.jpeg?width=1200&auto=webp&crop=3%3A2)
Penn Badgley is hanging up his blue cap this month as his hit Netflix series You draws to a close with its fifth and final season. And it seems like he’s very ready to say goodbye to Joe Goldberg.
In a new interview with The Guardian, the 38-year-old actor discusses the end of the series, which has been running since 2018. In You, Badgley portrays the serial killer and repetitive misogynist Joe Goldberg, who falls in love with a new woman each season and is eventually driven to madness by his obsessive romantic tendencies.
Badgley has now addressed how taxing the role has been on him and even admitted that he is “really glad it’s ending”. Part of this is due to the political circumstances of the world having changed, which Badgley told The Guardian was “of its time”.
“It’s a politically intensifying world, and I don’t think this show would make sense starting right now,” he explains. “It’s ending right now. The way this show plays with questions of how we reward bad people, that was a more playful question eight to 10 years ago. It’s not as playful a question now, and it comes with way more stakes, and I’m glad we’re not going to be playing with it any longer [...] And for that reason, I’m really glad it’s ending.”
The interview also addresses Badgley’s discomfort with filming certain parts of the series. It was revealed in 2023 that Badgley had requested less sex scenes in season four of You, with some outlets speculating that it was out of “concern” for Badgley’s marriage to Domino Kirke, the singer, doula and sister of Girls actress Jemima Kirke.
However, Badgley has now explained his real reasoning for the lack of sex scenes, telling The Guardian: “Sexual violence has been rampant for a long time, there’s inequality between the sexes, there’s a lot of reasons we should be concerned with sexuality and want to explore it far more meaningfully than we have, but a sex scene is not doing that. Usually it’s there to titillate, and to say: ‘Ah, the thing you’ve been waiting to see, it’s finally happening.’”
He adds: “It’s just not the way sex happens, the falling against the wall and grasping at each other’s clothes, all this stuff. There’s no time for condoms, there’s no time for conversation. There’s no time for awkwardness, for real connection. It’s a narrow and simplistic way that we have done it so far, and I’m just not interested in that.”
Badgley also discussed his experience with body dysmorphia, referencing his breakout role as Dan Humphrey on the cult TV series Gossip Girl. “What was that show other than aesthetic? That was its thing, the way we all looked,” he told The Guardian. “I didn’t particularly love the superficial celebrity aspect of the way I was perceived.”
In regards to You season five, Badgley doesn’t give away much, but tells the paper he was very ready to finish filming by the time he reached his final scene. “It was as though I couldn’t sustain the rage any more, couldn’t sustain the levels of artifice with him, just all of it,” he says.
And as for the nefarious Joe Goldberg, Badgley assures fans “we reached truly the best resolution for him.”
