Richard Gadd has now written, created, and starred in two of the most critically bruising series in recent memory — Baby Reindeer and Half Man — and he’d like you to stop calling them manosphere content. On the latest episode of VICE Culture Club, host Jackson Garrett sits down with the Scottish writer-actor to talk about where Half Man actually comes from, what it took to play a villain he almost didn’t cast himself as, and whether making art out of your own worst moments counts as therapy. The short answer: not really.
Garrett opens with a bracket-style game — ranking the greatest writer-actor-creator combos in TV and film history. Gadd works through Always Sunny, Fleabag, Girls, Atlanta, and Good Will Hunting with hard opinions, landing on Phoebe Waller-Bridge as his winner. He calls Fleabag a top-ten all-time show, and specifically praises the second season, which he’d been dreading. “I remember when it was commissioned for a second series, I remember being like, oh no, no, no, don’t ruin it,” he says. “They somehow surpassed the first season, which I thought was almost like an impossible artistic feat.”
From there, the conversation turns to Half Man — or rather, what it’s actually about. Gadd pushes back on the “toxic masculinity” label, not because he thinks the phrase is wrong, but because he thinks it steamrolls everything underneath it. “I never really set out to explore like a political agenda,” he says. For him, the show is about two men who can’t communicate with each other or themselves, and what that silence costs over decades. “A lot of destructive behavior comes from a lack of expression,” he says, which is about as unguarded a thesis as the show ever offers.
Playing Ruben — the show’s volatile, menacing antagonist — wasn’t even part of the original plan. It was actor Jamie Bell who suggested Gadd for the role. Gadd almost talked himself out of it. “I realized all my thinking was based around what people would think, whether people would judge me, whether it would fail,” he says. He changed his body, his voice, his entire physicality, then went looking for the thing underneath all of it: “Ruben ran on a river of pain.” The Emmy nomination that came after proved people bought it.
Those same Emmys come up again when Garrett brings in an LA Times quote: some Emmy voters reportedly found Half Man so off-putting they didn’t make it past the first episode. Gadd takes the note in stride, more or less. “There should always be a place for television to test people, to push buttons, to try things different,” he says. “My big worry with television right now is that I never wanted it to become so homogenized that people no longer recognize the human struggle in it.” Jackson, for his part, is less diplomatic about the voters.
The therapeutic question gets the most lucid answer of the episode. Making Baby Reindeer — which drew directly from Gadd’s own life — wasn’t a release in the moment. “I don’t think it was therapeutic at the time,” he says. “It was extremely tough, actually.” The catharsis came later, in the messages from strangers who recognized something in it. “People come up to me, and they say, I related to it. God, I thought I was the only one who had those feelings.” That, he says, is where the catharsis lives — not on set, but in the shared recognition afterward.
Watch the full VICE Culture Club episode with Richard Gadd to hear how he built two of TV’s most unsparing series, why he thinks art should disturb the comfortable, and what it actually felt like to root for Scotland at the World Cup.
In 2015’s “Jurassic World” — the first of the “Jurassic Park” franchise’s largely interminable bastard step-children — there’s a moment of action that briefly suggests the film might exist for reasons other than to extend its source material and make oodles of cash. In the scene, which occurs just as things fall apart (as they always seem to do in these films), dinosaurs break loose and attack all of the theme park’s patrons.
In the ensuing chaos, a woman is snatched up by a flying Pteranodon and swooped into the air, where others of its species take turns throwing her between their beaks. She’s then dropped into the water, where the winged creatures swarm her once more. Just as the dinosaurs pluck her out of the depths, a Mosasaurus leaps from the water and swallows both the woman and the dino attacking her. It’s downright cruel and undeniably entertaining. But namely, this sequence of dino-terror suggests that “Jurassic World” might actually provide audiences something they’d sorely lack for the next decade: fun.
