After ending last season with a near fatal plunge into the Thames, the final season of You brings charming murderer Joe Goldberg back to Manhattan. New York is also home to You star Penn Badgley, who joins our Zoom during a grueling day of nonstop interviews with reporters. When I jokingly ask how the metaphorical speed dating is going, he replies as glibly as his character might in one of his caustic internal monologues: “I’ve fallen in love over and over, and I’m exhausted! Emotionally spent!”
He’s kidding, of course. Affable and thoughtful about his seven-year journey playing Joe, Badgley says he’ll “never be able to say enough” about what it meant to bring this seductive serial killer to life. “I did have fun. It’s heavy as hell, too,” he says. “I’ve lived through my 30s with him.” This season, “I just thought about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a father, and what it means to be a husband as I’ve become those things at the same time as him. And the fact that it’s been so public—it’s not like I’m working any old job, clocking in, clocking out, and going home to my family.”
Because season five was shot in New York, Badgley was able to do exactly that as often as possible. Madeline Brewer, who plays You final girl Bronte, recently told VF that he gave off “big dad energy.” Already parents to Cassius, 16, and James, 4, Badgley and his wife, musician and doula Domino Kirke, are also expecting twins this summer. “Every year we have a new supporting cast, and every year I get older and they stay the same age,” Badgley laughs. “By this season, I really felt like the dad in the group. They were all going out and partying, and I was just, like, nope—sorry!”
Still, he did his best to remain present and accounted for. “I’ve never participated in a group chat as much as I did in the season five You cast group chat. I tried to keep the spirits high.”
Badgley takes a novel approach to becoming Joe Goldberg. “It’s this strange thing where everything I’ve ever said goes out the window,” he says. “To me, acting is almost just like reading comprehension. The wardrobe does a lot; the setting does a lot. If you understand what you’re saying, that sometimes can be your entire performance. It’s a lot of hours of television, and I don’t think I’m one hundred in all of them. But in order to do it, to finish the marathon, that was my method.”
Playing a toxic psycho might be emotionally taxing, but Badgley had strategies to manage the inevitable flood of cortisol that comes with a criminally aggro role. “I don’t think you’d ever catch me psyching myself out,” he says. “The tools I have are prayer and meditation, mainly, and I use those a lot.” Both are important to Badgley, who subscribes to the Baháʼí Faith—a belief system that extols the virtues of tolerance and peace, the oneness of God, and harmony of all religions.
For a book nerd, playing Joe could also be physically taxing. “Every season, I imagined myself getting into good fighting shape, just to be real limber and real healthy. That never happened,” Badgley says. “I just naturally adopt this lean runner’s diet halfway through. I almost end up intermittent fasting. There are days when I’m raging so much I can’t really eat. It’s like I’m running a marathon. It’s hard to do that with a full stomach.”
Badgley started acting when he was a child, initially because he needed a social outlet. “We had moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, from a suburb to a mountain outside of a town called Issaquah, in Washington state, in the middle of nowhere,” he explains. “I was very uncommonly isolated.”
The adjustment period was rough: It was summer, his cat had just passed, and his parents were on the verge of divorce. When his mother saw an ad for a community theater playhouse production of The Music Man some 50 miles away, they made the trek. Badgley got the part, and caught the acting bug.
When he was 12, he moved with his mother to Los Angeles. Soon, he was cast on the daytime soap The Young and the Restless. But as his impressive turn as the late Jeff Buckley back in 2013 made clear, Badgley’s first love was, and remains, music. As a young teen, he began taking dance classes and got into Dru Hill and Sisqó: “When Sisqó’s ‘Thong Song’ came on, it was an absolute revelation.”
A mere glance at his TikTok, or a listen to the middle school–era confessionals he coaxes out of guests on Podcrushed (a podcast he hosts with his Baháʼí brethren Sophie Ansari and Nava Kavelin) confirms that Badgley can be as lighthearted as Joe is dark. This was true on the set of You as well. He and Anna Camp, who plays polar-opposite twins Maddie and Reagan Lockwood, laughed a lot; so did Badgley and Charlotte Ritchie, who plays his onscreen wife, Kate Lockwood. “There’s something about Charlotte’s British sense of humor that I love,” he says. “There’d be moments where we’d be laughing so much just before having to do something twisted, and she’d be, like, ‘You have to stop!’ It makes the process more enjoyable. But I’ve been doing it so long that I forget that other people have to be allowed their methods, and maybe they don’t want to laugh as much.”
Spoiler alert: Badgley is also content with the way Joe’s story ends. “If destiny is or were a thing, it’s fitting—but you don’t know it until it’s happening,” he says. “The only other ending pitched to me in any meaningful way was from [showrunner/writer] Greg Berlanti. It was to let [Joe] get away with it—to let him have everything he thought he wanted, and just be absolutely miserable. Where that starts to fall apart is that it doesn’t take her into account, whoever the her is”—meaning whichever unfortunate woman ends up partnered with Joe in that alternate scenario.
So instead, You elected to end by centering Brewer’s Bronte, and putting Joe behind bars for good. In Badgley’s mind, killing Joe wouldn’t have been right either. If he’d died at the hands of a woman—someone “he’d been trying to seduce, manipulate, or kill,” Badgley says—that would have “saddled her with trauma that feels unjust. So I think we found the one just ending.”
Given Joe’s painful outcome—before he’s taken into custody, Bronte shoots him right between the legs—the actor also thinks bringing him back for a reboot or sequel series isn’t feasible. “It may sound a little coarse, but nobody wants a dickless Joe, do they?” Badgley says. “A man should be more than that, right? But given the way he works and operates, if he doesn’t have that, I don’t know what he has.”
As for his own next chapter, Badgley is adding author to his résumé via Crushmore, an essay collection he wrote with his Podcrushed cohosts that’s due out this October. He had to meet a tight deadline for the book while filming You’s intense final season—a challenge that oddly helped him get the work done. “I learned so much. I did not have a moment to procrastinate or hem and haw over writer’s block,” Badgley says. “I just had to power through, and try and understand lessons I had learned, and be really deeply reflective. I’m glad it’s over because of how intense it was! I’ll think twice about possibly signing on for another book deal ever again.”
But Badgley would love to find his way back to the theater, preferably in something more optimistic. While You is all about deconstructing an antagonist, he’d love to read a script that gets deep into what makes a protagonist. “I think what we see a lot less is intelligent, mature, complex, profound works of art that explore happiness and peace in a way that isn’t just the third act,” he says. “Consider the concept of a bad guy. Joe believes in bad guys, right? The only thing that makes a bad guy is believing in antagonists. We need to believe in our capacity for collaboration, for unification, and tell stories that contain that, but in a way that isn’t saccharine.”
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