There comes a point, having spent the better part of a quiet day lying supine in front of a screen, that one begins to question their relationship to consumption. At what hour does our interest in a story eclipse the actual point of the story itself? Four hours in, not bothering to perform the Herculean effort it would take to click the “Next Episode” button before it loads automatically, one ponders: Why am I so obsessed with the hapless best friend? What is it about the wealthy that makes me want to watch them die? Is it masochistic for me to think ruthless woman killer Joe Goldberg is so damn attractive?

A good story engenders self examination, and Netflix’s You has been an eminent case example since its 2018 debut. The series, which will release its fifth and final season this April, follows Penn Badgley as sociopathic hyperintellectual Joe Goldberg as he becomes obsessed with (and eventually discards of) the women of New York, Los Angeles, and London. Part of the glorious You viewership experience, it seems, is the requisite pathologizing of one’s own relationship to violence and lust on screen. Do we really feel empathy for, want to get our hands on, commune with Joe—the tender, attentive serial killer—or do audiences just actually want Penn Badgley, the dashing, verbose actor they grew to know as Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl?

For seven years, Badgley has made it quite clear that the answer should land squarely on the latter side of the spectrum. As he’s asserted in interviews and online: Joe Goldberg is a psychotic woman-killer. “You’re supposed to see past my face TO the crazy shit! It’s the other way! The other wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyhhyyyyggg :)” he responded to a 2019 tweet from a woman implying that Badgley’s face allowed her to see past Joe’s antics. “I’ve always tried to say that Joe is not a real psychological profile,” he tells me of his enduring (and what seems at times to be uphill) battles with audiences, himself, and Joe.

With this, You presents a delectable dilemma: the fictional Joe is obsessed to the point of murder with women, who he has flattened into objects of his desire. The audience loves Joe. The audience muddles a desire for Joe with a desire for Badgley. In the end, even if things go correctly—even if one comes to the realization that Badgley has so vehemently pushed for the last eight years that actually, they don’t empathize with Joe and that they actually just like Penn Badgley—there still exists a flawed relationship: the viewer as a consumer. Badgley, or Joe: the product.

Penn Badgley is a real person, with a wife and two children and two more on the way. But he might as well be a fictional entity as he exists in the minds of those who have watched from a distance: Badgley as Phillip in The Young and the Restless, Badgley as Sam in The Mountain, as Scott in John Tucker Must Die. In the closing season of You, we find Badgley as Joe back in New York City. He’s famous now, too, encountering layers of parasocial obsession while married to wealthy businesswoman Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie).  Where does Badgley (as Joe, or as himself) surface in this meta-triangulation of idols, fetish, and worship? 

“When we think of objectification as a force—the same way that people who idolize icons don’t realize that they’re objectifying, because they believe it’s a positive praise or flattery—of course it’s not sinister,” he says. “With Joe, it’s sinister. He believes he’s loving somebody, but he doesn’t understand how he’s being violent and he’s being dehumanizing and he’s objectifying. This whole season is bringing him to that realization very, very slowly.”

In the seven years since You’s debut, there has been a notable, sinister shift in the psychologies of popular media: short form video has inundated the public discourse; trend cycles have truncated parallel to attention spans; the popular solidarity that arrives with millions watching a show at the same time has been corroded by teasers, internet spoilers, and the memeification of anything earnest. “It does occur to me that if this show was premiering now,” Badgley admits, “it would probably not capture the same zeitgeist. Whatever the zeitgeist is, it is not the same as it was when it first came out. Let me just say that I’m glad the show is coming to a close right now rather than beginning another seven year arc. You made sense in the time that it made sense. I think it will feel like it has some important and relevant and fun things to say about right now, but we’re bringing it home, and I’m happy about that. I wouldn’t want to be trying to make great social claims about something I was making, or say it’s just a fun piece of fluff for you to get you through your midterms.” 

Badgley has thought, at great length, about the role of entertainment media as an engine of, and mirror to, social  triumphs and ills. “I don’t think anything is just a show,” he tells me. “If you’re spending time watching something, you’re imbibing the worldview of the world that is created. It’s just happening, right? And if you’re young you’re especially impressionable, because you haven’t lived so much…so inherently, anything you watch becomes an aspirational worldview and model for relationships [and such.]” 