That was, of course, not the case. In the years that followed, three more “Jurassic World” films saw the light of day, and none of them came close to reaching that first movie’s brief, brutal height. A swath of other summer blockbusters would be released alongside them; A “Spider-Man” here, a “Mission: Impossible” there. But finding a popcorn movie that could entertain beyond nostalgia alone was rare. (Though not entirely inconceivable.) Perhaps, in an ironic twist of fate, the truly original summertime creature feature went extinct before the onscreen dinosaurs could.
(Warner Bros. Pictures) “The End of Oak Street”
Audiences seldom get to experience summer fun at this caliber anymore. But as depressing as that may be, “The End of Oak Street” could very well be a blueprint for a fresh era in popcorn movies. They might not make ‘em like this anymore, but that doesn’t mean they can’t.
Cue Anne Hathaway, stepping into frame sensible sandals first, pointing a shotgun at her own ancient adversary in David Robert Mitchell’s delightful “The End of Oak Street.” That alone is the kind of image powerful enough to make any viewer believe that mainstream cinema is still kickin’. Everything that follows is simply further confirmation.
Mitchell’s film, which follows a family of four in 1982 as they realize their entire quaint suburban neighborhood has somehow been transported back to the Mesozoic era, has understandably swept audiences off their feet. “The End of Oak Street” has everything a viewer could want — especially a viewer fatigued by the Hollywood sequel system and all its shortcomings. There’s action, romance, suspense, creatures, creatures having sex, large piles of excrement, interdimensional portals, pizza, a comical amount of split-diopter shots, and what looks to be a pleasantly well-funded public library. What’s more, Mitchell’s film is feisty and unpredictable, always managing to stay one step ahead of the viewer.
“The End of Oak Street” has all the elements that Hollywood studio executives love to pluck from box-office hits of the past in their never-ending attempts to Frankenstein a decent modern blockbuster out of spare parts. Yet, here, there are no visible stitches, no scars or seams. Mitchell’s film succeeds where others have failed because it runs on its feelings rather than its features. It’s still pastiche, but unbeholden to the nostalgia-obsessed, highly referential style that has plagued so much contemporary media, like “Stranger Things,” “Super 8” and “Wonder Woman 1984.” The more Mitchell conjures joy and fear from thin air with the snap of his fingers, the more frustrating it becomes that audiences seldom get to experience summer fun at this caliber anymore. But as depressing as that may be, “The End of Oak Street” could very well be a blueprint for a fresh era in popcorn movies. They might not make ‘em like this anymore, but that doesn’t mean they can’t.
But that will require some convincing. For a few years now, studios have had it in their heads that the ideal way to merge art and commerce is to hire stylish, auteur-minded filmmakers to helm their franchise movies. Think Chloé Zhao taking on Marvel’s “Eternals,” or Amazon MGM tapping Denis Villeneuve to pilot “James Bond” into its next era. By and large, this formula has not worked because studios demand accessibility, even from the artistes. That cool camera setup isn’t worth it because viewers don’t care about that kind of stuff, executives say. Unless you’re Steven Spielberg, with enough money and success to have final-cut privilege, everything in a franchise blockbuster is bound to look flat, feel drab, and be nauseatingly overexplained.
That’s a big part of why “The End of Oak Street” feels like a break in the pattern from the jump. Mitchell is the film’s sole screenwriter and director, working with a clear reverence for the kinds of story-first features produced under Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment label — the movies that sprang from big, bold ideas, not financial bottom lines. The story has elements similar to popular summer blockbusters, but they’re so finely remixed and retooled that they don’t bear such exhausting resemblance to their forebears.
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Perhaps best of all: The movie has a gritty, charming meanness to it; a stickiness that’s hard to shake off. Where “Jurassic World” balked at doubling down on its single cruel sequence, “The End of Oak Street” has at least 10 stomach-dropping thrills. With a PG-13 rating that gets away with quite a bit, the action harkens back to the days of “Poltergeist,” a PG-rated film that had whole families walking out of the theater traumatized and silent. “Poltergeist” was, notably, a summertime Amblin release that similarly riffed on classic creature scares — updating dusty, old ghost tropes with new ideas — much like Mitchell does with his dino-time-travel extravaganza.
