Baby Reindeer star Jessica Gunning is recalling the “liberating” moment she came out as gay two years ago.
“I came out in November 2022 and that was a mega, mega thing for me,” Gunning, 38, said during the Tuesday, June 4, episode of the “Reign With Josh Smith” podcast. “I’m surrounded by gays, all my friends are gay and so it wasn’t that I was repressing anything. It was just that I didn’t think I could be, and I still can’t articulate it in the best way.”
She continued: “But yeah, I realized I was a big old gay, and I was like, ‘That’s what it’s been. That’s what it is.’ That was a massive moment where everything clicked and I made sense for myself then because for so long, I’d thought, and I’m a bigger woman, and I thought maybe it was to do with my size, that I felt a little bit almost alien, or I was tagging along. But as soon as I realized, I was like, ‘No, it’s that.’ That was the most liberating thing.”
Gunning, who played Martha on the smash-hit Netflix series, went on to draw an analogy between her own homosexuality and her character.
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“There’s a really emotional thing actually in Baby Reindeer where Donny [Richard Gadd] talks about sleeping for the first time at his parents’ house, and I told my family [at] Christmas [in 2022], and I slept for 10 hours that night,” she recalled.
Gunning called being gay “a little secret” that she’s “been keeping from myself, even.”
“And not in a kind of hating way,” she explained, noting that she didn’t think “any reaction would be bad” from other people. “I just kind of was like, ‘I didn’t think I could be.’”
The actress said she used to “watch The L Word,” joking it was “a bit of a giveaway. I should have even known when I did Pride, I would cry all the time. All the time. I found it so emotional. I should have really known then.”
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“And then I did a play with Cate Blanchett where I got to kiss her every night onstage — again, should have known then,” she said with a laugh. “All these signs from the universe! It took me 36 years, but I did it.”
Gunning said she feels “really peaceful” after coming out, adding, “Naively, I always used to think it would be just weirdly a sexual thing — like that if you’re telling people it’s like you are saying, ‘I like boobs,’ and it’s not that in any way. You are going, ‘This is who I am.’ And it’s actually really emotional.”
