You on Netflix: Why Penn Badgley can’t despise Joe Goldberg

❘ Updated: 2023-02-09T14:49:04

Netflix

You returns to Netflix today in a season set in London, and while promoting the new series, star Penn Badgley has been explaining why he can’t bring himself to despise his character, Joe Goldberg.

Part 1 of Season 4 of You dropped on Netflix today, with the story playing out in a brand-new location, as the official synopsis explains…

Starting anew in London, Joe vows to bury the past and be his best self. But on the rocky road to redemption, a new obsession starts to take hold.

The show’s star – Penn Badgley – has been talking about how his character adjusts to life in a new country, and what it’s like to still play such a horrible man.

What Joe Goldberg makes of London in You

“I think in some ways he settled in quite nicely, apart from the fact that he’s Joe Goldberg and he can’t settle in anywhere nicely,” Badgley tells the BBC. “[London is] the source of the fantasies in Joe’s mind about how people should be, the literature that he loves.

“He’s really trying to make a go of it and I think at the beginning you see him on one level doing a good enough job. Of course by the end of the first episode, you discover that’s not the case.”

You can you can read our review of the season’s early episodes here, where we said: “The plot doesn’t lean into the suggested meta of murder mysteries as often as you’d like, and some of the murderous reveals, while fun, don’t really make much logical sense when you give them a second thought.”

Why Penn Badgley can’t despise Joe

Badgley was previously best known for playing the slightly more chilled out Dan Humphrey in Gossip Girl, and says that playing killer Joe Goldberg has been a complicated process.

“It takes a lot of emotional, spiritual and physical energy to play him for so long,” he tells the BBC. “Because he’s such an unreliable narrator and so inconsistently manic. He’s predictably unpredictable.”

“But I think more than ever, I probably accept him and I think I think despising him would take up even more energy, which I don’t want to give him.”

Season 4 Part 1 of You is now streaming on Netflix, and you can read the rest of our articles on the series here. While for previews of other upcoming shows, check out the below hubs…