For almost five years, over three and a half seasons, we’ve watched Penn Badgley fall in obsessive, toxic, all-consuming love with one woman after another as Joe Goldberg in You, stalking and seducing each of them, until inevitably their bad romance goes awry and end in bloodshed. The show toes a strange line of showing viewers events from Joe’s point-of-view, even as he does the most depraved and violent things.
All of which is to say, sex is a huge part of You. But Badgley has had enough of filming those kinds of sex scenes. “It’s important to me in my real life to not have them,” he said recently. “My fidelity in my relationship. It’s important to me. And actually, it was one of the reasons that I initially wanted to turn the role down. I didn’t tell anybody that. But that is why.”
The actor’s words had a mixed reaction on social media, with some commentators pointing out that it part of the job is to be able to create the distinction between a performance with a co-worker in a professional setting, and genuine intimacy.
“It’s not a place where I’ve blurred lines,” he later clarified in an interview with Variety. “There’s almost nothing I could say with more consecration. That aspect of Hollywood has always been very disturbing to me — and that aspect of the job, that mercurial boundary — has always been something that I actually don’t want to play with at all.”
Badgley broached the subject with You showrunner Sera Gamble, and as a result, Season 4 of the popular thriller series features a different kind of love scene: Badgley still shares several charged moments and sexual encounters with Kate (Charlotte Ritchie), but they are all fully clothed, and in the episodes that have aired so far, the two characters haven’t even kissed (Kate instructed him not to, lest he fall in love with her).
“I told her kind of my desire, and she immediately was accepting and responsive,” Badgley said of Gamble. “I’m always very practical. I said I know it can’t be none, because there’s something coded into the DNA of the show, and I signed the contract, and so it is what it is but as little as possible would be my preference.”
Philip Ellis is a freelance writer and journalist from the United Kingdom covering pop culture, relationships and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV.
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