[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from You season five, including the series finale, “Finale.”]
Having known Joe Goldberg the best after playing the tortured-yet-desired character for five seasons of You, Penn Badgley wanted one thing in the final season: to deconstruct Joe as a romantic icon.
While his character has captured audience attention each season, Joe has also questionably captured some hearts, on and off screen, and that’s exactly what Badgley didn’t want as Netflix‘s hit show came to a close with season five. “What I believed was critical was that Joe finally be undeniably and very viscerally perceived and felt as a sexual predator, because that’s what he is,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Each season typically starts as a love story — and season five was no different — though they each take a turn, with Joe killing almost every one of his love interests (plus others) in the name of, well, love. In the final season, what starts as a happy marriage with Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) quickly switches as she starts to unravel who Joe truly is. At the same time, Joe’s new obsession, Bronte/Louise (Madeline Brewer), ultimately becomes his downfall as she’s secretly out to avenge Guinevere Beck’s (Elizabeth Lail) death from season one.
“It was really important that in the end, we all understood and agreed that he’s not gonna be taken down in the box, he’s gonna be taken down in the bedroom,” Badgley tells THR of delivering Joe a brutal ending — his savage attempt to kill Bronte backfires when she shoots him in the genitals and he is arrested, convicted and sentenced to life in prison with no parole. “In the box he’s actually transparent about who he is, or at least he’s the most transparent about who he is, it’s everywhere else where he’s able to create a fantasy that even if it’s not convincing, it’s charming and seductive enough that people are willing to be convinced.”
Below, Badgley breaks down the fifth season and series finale, including his storylines with Bronte and Kate, why “this show has been something of a touchpoint culturally,” his preparations for that intense ending, if he’s really satisfied with Joe’s punishment and what he will take away from You.
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Are you looking forward to not saying, “Hello, You,” anymore or will you kind of miss it?
(Laughs) Yeah. There’s, of course, things about it that I’ll miss, but only in time. I haven’t had enough time to miss it yet.
As this journey with Joe comes to an end, what do you make of your whole experience?
There’s a few aspects. One is an uncommon part of this show, which is how central and somewhat alone Joe is as a figure. Every season is a new cast, and practically for me, it’s a new crew because we move cities. That’s rare, it’s a show called You starring me, and I’ve never had something like it before. I’ll never have something like it after. For it to go this long and for it to be this popular and hinge so much on this guy’s thoughts and unspeaking face… it’s a technical role, so I really have enjoyed getting to flex my of technical proficiency. It’s just fun to lift something up like that as an actor. Then on the deeper thematic side, it’s been really interesting to see such a figure like him garner so much attention and be a part of that cultural conversation.
Clifton Prescod/Netflix
Do you feel proud of what you accomplished with the series and bringing Joe to life?
Definitely, absolutely. Is it 50 hours of television? Across the 50 hours, there are a few points where I could have been a bit more on my A game. But I do feel good, particularly in the end. I think a show like this has to stretch the audience’s capacity for belief and disbelief, it has to go to new and absurd places every time in order to find something new. And the camp and absurdity is part of what makes it an enjoyable ride.
If it was a more clinical portrayal of a serial killer, I think it would be insufferable. We don’t need 50 hours of that. So the thing has really been more about a deconstruction of romantic tropes, and what we all think about love and when desire turns it into something else that feels and looks like love, but really isn’t at all, and how we all experience that in much smaller ways and relationships. We participate in that and we even do it ourselves.
So I’m proud that this show has been something of a touchpoint culturally. It’s been fun, and it’s also something that has been a part of an interesting conversation over the last eight years or so. A lot has been happening in the world where the conversations and themes of this show are so relevant, and it’s interesting to be a part of something like that.
When you started filming for this final season, returning to New York where it all began, what was going through your head as you prepared to say goodbye to this character?
Joe is, for better or worse, very second nature for me. I was glad that it was in my home. I live in New York, or at least I’ve been here for a long time. The writers promised me it would be a return to form, and I don’t think that it left its form. I do think that the show, the latter half of every season, does something that’s very different from the first half. The first half is telling the love story that on the surface it’s meant to be about, which draws people in — using all of the tropes of romantic stories at the pop culture level.
