One of the bright spots in Richard Gadd’s darkly testosterone-filled new HBO and BBC drama Half Man is Julie Cullen, who plays Joanna, a uni pal of the main characters who appears in a crucial set of flashback episodes. Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer is already one of the most talked about shows of the year and Cullen is delighted and bewildered at being in the eye of the storm. “I’m just back from the premieres in New York and London and it feels like being in a whirlwind,” she says.
The Glasgow actress who now lives in London says being sent the scripts was an electric moment, since she was a big Baby Reindeer fan: “I was in my flat by myself and watched the whole thing thinking, ‘Oh my days, this is mental.’” She later found out from Gadd that when that show was first aired on Netflix he watched it on different devices at the same time, “To get the views up. He definitely didn’t need to do that, it went viral.”
Half Man is a very different beast to Gadd’s breakthrough. Cullen describes it as, “A story of two stepbrothers through three decades of their lives. It follows their difficult relationship through highs and lows. And they meet a lot of different characters along the way, one of which is Joanna, who Niall [Gadd’s character, but played by Mitchell Robertson in the younger guise] meets in uni. She’s a bundle of energy and very naïve. But she has a stronger moral compass, and that leads into Niall making some decisions throughout the show, that are better decisions because of her.”
She says despite the darkness of the show, “It’s about how we’re quick to judge and not really understand an underlying reason as to why someone might be acting a certain way. What would be a nice takeaway for people is to be kinder in this very intense world.”
I have a mood board at home and I put HBO on there, and it happened. I like to manifest!
Her family is not in the performing arts; her dad “does fuel drains for cars and my mum’s a receptionist at a SEND school, but she was into am-dram and took me to rehearsals when she was doing Sweeney Todd, so I had a taste of singing onstage at seven years old.”
The musical theatre bug bit, and brilliantly her first professional job was “in panto opposite The Krankies, with Michelle McManus and David Hasselhoff playing Wendy and Peter Pan.” She eventually trained in Glasgow before moving to London at 21.
After finding herself amid the Rada crowd and dealing with a lot of imposter syndrome, a stint on Costa Cruises refreshed her perspective and she returned, “to go down the film and TV avenue… I have a mood board at home and I put HBO on there, and it happened. I like to manifest!”
And while she acknowledges the “volatile” nature of her industry she is ready to grab, or manifest, a Half Man-propelled future. “This is the best opportunity that I’ve ever been given.”