But Mitchell wants you to make those correlations, too. When the film opens at Oak Street’s idyllic summer block party, complete with cookouts and kids happily pedaling together on their bikes, he purposefully evokes the atmosphere of the movies he covertly cites. There’s some bickering between the Platt parents, Denise (Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor), that their kids, Brian (Christian Convery) and Audrey (Maisy Stella), pick up on. But Mitchell cleverly avoids setting any tone in stone. When a storm followed by a flash of blinding light sends their house and the surrounding neighborhood back in time, the entire Platt family quickly understands that they’re in deep sh*t — or, more precisely, dinosaur feces, of which a large amount has accumulated in the neighbor’s backyard.
(Daniel McFadden/Warner Bros. Pictures) Christian Convery, Anne Hathaway and Maisy Stella in “The End of Oak Street”
So much recent blockbuster filmmaking has been about embedding heart-wrenching pathos into the nostalgic elements we know and love. But more often than not, the combination comes off forced; corny at best, insipid at worst.
From here, Robert carefully stacks a Jenga tower of suspense-laden set pieces and surprisingly moving family drama, without so much as letting the structure teeter. Where other filmmakers would painstakingly elucidate every thematic detail to make their silly popcorn movie “say something,” Mitchell restrains himself. “The End of Oak Street” doesn’t need to be “about” anything, which is the best way to make a film feel like it’s actually about several things.
On one hand, “The End of Oak Street” exists to be entirely what it is and nothing more. It’s a piece of delicious, fluffy cotton candy, sweet and quick-dissolving. On the other hand, when a director isn’t trying so hard to convey a message, that’s typically when they can conjure an emotion to fill the space left empty by thematic contrivance. This movie is about family dynamics and love, sure. It’s even got a dash of trauma. But Mitchell says so much more by saying nothing overt about those things, and instead, depicting a family who wants nothing more than to get out of the bind they’ve found themselves in. It’s as if he recognizes that so much recent blockbuster filmmaking has been about embedding heart-wrenching pathos into the nostalgic elements we know and love. But more often than not, the combination comes off forced; corny at best, insipid at worst.
(Warner Bros. Pictures) Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway in “The End of Oak Street”
Mitchell’s self-imposed moderation might not look radical at first. But in a blockbuster landscape like the one we’re in now, thoughtful constraint is welcome and needed. I’m reminded of “The Odyssey,” which felt, to me, crushed by its own ambition, hoping to be everything at once simply because it could be. “The End of Oak Street” couldn’t be more different. It’s just as ambitious and loaded with ideas and surprises, but Mitchell isn’t trying to make this story anything more than it needs to be.
As with his last two films, “It Follows” and “Under the Silver Lake,” Mitchell has found a winning, thrilling formula in throwing ordinary people into extraordinary situations and searching for the resonance in the results, even if the answer is simple. That’s the real key in making something feel nostalgic, without nostalgia-farming. His latest film succeeds because it’s not trying to make audiences say, “I like this, because it reminds me of that.” Rather, “The End of Oak Street” recalls a time when both life and the movies seemed simpler, but were really much more complex than most people remember. They just didn’t feel the need to spell it out for us, allowing the movies to do the talking instead.
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The app now allows men to make the first move, suggesting its women-first positioning was limiting growth. It joins other dating apps now throwing everything at the wall in a bid to stay relevant.
The West Coast house-party scene has long been iconic. For these young, tech-savvy entrepreneurs, it was also inspiration for MyPlots, a party-promotion empire.
I mean, who could possibly believe the suggestion that brainrot videos “literally suppress activity in the parts of your brain responsible for cognitive control, the systems that help you resist impulses?”
It’s not like I recently went to a music festival and, instead of enjoying Turnstile and Lorde, just held my mobile phone up in front of my face and watched videos of Tommy Lee playing bongos for a chimpanzee.
