What’s the Next ‘Baby Reindeer’? Maybe Francesca Moody Has the Script.

One day in fall 2018, the British theater producer Francesca Moody was rummaging around in her bag for something to read during a train ride when she found a script she’d been meaning to look at for weeks.

Glancing at its first page, she read a scene in which a man logs onto his voice mail. “You have 50 new messages,” the cellphone’s robotic voice says. The messages are all from a woman named Martha.

For the rest of the train journey, Moody couldn’t take her eyes off the script of “Baby Reindeer,” a one-man play about a comedian’s struggles with a female stalker who he occasionally, with self-destructive results, encourages.

“It was just a thriller,” Moody recalled in a recent interview. “And what was amazing was it wasn’t a normal victim-perpetrator narrative. It was about all the gray areas in between.”

When the train reached its destination about an hour later, Moody didn’t get up. She stayed in the empty carriage to devour the script’s final pages. By then, Moody recalled, she’d already decided two things: That she had to produce this play, and it had to be at Edinburgh Festival Fringe — the best place in Britain to generate buzz for new plays and musicals by lesser-known writers.

Success there, she knew, could propel the show to success in London. Maybe in New York, too. Although at that moment, she couldn’t predict that “Baby Reindeer” would also secure a Netflix deal and 11 Emmy nominations.