“Playing Joe Goldberg has been beautiful, healing, wounding, and intense. The glorification of a villain like Joe was sort of imaginative and fantastical in 2017 when it was being shot. I wouldn’t want to start this journey now—as a viewer, as a human being, as an actor. I’m glad it’s ending.”
-Penn Badgley, episode 413 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
Television, perhaps more than movies, has a way of etching its stars in stone. And few actors seem to be able to break the mold more than once. Which is what makes Penn Badgley’s career—first on Gossip Girl then You—special.
We sit this week around the fifth and final season of You (7:00) to unpack its shocking series finale [spoiler] (9:13) and the political climate in which the show is coming to a close (12:10). Then, Penn opens up about the solitude of his west coast upbringing (19:50), his years as a child actor (23:19), and his beloved portrayal of Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl (33:12).
On the back-half, Badgley’s transformative trip to South America in 2012 (39:46), his spiritual journey into the Bahá’í Faith (42:38), and how these experiences led him to his wife, Domino (44:30). To close, he describes the intense physical experience of filming the You finale [spoiler] (51:36), what the ‘fantasy of Joe Goldberg’ reveals about masculinity today (55:55), and a fitting Dave Eggers passage from the prologue of The Executioner’s Song (1:03:22).
We’re now on YouTube! Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected].
This episode was recorded at Spotify Studios.
Show-notes:
- See Penn in You Season 5, now streaming on Netflix.
- Listen to his podcast Podcrushed.
- Pre-order his book Crushmore, co-authored by Sophie Ansari and Nava Kavelin.
- Watch more of his work in Gossip Girl, Easy A, and John Tucker Must Die.
- Read Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, including a foreward by Dave Eggers.
- Follow Penn on Instagram.
- For more talks, hear our episodes with Dan Levy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Quinta Brunson.
- Order your Talk Easy mug in cream and navy or our vinyl record with Fran Lebowitz.
Illustrations by Krishna Shenoi. Reference photograph by Sarah Schneider.
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