No, I also spent a significant amount of time with my headphones in, listening to ambient reimaginings of Limp Bizkit tracks.
But none of this influenced my behavior negatively. It’s just a coincidence that I gorged myself on oysters and Chardonnay until I shit my pants and had to be hosed down while screaming about how “my body is a machine for turning natural wine into a natural disaster.”
Further research is clearly needed. Don’t worry nerds, I got you.
If you’re rapidly hurtling towards your fourth decade in the doomed planet simulator, you might find this video funny. But whatever you do, don’t actually laugh at it. To our omnipotent, all-seeing machine overlords, the sound will be proof that you’re ready for the liquefaction process, whereby you’ll be reduced to a human lather they use to cool the servers.
When I saw the footage of Hannah Einbinder talking about her favorite “dipping sauce,” I assumed, like everyone else, that she was simply trying to become a reaction GIF—now I wonder if she’s been playing “danger can” with her new podcast pals. After spending an evening smashing an entire six-pack against your frontal cortex, you might well find yourself drooling in front of a pot of ranch dressing, trying to work out how to operate a pizza crust.
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) August 17, 2026
They say you know you’ve been online too long when you mourn lost webpages like dead friends. I say now you know why I’ve been drinking 12 beers and crying in the street every night this week.
London literary impresario Tom Willis is launching his own talk show, which means that surely it’s time for London’s version of Future Islands—Jimothy Lacoste—to have his own Letterman moment, growling around onstage like he’s possessed by the ghost of Martin Amis. For those of us haunted by the memory of a dead literary culture, life is getting quite exciting right now.
SKIPPING LEG DAY WITH GLENN DANZIG
Danzig's workouts are the most straight guy gymbro routine ever, I may replicate it some day for fun. Entirely ipper body, with training legs replaced by kicking a punching bag and occasional cardio, all inspired by Nietzsche and Arnold Schwarzenegger. https://t.co/gN6TjRt5WOpic.twitter.com/yimDGo6G0P
Danzig is what, 5 foot 3 or something? So he’s probably not used to touching the ceiling very often. He’s skipping leg day, too, so he won’t be beating Clavicular’s record for the vertical jump anytime soon. Still, most manlets would probably be better off following his workout routine than taking advice from the famous monsters on TikTok and Kick. Look kid, the original Misfits are the only ones worth listening to.
With Ye announcing new tour dates in St. Petersburg, it’s good to see that he’s got his mobile air-defense system sorted out so no one will have to worry about drones when they’re “Putin their hands to the constellations.”
A TRILLION HUMANS IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Jeff Bezos on why he wants a trillion humans in the solar system
"I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a 1,000 Mozarts and a 1,000 Einsteins"
1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins? Sounds like one of those Epic Warz videos with a Wolfgang Amadeus horde battling an army of Alberts to the death. Which side are you on, my friend? The piano-playing poo-joke man? Or the guy who nuked Japan?
H.R, you’re finally awake! You hit your head pretty hard while practicing that backflip. UK poo? Bloc Party? Kele Okereke sitting by the sea in his Bad Brains T-shirt singing about “Pigwig”? C’mon bro, get up, we’ve got to go on stage at CBGBs and inspire future generations of guitar bands to keep spreading that sweet P.M.A..
We used to argue over whether the kids who shot up Columbine were or weren’t goths, now I’m sliding into the Twitch chat demanding that alt-girl streamers name me three Marilyn Manson songs. These days, it’s impossible to tell who’s shooting content for OnlyFans and who’s doing target practice in the woods.
AI LAPTOP OTTER ON A PLANE
rapid progress, yet I cannot name a single AI-generated video that has moved me and lingered in my memory as something honestly worth watching, nor even a single good adaptation of an existing work
at some point "rapid progress" in tech demos is insufficient. will there be art? https://t.co/wFqICO4RLC
Can u imagine terrorists tryin to hijack a plane that the laptop otter was on? Box cutters vs cutest little remote worker on the planet? Game over, AI.
