How Penn Badgley Lived Long Enough To Become The Villain

On Netflix’s You, the former Gossip Girl breakout finds himself playing a deranged stalker – one who convinces himself he’s doing it all for love. And that he’s pulling it off during a cultural moment when more bad men are revealed every day is nothing less than a high-wire act

- Lauren Larson

‘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 show, You, in which he plays psychotic stalker, Joe. Chatting in a cafe in Tribeca, 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’s 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.’