“Let me just take a moment to get really abstract,” Penn Badgley says. Badgley, 32, interrupts himself with a disclaimer any time he’s about to punt a conversation into the metaphysical realm. He’s very thoughtful, so this happens a lot. At one point he even provides a disclaimer for a disclaimer, quoting a verse from André 3000’s bit in “Where’s the Catch?”: “I hate heady-ass verses, I wrote this shit so here we go.”
So here we go.
At the moment, Badgley is explaining why his face can sometimes look really sinister, as it does for most of his latest show, You, in which he plays psychotic stalker Joe. Chatting in TriBeCa's Le Pain Quotidien, surrounded by SoulCycle moms and wearing a fleece, Badgley looks very un-Joe. “Consider all the other animals, the ability to express emotion. How much we personify inanimate objects, animals, plants—we'll make a play out of anything. I think the thing that is so compelling about this show, which the human being does so implicitly and explicitly, is you take things that seem to not go together and you put them together, and then suddenly you learn a lot about what it means that you're finding points of connection between these two apparently contradictory things. The human face can express apparent contradictions at once. Depending on the context, my presence is either really disturbing or really charming. But it's not so much me, I think it's actually you.” Me? You.
Women’s magazines used to deal heavily in diagrams that paired different face shapes with different hairstyles: You had an oval face, a long face, a square face, or a heart face. Badgley has an extreme heart face. (He would look good with a choppy lob.) His cheekbones come shooting out from his chin in two harsh ridges—if he sucks in his cheeks even a little bit, his cheekbones cast actual shadows. His face can switch from warm to menacing with a slight downward tilt of his head.
Because Badgley’s face is so distinctive, and because New York doesn’t have too many actor-locals, many New Yorkers have a story about seeing him out and about. During a five-year run playing proverbial nice guy Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl, Badgley earned a comfortable, recognizable-accessible celebrity—Brooklyn James Franco, before we learned that Franco sucks. Badgley spurns the sunglasses-and-hat defense typical of actors, preferring to defuse unwanted attention by “treating everyone with dignity.” (When I blurt out that I once saw him on a street in Williamsburg, he says “Did you?” with such polite interest that my embarrassment dissolves.)
But a year ago, he says, he wasn’t even sure when his next job was going to come. He’d been in a couple films since Gossip Girl, playing Brittany Snow’s wholesome friend in John Tucker Must Die and Emma Stone’s wholesome friend in Easy A, but most of the Badgley buzz pertained to his highly publicized romances. Even when Gossip Girl hit its peak, his stardom was very different than the one he’s experiencing now. “The cultural value of Gossip Girl was this interesting question. Sure, it seemed to have been a worldwide, cultural phenomenon for some time. And, yes, anywhere I go I do get recognized. At the same time, it also lacked the kind of importance that people might anticipate. Frankly, there's so many frigging global cultural phenomena now.”
After You built an audience in the warm womb of Lifetime, Netflix picked it up, and by January the show was indeed a global cultural phenomenon, but even now Badgley is suspicious of the show’s momentum. “It all comes and goes,” he says of the masses of viewers who have binge-watched You on Netflix. “Inherent in bingeing is purging. The second part, nobody talks about.” (Netflix is producing You’s second season, which Badgley is shooting now.)
You is very much in the pandering, “so tacky it’s profound” tradition of Gossip Girl, but it has captured the zeitgeist in a way that Gossip Girl didn’t. It’s not a “good” show, per se, but it’s definitely a blast. Badgley plays Joe, a bookstore employee and psychotic stalker. In the pilot he has a meet-cute with Beck (Elizabeth Lail), a writer, yoga instructor, and composite Williamsburg babe. Joe’s stalking starts on social media, but before long he’s hiding in Beck’s shower and taking drastic action towards anyone who tries to stand in the way of their love. There’s a murder basement with a plexiglass torture chamber, a wealthy and obsessive friend named Peach Salinger (Shay Mitchell), and John Stamos plays a sexy stoner therapist. You is pure Lifetime, leaning into the sex and murder and trusting the audience to draw weightier conclusions.
Initially Badgley worried that if the show wasn’t done just right, he’d be the most problematic part of a really problematic show. “On one hand,” he recalls, “no one in any position of authority could ever try to act as though we don’t know that sex and murder sells, but how can it work in a different way we’ve not seen? That’s where I think this show does something that none of us could have said for certain that we would nail. It could have been really irresponsible. It could have fallen flat and been like, whoa.”