Before the heatwave, I thought the worst part of living in France was no Diet Coke, only Coke Zero.
Diet Coke, specifically, is one of humankind’s most perfect technologies, because unlike all my other vices, it provides a disproportionately high level of pleasure with virtually no drawbacks or consequences.
According to Newton’s third law of motion, forces come in pairs; every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
According to Sir Isaac Newton, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
According to my psychiatrist, the reason I’ve been having horrific night terrors is because of the beta-blockers I’ve been taking. They are remarkably effective at tempering the physical symptoms of my anxiety during waking hours. I am finally able to withstand minor inconveniences without experiencing the cortisol spike of someone being hunted for sport, the only drawback being that I wake up to the sound of my own screaming several times a week, damp, in a puddle of my own cold sweat.
It turns out, all that cortisol has to go somewhere.
“Despite backlash, Louis Vuitton is going ahead with a beach-themed runway show on actual sand with a simulated tidal wave as its centerpiece”
I believe Diet Coke may be as close as it gets to a biological free lunch. I know some studies point to aspartame, the artificial sweetener, being allegedly linked to cancer, but a cashier at a grocery store once warned me to wash my hands immediately after touching the receipt she was handing me because the heat-sensitive paper was “insanely carcinogenic” (it was a receipt for a pack of cigarettes).
Stress is the real killer, and by that logic, things that make me happy must be good for me. What makes me happy is Diet Coke, not Coke Zero, which uses a combination of aspartame and acesulfame potassium. I do not know if this makes it more or less carcinogenic than Diet Coke, which uses only aspartame in its formula, but believe me when I tell you that it changes the flavor in some truly ineffable way, and up until the heatwave I thought that was the worst part of living in France.
In France, they call it Canicule. La Canicule, to be exact, because it is a feminine word, a word with a delightful and ancient origin story. It comes from the same root as the English word “canine”, the Latin canicula, meaning “little dog.” It refers to the star Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, which rises with the Sun in those late summer days that I grew up calling “the dog days of summer,” without ever knowing why. In the ancient Mediterranean, the little dog’s appearance in the sky from late July into August became symbolically intertwined with oppressive summer weather. Which is why, in the dog days of summer, when Paris becomes unbearable, you go to Normandy, Corsica, Provence, maybe Marseilles if you’re basic like that, Biarritz, Hydra, Ibiza, Mallorca, maybe Menorca if you have kids. This collective emptying, les grands départs, has been going on, same time every year, for generations. So when the little dog showed up early this year without warning or precedent in the third week of June, right in the middle of Men’s Fashion Week, no one was ready.
No one I know in Paris has an air conditioner, because it is easier to leave the home than to cool it. The Parisian apartment is a winter object, designed to retain heat. Window AC units are totally incompatible with the ubiquitous French window, rendering them virtually non-existent in the city, which would leave the portable corrugated single-hose variety as your only remaining option for in-home climate control.
I am told that in France, owning a residential AC is a sign of, and synonymous with, conservative politics. An exhaust hose dangling from a Parisian window has taken on an implicit subtext, a subtle but unmistakable symbol of ecological indifference and bad faith. As an American, there is something about it that feels spiritually reminiscent of a MAGA hat in its sly antagonism. And there is something grotesque about it, a flaccid tube dangling out an open window like that. Something obscene about the innards turned outward, the organs of a private place revealed, its bowels exposed, a prolapsed rectum.
It’s making me think about how every single thing has a metabolism, and how people are really just tubes that take things in at one end and release them at the other, and somewhere along the course of thousands of years of evolution, our tubes managed to grow appendages like arms and legs, and how those appendages are really the only things that separate people from worms, and how our metabolism is the thing that both keeps us alive and then ultimately kills us.
It’s making me think about how a few years ago, during a low-grade but prolonged manic-depressive episode, I accidentally got addicted to colonics and started going twice a week to have a tube lubed up and inserted into my tight little asshole by an Australian woman with long gray pigtails who called herself a healer. Upon first insertion I would always burst into tears and sob uncontrollably, and the healer would gently explain to me again that I had lots of trauma stored in my colon, and that an emotional release was to be expected. She told me that people cry during colonics all the time, and not just from the pain.
