Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning says coming out is ‘like a revealing of your soul’

At a recent 10th-anniversary screening of the film Pride, actor Jessica Gunning had a moment of clarity. Making the film, playing the role of housewife-turned-activist Siân James, had been an emotional process, but at the time she hadn’t realised the specific reason why. “It was really nice to see it with fresh eyes in a way,” she beams now, “in every scene being like, ‘Oh yeah, of course, there’s little gay me!’”

It’s part of why receiving The Culture Award, supported by Jaguar, at the 2024 Virgin Atlantic Attitude Awards, powered by Jaguar, feels special to Gunning. “I’m very honoured. It means a lot, especially because it’s a cultural award, so it’s celebrating work I’ve done in the past, before I came out or before I realised I was even gay,” she says, before laughing, “which is a strange way of wording it, but that’s kind of the only way I can think about articulating it.”

Even though most of her close friends are gay, it had never occurred to the actor from Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, that this could also be true of her. That was until around two years ago when she met a woman she fancied who she’d assumed was straight. When the woman said, mid-way through the story she was telling, “And then I came out,” Gunning felt like it was a movie-style moment of realisation. Gunning told her, “I’m gay” — it was the first time she’d ever said it to herself or anyone else. At the end of 2022, she came out to the people in her life.

With hindsight, the 38-year-old can see there had always been signs, likening her self-proclaimed “evidence” to the filing cabinet scene from Bruce Almighty. Yes, there was how she felt making Pride, but she also lists having to pretend to fancy members of Take That to fit in with her schoolmates; a disinterested, “alien” feeling about the concept of having boyfriends; casually suggesting her family watch At Home with the Braithwaites, a Sally Wainwright show about a family that wins the lottery, in which one of the daughters is a lesbian. “I really clearly remember looking at the clock, knowing the show was about to start and being so intrigued by the daughter, but I’d just casually say something like, ‘Should we just watch that lottery one again?’” Perhaps the biggest tell- tale sign was sneaking downstairs at night to watch The L Word. “You can’t really pretend it was to do with the writing or storytelling,” she guffaws, before recalling how a year before she realised about her own sexuality, her therapist had tried to nudge her when she’d mentioned her memories of watching the show: “She was like, ‘And what does the ‘L’ stand for?’”

Chatting with Gunning is easy and open — meeting her is kind of like catching up with a mate you haven’t seen in a while. Wearing a multi- coloured dress and black leggings, she is warm yet understated as we sit in the café adjoining the South London Gallery in Camberwell; she
peppers our conversation with constant self-effacing asides. Over hot drinks, we cover everything from her sister’s soon-to-be-born new baby, to the difficulty of getting a booking at La Camionera (the relatively new, cute lesbian bar in east London), to the tyranny of dating apps.

In fact, she is so personable and unassuming that it’s easy to forget that a few days prior to our meeting she was literally on stage in LA with Kathy Bates, accepting the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress. That is until, on the subject of the apps, she notes in an affable understatement, “I can’t really do them at the mo,” a wry smile playing on her lips as she adds, “Just because it would be slightly worrying if people were like… into Martha.”

Martha, of course, is the harrowing stalker character played so vividly and unforgettably by Gunning in Baby Reindeer, the behemoth series which came out earlier this year on Netflix. Written by and starring Richard Gadd, the show dealt with shame, cycles of abuse, sexuality and loneliness — all with a striking clarity and nuance. Full of impressive performances, Gunning’s in particular was a revelation, bringing a gentle and heartbreakingly human complexity to a character who, in other hands, may well have become a one-note, terrifying villain (in fact, Gunning was so convinced she knew what to do with the role that she auditioned for it five times, going so far as to get a friend to apply her makeup and age her up to give the casting directors a sense of what she could do).

This is an excerpt from an interview in the Attitude Awards issue 2024. To read the full interview, order your copy now or check out the Attitude app.