martha, it’ll be too soon. And yet, when I started to research the woman who stalked Gadd in real life (fans of the show sussed out who it was quickly), it seemed to me that casting a fat actress to play her was probably an attempt at accurate representation. In recent weeks, she has identified herself publicly as Fiona Harvey — and was even interviewed by Piers Morgan.

And this is where I feel so conflicted. I do not want thin actors to portray people who are fat in real life. I’ve railed many times against fat suits, which seem to have made a comeback in recent years. In 2020, I published a feature in the LA Times in which I wrote that fat suits worn by thin actors — such as January Jones (Mad Men), Gwyneth Paltrow (Shallow Hal), and Eddie Murphy (The Nutty Professor) — had gone out of fashion. At the time, there were several shows featuring fat women as protagonists, including This Is Us, Shrill, Dietland, Good Girls, and Orange Is the New Black.

Four years later, I no longer feel so optimistic. Recently, we’ve seen many prestigious actors donning fat suits to portray fat characters or depict real-life fat people, a trend that dehumanizes fat people by reducing us to our body size and magnifying this one aspect of us. These include:

• Sarah Paulson (playing Linda Tripp in American Crime Story: Impeachment)
• Viola Davis (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom)
• Renee Zellweger (The Thing About Pam)
• Tom Hanks (Elvis)
• Emma Thompson (Matilda the Musical)
• Olivia Colman and Keegan-Michael Key (Wonka)
• And most famously, Brendan Fraser, who won an Oscar for his performance in The Whale.

What’s so striking about this list is that almost all of these people have numerous Oscar nominations, and most of them are Oscar winners!

When it comes to fat representation (especially women) on TV in general, I struggle to name more than a few starring roles. There’s Bridget Everett in Somebody, Somewhere (a wonderful show), Michelle Buteau in the hilarious, amazing Survival of the Thickest, and Queen Latifah in The Equalizer. I know the third season of Bridgerton just came out on Netflix and apparently Nicola Coughlan has become the star, but let’s be honest, she’s not even plus-size. She’s a size 10–12, which is actually smaller than the average American woman!! The fact that she’s considered “large” in all the media coverage of the show is frankly just evidence of how appallingly unrealistic Hollywood’s criteria for body size is.

To sum up, we’re at a point in which fat suits have made a comeback at the same time that the number of prominent roles for fat actors seems to have decreased. Then, you add in the explosion in popularity of Ozempic and similar drugs. My guess is that any actors considered even slightly larger than the (very thin) Hollywood norm are feeling pressure from all sides to take Ozempic even if it’s not medically necessary. And when you combine all of these things — it feels pretty clear that we’ve gone backward in terms of diverse body representation on screen.

Now, everyone has the right to make their own decisions for/about their bodies, and I understand on a deep level how much easier it is to be thinner in the world. However, I also feel sure that the end result of so many people jumping on the Ozempic bandwagon will be to further stigmatize fat people who either don’t want to take these drugs (due to the fairly serious side effects), or who can’t afford these expensive drugs. All of the evidence tells us you have to be on these drugs for life to maintain weight loss, and that’s a pretty huge tradeoff if you’re taking them ONLY to lose weight (and not for a medical reason like type 2 diabetes). Regardless of anyone’s individual decision, I don’t want fat people to experience more stigma and bias than we already do.

So to get back to Baby Reindeer and the character of Martha, I think what makes this portrayal painful for me is that she’s virtually the only fat woman on a hit show at the moment — and she reinforces all the worst stereotypes about us. If there were more than a handful of fat female protagonists on TV, it wouldn’t matter that one of them reinforced negative tropes, because we would have lots of other depictions showing the real-life diversity of fat women’s experiences. Many fat women are married/partnered, considered desirable, sexually active, highly intelligent and capable, confident in ourselves, and/or physically active. Like all other marginalized groups, all we’re looking for is diverse representation on screen that reflects our experience in the real world.

At the end of the day, it’s not the specific Martha portrayal (which is a great showcase for Jessica Gunning) that stings so bad, but rather the dearth of roles for fat women in general.