Then the second half is deconstructing that and revealing him to be who we say he is from the outset, which, of course, somehow people either forget or overlook, or just are willing to tolerate all throughout. Every season they do the impossible; they take it to some crazy places and then stick the landing, and so I trusted that they would do it again. I trusted them enough that it was like, “All right, it’ll be difficult at points, it will be crazy, but we’re gonna do it.” And by the time I saw the final episode, I thought it was really gratifying. It’s like, “We did what we came to do and we put this man to bed in the right way.”
I spoke with co-showrunners Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo, and they said they had conversations with you about “making sure Joe was at his most horrific this season.” Can you expand on what that meant for you, and if you feel you succeeded in doing that?
What I believed was critical was that Joe finally be undeniably and very viscerally perceived and felt as a sexual predator, because that’s what he is. The first episode, he’s masturbating in the street outside a woman’s apartment, who nine episodes later, he strangles. When you say it like that it’s awful, and I’m sorry to say it like that. It’s jarring, right? But it’s like, guys, that’s what happened.
That’s actually what is happening in this show, while a number of other things are happening. And it isn’t even so much the sleight of hand of a magician — we’re showing you exactly what we’re doing from the get-go. But the sleight of hand part — whether it’s right or wrong, it just is the way the show has chosen to be from the outset — is we withheld the viewer from seeing those most visceral moments where we didn’t see him actually murder Beck. He didn’t kill Candace (Ambyr Childers). We saw him kill Love (Victoria Pedretti) but in self-defense. The people that you really saw him murder were all men for the most part. I’m not exactly sure, but I think that when a woman dies, if it’s at Joe’s hands, we never see that moment. We only saw Candace with Love. Season four, we didn’t see any of them happen at first, because it was all happening while he was Tyler Durden-out [referencing the 1999 movie Fight Club].
It was really important that we not only see him in the act of abuse, but in seduction and manipulation, and that’s really the proverbial bedroom. And this wasn’t my idea in the terms of the specifics, but to me it was really important that in the end, we all understood and agreed like, he’s not gonna be taken down in the box, he’s gonna be taken down in the bedroom. In this house, in this fiction, this fantasy that he’s trying to create. Because in the box he’s actually transparent about who he is, or at least he’s the most transparent about who he is, it’s everywhere else where he’s able to create a fantasy that even if it’s not convincing, it’s charming and seductive enough that people are willing to be convinced.
So it was important that was where he’s sort of frozen and caught in his most vulnerable state, and that, for better or worse, our female protagonist, Bronte or Louise, played by Madeline Brewer, I think brilliantly, she was as dangerously close to a moment of nonconsensual sex. For the first time we’re seeing really the true colors of this man and what he’s doing, and for the first time ever we see him in the act and we don’t want it to happen. It was really important to me that he’d be deconstructed as a romantic icon. I was singing that song since season one, but I was really explicit with it with the writers throughout this season.
When you first read the script and learned that Bronte (Madeline Brewer) was actually playing Joe, seeking revenge for Beck’s (Elizabeth Lail) death from season one, what was your initial reaction?
I was into it. The funny thing about this show is it never goes where you think it’s gonna go. I mean, it’s following a form which it’s meant to, but the way that they do it every time, it’s always like, “Wow, this is bananas, OK, all right.” I still feel every time I’m reading through a season, I’m always disappointed when Joe continues to be Joe and it’s not going to work out between him and his romantic interests; it’s still disappointing. It’s a dark, kind of awful feeling. And when I found out what was happening with Bronte, I remember feeling a bit of his sense of betrayal, because again, I talk about it in a certain way, but it feels good to tell a love story I think (laughs).
You want these people, no matter what’s happened, to be in love and you want it to be real. So I remember feeling this sense of betrayal, but also knowing like, “Oh this is great, this is really what needs to happen.” But even I couldn’t tell exactly where it was going before I read episodes eight, nine and 10, and that’s when I felt like, “OK, it’s a bit of a slow burn at first, but where they bring it in the end is really satisfying.”
Season five of You, along with all previous seasons, is currently streaming on Netflix. Read THR’s finale postmortem with co-showrunners Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo.
