Baby Reindeer star Tom Goodman-Hill was accosted by upset viewers while dropping his children off at school after the series aired, his wife and actor Jessica Raine has said.
Goodman-Hill, 57, played Darrien in the Emmy award-winning Netflix series; a manipulative and abusive TV writer, who assaults Richard Gadd’s character, Donny Dunn after he becomes his mentor.
“The school run was weird [afterwards],” the actor’s wife and Call the Midwife star Jessica Raine said of the daily impact of the series.
“People would say to Tom, ‘You’re a bad man!’ But its [critical] reception was incredible, we’d never have guessed it was going to turn out this way,” she told The Telegraph.
Baby Reindeer quickly became one of Netflix’s most-watched series of all time when it was released in 2024 – but Raine said she couldn’t watch the show alongside her husband. “I watched it alone when I was filming away and I was like, ‘We’ll leave that there.’” she said.
Raine and Goodman-Hill married in 2015 after they were both cast in Mike Bartlett’s play Earthquakes at the National Theatre. They welcomed their first child, a son, in 2019.
Goodman Hill’s chilling performance in Baby Reindeer earned him an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.
Raine and her husband travelled to LA for the awards ceremony alongside their now seven-year-old son and stayed in an Airbnb next to a doggy daycare salon. “Dogs are such a big deal in LA,” Raine said. “And we had the best time ever.”
The couple will now star alongside each other for the first time since they met at the National Theatre in 2010 in a new BBC drama series Two Weeks in August.
Set on a sun-soaked Green island, the drama follows a group of university friends who reunite for a long-awaited summer holiday.
When Raine was cast in the lead role, she and Goodman-Hill agreed he’d stay at home in London to care for their son while she went on the five-month shoot in Malta. But after Goodman-Hill was later cast alongside her, they scrambled to hire a crew member’s girlfriend as their nanny.
“But it was [by the] skin of the teeth,” said Raine. “I always grab other actresses who are mothers and ask, ‘How do you do it?’”
The couple’s son only missed five weeks of school and was home-schooled by former teacher Goodman-Hill – but Raine said she wouldn’t take him out of education again.
“People say, ‘Oh, acting is a travelling circus,’ but I chose this life, not him,” she reflected. “Tom’s made the biggest feminist gesture of always allowing me to work on incredible things with no chip on his shoulder and take the hit [on his career].”
Two Weeks in August will air on BBC One on Saturday, 23 May.
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