Penn Badgley has been open about the limited sex scenes in You season 4, which Netflix delivered the first half of the season on February 10. In a cover story by Variety, he has gone deeper about his feelings on those scenes and even revealed that he almost turned down the role of Joe Goldberg because of it.
Previously, on his podcast Podcrushed with Maya Kavelin and Sophie Ansari, he had revealed that he asked co-creator Sera Gamble to axe the “intimacy scenes.” Now in the Variety interview, Penn Badgley talked about how sex plays in his life, which led to why he is not a fan of them in scenes of his work.
“It’s important to me in my real life to not have them,” he said. “And actually, it was one of the reasons that I initially wanted to turn the role down.”
Penn Badgley said yes to You despite sex scenes because of his wife
It is nothing new that a significant other can convince their partner to take a job, especially in Hollywood. As Penn Badgley almost said no to You due to sex scenes, his wife, Domino Kirke-Badgley, convinced him to take it. When it came down to it, he “wasn’t going to listen to anyone more than her.”
Four seasons in, and the actor still has a bad taste in his mouth when it comes to the portrayal of sex in movies and TV. It is one of the reasons he pushed for a limitation on this latest season, which sees sex scenes where he and other women are fully clothed, unlike the nudity seen in previous seasons. To him, that “aspect of Hollywood has always been very disturbing.”
You takes a spin on all sorts of topics, but the series, based on the novels by Caroline Kepnes, mostly explores the sinister aspects of romanticism, particularly romantic men, that we often see in media. This twist sees Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) falling in love with women to the point of stalking them and manipulating situations to be in their life. Inevitably, anyone standing in his way or when he finds out the girl is not who he had thought, he ends up killing them.
The first half of season four of You is on Netflix. The second half releases on March 9.
