When production designer Emer O’Sullivan got the scripts for Half Man, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to the Emmy-winning Baby Reindeer, she knew she had to create a world full of realism that didn’t fall into poverty porn.
That meant grounding the series in a lived-in reality full of soft pastels and familiar comfort, rather than the trope-filled grays and stripped-down looks often associated with British working-class stories. By adding unexpected layers and a softness, O’Sullivan presented an environment that reflected how the characters live within it, while navigating difficult circumstances.
“We were conscious of our social responsibility of avoiding that style of British filmmaking, which can be pretty rough-looking,” she says.
HBO’s Half Man follows a man named Niall (Jamie Bell) across different stages of his life, beginning in a small, contained world that gradually expands, particularly as he becomes “brothers” with Ruben (Gadd). Eventually, the pair become estranged, until Ruben shows up at Niall’s wedding three decades later.
Emer O’Sullivan on the Aesthetic Evolution of Half Man
As the characters age, the show’s evolving production design changes. O’Sullivan tracks the disruption caused by Ruben’s arrival by introducing new patterns, clashing textiles, and 1970s-inspired elements. As the series continues, the colors also grow darker.
“We leaned into a lot of Scotland and Glasgow brutalist architecture,” she says. “We found a great location for the school that was nestled in the hills with an excuse for color, but it also had a gritty housing feel.”
O’Sullivan and her team leaned on texture to make it feel as though viewers could reach in and touch what they were seeing. She incorporated harder plastics, shiny vinyl, and glass, while maintaining the brutalist throughline.
O’Sullivan admits the approach was challenging, particularly because the locations led to unforeseen delays and pressure. The team wanted a cinder-block finish that required detailed plasterwork, which took time, and the spaces had to accommodate big events, like fighting and drinking sequences. Many of the buildings they wanted weren’t safe to film in. At one point, production had to be reorganized when a location couldn’t come together in time.
In the end, though, O’Sullivan hopes her extra visual details will immerse viewers in the story.
“We wanted to lean into that sense of foreboding,” she explains. “Even when Ruben is working in a community center that’s supposed to be nice and wholesome, it’s still really shoddy.”
The wedding scenes, which are teased in the show’s trailer and loglines, presented a whole new set of challenges.
“We used four different locations to create one wedding venue,” O’Sullivan says. Finding the Ideal barn took considerable time, and any fans hoping to visit the location for their own weddings will likely end up disappointed.
O’Sullivan wanted a “homespun” look, but finding authentic references was hard, given today’s Instagram world, where everything seems created to be shared online.
“Trying to get a hand on what the wedding was and who’s done the decorating and what’s going to look homespun or not homespun was wild,” she says. “A nephew of ours had gotten married and did a really homespun wedding in his local community hall, where everybody brought their own dish. It was very low-fi, and that became a launching point for us.”
Instead of matching everything perfectly, she unified the spaces with small details such as flowers, table settings, and textures from the buildings themselves.
“It was really expensive for the production to travel to all these places that were pretty far flung, but in the end, we were really pleased with everything,” she adds.
Half Man is now streaming on HBO Max. You can read more of our Emmy contender interviews here.