Badgley had also been frustrated by how he was perceived after Gossip Girl. “Up until this role, everybody thought I was such a nice guy. And it’s great to be a nice guy, but the kind of nice guy that makes ‘nice guy’ an insult—that's actually not a nice guy. I think that's what frustrated me. Lo and behold, I play somebody who's not a nice guy, and that everybody loves. We don't like Dan Humphrey. We like Chuck Bass. We like Joe Goldberg. So in a sense, what do you expect?”
He’s quick to clarify that he isn’t apologizing for men. He’s just newly awed by the transcendent powers of an engaged audience: To make his features into something sinister, to make a show that was (probably) only meant to entertain into the locus of social discourse, and certainly to define onscreen ideals. Bad man supply is meeting bad man demand.
“But we should always appreciate the audience's intelligence. This is what I probably didn't do well in Gossip Girl. In Gossip Girl, I was far too judgmental of everything that was happening, because I was young,” says Badgley, shrugging. “If anything, this show's saving grace is that we're not even trying to act like we're not doing this. We're doing this. We're going to take you with us, and we're going to kill her at the end. No lying to ourselves here. I think, somehow, that's what works about it.”
You does have some fraught moments. Badgley says the scenes where Joe masturbates felt particularly risky to him: One scene in particular comes to mind, in which Joe pleasures himself in the bushes across the street from Beck’s apartment, where she herself is masturbating, unaware she’s being watched. But the discourse that surrounded the show required an even more delicate hand. Many viewers seized on You as a show about white male privilege and toxic masculinity, because of the way Joe (white, male) is able to repeatedly charm people into looking past his increasingly obvious crimes. Another contingent saw the show as a commentary on the dangers social media. Others seemed to miss the heavy-handed morals of the story entirely, tweeting about how sexy Joe is (“kidnap me pls”). That last group of viewers, thirsty for a murderer, was the one Badgley felt compelled to engage with.
Over a slab of avocado toast, Badgley reflects on the most recent time he was in a Le Pain Quotidien. He was on Twitter, scrolling through thirsty tweets about You. Perhaps lulled into a philosophical mood thanks to Le Pain’s woody salon vibes and pastoral peace, he decided to fire off a few responses. “I didn’t think much of it. I was just sitting, as we are, and just…” He shrugs. That day, Badgley had unassumingly entered a Twitter vortex. “He is a murderer,” he reminded one viewer. When another tweeted that she could “see past the crazy shit” because Badgley is “gorgeous,” he responded, “But you’re supposed to see past my face TO the crazy shit! It’s the other way! The other wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyhhyyyyggg :)” While flattering, fans’ thirst was misplaced, and steering clear of the discussion didn’t feel like an option. “I'm realizing this is almost the only role that I could have possibly done after Gossip Girl,” Badgley muses, “because I've basically had to completely abandon any sense of ‘I'm a real actor. We're not going to talk about that.’”
The mandate to engage with audiences is less a function of Badgley’s background than it is a function of our time. In 2019 no performance happens in a vacuum, so not only do you have to get thee a man who can act the role of the villain, he also has to be able to navigate the discussion around the project without attracting the wrong kind of attention. In college admissions parlance, you now have to cast “the whole person.”
As a whole person, then, there are few parallels between Badgley and Joe beyond a brooding je ne sais quoi. His insights into the dating side of You, for instance, are limited. “I know this might sound absurd, but since I’ve been famous”—he gives a quick eye-roll—"I believe I’ve only been on two dates that would be considered a ‘first date.’ It's not the way I've ever really engaged in terms of romantic relationships. I'm quite monogamous. Thoroughly monogamous.”
Badgley has approached the discourse around You with curiosity rather than authority, direct messaging with fans (in a “noble” way, not a creepy way) to better understand what was capturing their attention. “I feel like I’m learning something new about You every day, to be honest,” he says. “Part of that is a testament to the show. And part of it is: If you’re actually thinking about something, and if something is a conversation, rather than just calling it a conversation, it’s ongoing.”
If you’re going to make television that starts a conversation about creepy men, you’re going to have to find someone to play the creepy man. For that, you want the chronic overthinker. When Badgley was fretting about whether to take the role, he discussed his concerns about an accidental martyrdom on the bad man altar with You creators Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti. He also talked it over at length with his wife, Domino Kirke. Kirke encouraged him to do it. “She understood where I was coming from, but I think she thought, ‘If you’re thinking like this, then it’s good to have somebody responsible in that role,’” he recalls. It’s a nerve-wracking responsibility, but one that he’s embraced. “Someone has to represent the villain, and I think maybe, suddenly, that’s me.”
