Penn Badgley has reflected on troubling “similarities” with his onscreen serial killer persona, Joe Goldberg.
The 38-year-old gained acclaim for his portrayal of the cerebral stalker who develops an obsessive fascination with a woman in Netflix’s record-breaking series,You.
But the Gossip Girl star says that despite his discomfort playing the toxic character, he thinks he could have ended up the same way.
“My thirties have been officially defined by him,” he told The Guardian. “It’s possible that [Goldberg has] made me a better person because he’s caused a lot of reflection.” Badgley described playing him as an “exercise in understanding all the things I want to avoid”.
Some of the things are “obvious”, he continued, such as: “Don’t kill, don’t manipulate, don’t be a predator.” However, he says he has had to dig deeper than that.
“What I’ve had to do is try to understand, in some manner, where these things come from,” he reflected.
“I’ve found similarities, and had to understand how it could have been possible for me to end up that way, rather than the way that I am.”
Describing the essence of the hit programme, Badgley said: “Ultimately, the show is about misconceptions or modern myths about love and about masculinity.
“I’ve been reflecting on love and what that means, and what it means to be a man and a father and a husband, [while] all these things were starting to happen to me in real life as well.”
The show’s villain has also become the object of troubling admiration among audiences, a trend that Badgley finds unnerving.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to understand,” he said. “I think we all have to wonder how much value is there in exploring the darker side of human nature. I do think we need to explore the ‘light’ side, and I don’t mean ‘light’ in a way that is thin or has less gravity.”
He also opened up about feeling Goldberg’s “rage” in his body. “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.”
Ultimately he’s glad his time with the character will be over after the show’s fifth and final season airs this year.
“It’s a politically intensifying world, and I don’t think this show would make sense starting right now,” he said. “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.”
