Mitchell Robertson on his role in Richard Gadd's Half Man

I’m speaking to Cumbernauld-born actor Mitchell Robertson and trying not to call him Niall, the name of the character the young up-and-coming talent plays in the BBC/HBO series Half Man, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to his Netflix hit Baby Reindeer.  “Other journalists have accidentally called me Niall too,” Robertson says, smiling. “But I take it as a compliment”.

The show is a Shakespearean tale of two half-brothers, Niall and Ruben; Robertson plays the teenage Niall, and Jamie Bell plays the older version of the character, while Ruben is portrayed by Stuart Campbell in his younger years, and later by Gadd. Robertson/Bell’s aww-shucks character is the boy next door to Campbell/Gadd’s tearaway juvenile delinquent; if Ruben is a pit bull, then Niall is a Labrador puppy, cowering in the corner and eager to please.

Half Man jumps around through working-class West Scotland in the 1980s, the 90s and 2000s, and like other recent buzzy cultural artefacts like Adolescence and Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere, it paints a bleak and brutal tableau of modern masculinity and its effects on mental health. It’s an intense watch, and I am curious how vulnerable it felt to shoot. Robertson says his affinity with Niall and his upbringing certainly helped: “I definitely could relate to parts of Niall in terms of growing up in the west of Scotland and that socio-economic background, being a bit more of a softer male. I grew up a little bit more sensitive than a lot of the males around me.” However, there’s plenty of universality to Niall’s coming of age, too. “Everyone can probably relate to [Niall] in the sense that he has a lot of shame. I think all of us carry a little bit of shame and don't really know what to do with it or how to shake it.” 

Despite being comfortably Gen Z – Robertson is 27 – he didn’t find playing a teen in the late-80s and early-90s any sort of hindrance. “What was most important [to me] was to play the scene and play whatever [Niall] was feeling or trying to hide or was experiencing in that moment,” he tells me. What about research? “I did enough research to give myself a little bit of texture for it, a texture to the performance”, he laughs, “but never at any point during the shoot did I think about how Jurassic Park was a really big movie in 1993.”

We follow Niall from a teen loner into indie music and Doctor Who, who’s being bullied by his classmates, to a sensitive soul at the University of Glasgow, who's trying to grapple with his sexuality, to a failed writer in his 30s, who cruises for anonymous sex in library toilet stalls. When Niall is a teen, the arrival of half-brother Ruben – slick, confident, menacing – gives the sensitive boy a newfound social validation, but Ruben also brings with him a plethora of problems. Niall, who always appears to be drowning on the inside, just needs a hug, but is instead told to man up. 

Ruben nicknames Niall 'Bambi', and it’s an apt moniker for someone whose big brown eyes can break your heart. “It's funny because sometimes when actors talk about acting, it gets super mystical,” Robertson laughs. “The truth is, sometimes I am acting. Sometimes I am sitting there being like, right, [Ruben] is about to walk in the door, I need to look like I'm nervous. How do I make myself look like that?” The secret is in those Bambi peepers. “I knew going into it, I wanted a lot of it to be in the eyes. Especially with episode one, Niall does a lot of watching. He doesn't actually say that much. He’s just constantly searching for danger. And he’s also trying to hide something. So I knew a lot of that had to be in the eyes.”

Robertson’s mature intensity belies humble roots: his interest in acting came from watching EastEnders with his mum. “I wish I had something [more highbrow to cite] like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly,” he smiles when I ask about his acting influences. “But I grew up on TV” In fact, it was seeing David Tennant as Doctor Who and discovering he was Scottish that gave the then 13-year-old Robertson the confidence “to start thinking, maybe this is something I could do.” He started trying out for school plays and making YouTube sketches with his friends, copying things like Limmy's Show. 

Stuart Campbell (L) as Young Ruben and Mitchell Robertson (R) as Young Niall in Half Man. Photo: Anne Binckebanck for Mam Tor Productions and BBC

This led to the creation of jintyhouse, Robertson's “rustic” indie production company. “It was more of a place to make some stuff and direct and be on the other side of the camera as well,” he explains. “It has a very specific aesthetic, I guess, along the lines of Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming. It’s a chance to work with some of my mates who [like Robertson] are writers and poets. Sometimes the label of being an actor can be quite difficult, in the sense that you don't have a lot of control over it.” 

True to his working-class roots, Robertson doesn’t have any pretensions when it comes to acting as an art form; he isn’t method. He and Stuart Campbell didn’t stay away from one another when filming. In fact, the opposite: they became best mates on set and just “clicked”, and he talks with tenderness in his voice regarding the experience of Half Man’s shoot.

“You get to go a little bit further,” he says, referring to his bond with Campbell. “It means you get to push the difficulty of what you're doing just a little bit deeper because you feel safer with the person.” Their connection and tension crackles through the screen – it plays out like a sizzling will they/won’t they romance, only with “brothers from another lover”.

Though it’s his big breakthrough, Robertson is still reluctant to call himself an artist. “Maybe it’s a West Scotland working-class thing that, you know? I'm so reluctant to cross my legs and call myself an artist. I think maybe it feels like a heavy word, or it feels like a word that you have to earn. Maybe I don't feel like I've earned it quite yet.”

Robertson may be hesitant, but watching him onscreen in Half Man, there’s little doubt he's earned that title.

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Filmography (selected): Half Man (2026), Curfew (2024), Harvest (2024), Mayflies (2022), A Very British Scandal (2022)

The finale of Half Man screens 2 Jun on BBC One; Half Man is available to watch on BBC iPlayer

mitchellrobertson.co.uk / @mitchellroberts0n on Instagram