Penn Badgley Says ‘You’ Had to End This Way: “Killing Joe Off Wouldn’t Have Been Right”

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 vital 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 scratchy: 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 delayed Jeff Buckley back in 2013 made clear, Badgley’s first love was, and remains, music. As a youthful 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.”