“I accidentally got addicted to colonics and started going twice a week to have a tube lubed up and inserted into my tight little asshole by an Australian woman with long gray pigtails who called herself a healer”
Climate control in France is generally reserved for museums, department stores and hotels that cater to American tourists, because the American solution is to cool a place, not to leave it. Even in the case of these exceptions, air conditioning is pretty generally looked down upon throughout the country. I’d guess that the contemporary attitude towards energy consumption may have a lot to do with a lingering, inter-generational guilty conscience from France historically being one of Europe’s most prolific coal-burning polluters. The country finally got its shit together in the 1970s, when it radically decarbonized its power sector, becoming a global leader in nuclear energy and a relentless proponent of eco-friendly legislation and red tape.
But defiance has always had its own libidinal appeal. I believe this heatwave may have radicalized me.
Day two of La Canicule, the mid-day temperature has hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit. At least 18 heat-related deaths have already been recorded, including two young children who were left in a car with the windows rolled up. Dior and Rick Owens have rescheduled their runway shows and I’ve developed a strange rash around my collarbone and clavicle where beads of sweat pool and collect. All of my plants are dead.
Inside my second-floor one-bedroom, opening the window is like opening an oven. Somehow, the only thing worse than moving around is standing still. There is no relief. All I can do is take a cold shower every 20 minutes and air dry, and then do it again.
I wonder what I did to deserve this, what anyone did to deserve this.
I open my laptop and type into the search bar: “air conditioner no tube discreet.” I am desperate but guilty, ashamed of my weakness and reluctant to expose it, my inability to participate in the shared performance of endurance and restraint. I’m imagining a technology that simply eliminates heat, rather than relocating it.
“Have you listened to a word I’ve said?” says Sir Isaac Newton, rolling his eyes.
“Shut the up, nerd,” I mutter, as I type into the search bar: “how does ac work.”
It turns out, the technology I’m imagining violates every law of thermodynamics, and now I’m learning about cold fusion, a radiation-free form of limitless free energy that, although much hypothesized within the physics community, exists only in theory.
It turns out, all that heat has to go somewhere.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
It would be really hard to have air conditioning in outer space. On Earth, an air conditioner cools a room by moving heat through either a window or a tube, and dumping it outside, where the atmosphere carries it away. In space, there is no atmosphere to absorb that heat and no air to carry it away. The first country, corporation, or individual to solve cold fusion will be the first country, corporation or individual with data centers in space.
Day three of La Canicule is the hottest day in France’s recorded history. The only places on Earth hotter than France right now are parts of the Middle East and the American Southwest. The mysterious rash has spread to my neck and back. Despite backlash, Louis Vuitton is going ahead with a beach-themed runway show on actual sand with a simulated tidal wave as its centerpiece, and I’m thinking about this Jean Baudrillard essay from 1993:
“Not much snow this winter… So the pistes are made up with artificial snow, providing a real basis for the simulacrum of leisure … The carbon gas produced by all the winter tourist industries is contributing to the warming of the atmosphere, and as a result, an absence of snow.”
On the fourth day of La Canicule, the mysterious rash has spread to my chest and a South African art collector is texting to invite me to meet him and his museum-board member wife for tapas at a hotel in the 5th arrondissement. His family’s wealth is, allegedly, directly tied to the extraction and exportation of a certain rare mineral from the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the contemporary Mediterranean small bites place at his hotel has AC and he’s saying I can use his pool access.
No such thing as a free lunch.
The pool is indoors, and the floor surrounding it is made of cool white marble that matches my bikini.
For the first time in days I experience a level of physical comfort I’ve forgotten was even possible. I think to myself, “I don’t deserve this.” And then, “Who deserves anything at all?”
I cool down so much, I decide to spend a few minutes in the sauna.
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