This is a weight that Badgley clearly carries: the burden of the media player as a vessel for meaning. The actor is a practicing Baha’i, having come into the faith decades into his career. “When I became a Baha’i, I actually was questioning whether or not I could keep acting,” he says. “Did I want to keep being the avatar for all these other people’s ideas? Do I, in an increasingly volatile political climate, want other people to be like: ‘You be the face of it and go talk about it now.’” 

As a Baha’i, Badgley has learned to hold multiple things to be true at once—a philosophy which helped him enormously in his endeavor towards understanding, and negotiating, the qualms he had (and continues to have) with the industry. “I wonder about the relationship between quote-unquote Hollywood,” he ruminates, “and the population it makes stories for. Because I feel like there’s a growing disconnect. I actually think that’s really significant, and  I’m curious where that’s gonna go. You know what I’m saying?” he pauses. “It feels like...I don’t know. I don’t know what to call it.” 

Whatever discomforting feelings that Badgley (and the millions of others who have felt that this boundary-blurring between the public and private spheres is demonstrably sinister) may have, he believes there is no way out but through. “It’s really important that seemingly opposing groups of people can learn how to recognize points of agreement and unity between each other and learn to collaborate. If we don’t, we are absolutely fucking doomed. We are,” he emphasizes. “We cannot roll our eyes at one another. We cannot castigate each other.” 

This desire to reach across, to take seriously the discrete inner lives and complexities of another, inspired Badgley to initiate speaking series Can We Talk with Dr. Nura Mowzoon. The series, created with the intent to catalyze uncomfortable conversations about relationships in young adults, sees Mowzoon and Badgley at college campuses across the United States, opening up spaces for audience members to forge honest dialogues with one another about the chasmic differences between them. The series offers Badgley, and those who attend, a small chance to see each other—and Badgley—as vulnerable, as human. 

The actor also co-hosts podcast Podcrushed with Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari, in which guests delight—and despair—in each other’s tales of early adolescence. “I’ve been working professionally and continuously since I was 12. By the time I was 24, I’d been professional for half my life,” he continues. “The adolescent thing with Podcrushed just made sense. My world changed when I was 12…[Can We Talk and Podcrushed address] this strange, unwieldy phenomenon of celebrity, and kind of just take the reins a bit.”

Badgley has been working a long time—long enough, it seems, to be able to recognize his complicity in the way that stories have become edicts of socialization. He’s also been working long enough to believe that there is time to change. After You comes to a close, Badgley will continue to work on his production company, Ninth Mode Media, on developing stories that feel honest and restorative. “That has to be the way forward for everybody,” he tells me. “We can’t just sit on our laurels and keep doing what we’ve been doing.”

“All real living is meeting,” Zadie Smith writes in “Meet Justin Bieber!”, an essay that Penn Badgley has recommended about the absurdity of celebrity as an object of love. She furthers: “But what most of us do, most of the time, feels more like ‘presenting.’ As in, I present myself, with all my individual qualities to you, and you present yourself back.” 

It is an apt quote to ponder in relation to Penn Badgley, while watching him as Joe Goldberg in the raucous and undoubtedly entertaining final season of You. More than likely you have not met—will not meet—Penn Badgley as a person. This does not matter. Penn Badgley is equally as real to the average watcher as Joe Goldberg. He has presented himself to you. He has presented Joe Goldberg, and Dan Humphrey, and Sam and Scott and Phillip to you. The least you can do for him is to look at yourself honestly, evenly. Clear your head from your screen session and get out of bed. Go forth into the world and really, truly meet another human, without the presentation.

Photographed by Isaac Anthony

Styled by Marc Anthony George at Art Department

Written by Annie Bush

Grooming: Amy Komorowski at The Wall Group

Flaunt Film: Tyler Rabin and Jabari Browne

Super 8: Eliza Kamerling-Brown

VFX: Lucas Ansel

Score: Daniel Vila

Photo Assistant: Alex Korolkovas

Location: Bizarre Bushwick Studio

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