How Mitchell Robertson's and Stuart Campbell's Half Man Auditions 'Burrowed Into' Richard Gadd's Heart

When Richard Gadd watched self-tapes for the leading roles in his new drama Half Man, two in particular, in Gadd's words, "burrowed deep into [his] heart." Half Man tells the story of two stepbrothers' turbulent relationship across three decades, and the Baby Reindeer creator was searching for the actors who'd play the pair in their youth. Mitchell Robertson landed the role of the doe-eyed Niall Kennedy, who's relentlessly bullied at school, while Stuart Campbell was cast as the beast-like Ruben Pallister, who becomes a protector Niall both admires and fears. (In the characters' adulthood, Jamie Bell plays Niall, and Gadd plays Ruben.) 

Gadd told TV Guide that the show's creative team began by casting the younger versions of the characters "and immediately knew from the self-tapes there was something very special about these two." 

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Though Robertson's and Campbell's auditions stood out from the jump — Gadd said he watched their tapes early on — the series creator described the casting process in Scotland as a "big old journey" due to how extensive the search was. "Just because we had the time and just because we wanted to cover every single stone, we probably saw every young actor in the entire country by the end of it," he laughed.

"If we take them individually, some of the mistakes that I suppose were made when people come in to audition for Niall, they make him very meek," Gadd explained, hunching his shoulders and making his upper body smaller as a demonstration. "And then with Ruben, it's puffed chest." But Gadd was less interested in the physical expressions of the characters' traits.

"I think actually what I wanted to see was a bit of a window into the inner life of the character," he said. "Which in Niall was a sense of great strife. And in Ruben was a real undercurrent of trauma and pain. In the nuances of [Robertson's and Campbell's] performance and their auditions, I just saw something that really spoke to the characters in the way that they were intended."

Half Man premieres April 23 at 9/8c on HBO.