Penn Badgley Reminds Fans His “You” Character Joe Goldberg Is the Worst
Former Gossip Girl star Penn Badgley is now playing a stalking, murderous boyfriend on You, a thriller that recently moved to Netflix from Lifetime. Now that You is gaining a whole new audience, fans of the show on Twitter are seemingly having a bit of difficulty with romanticizing Joe Goldberg, who let’s repeat, is literally a murderer.
Luckily, Penn is here to clear things up. In a series of tweets on Jan. 9, he addressed fan commentary on the series, including one person who wrote, “Kidnap me pls.” Penn’s response? “No thx.” Another fan tweeted, “Said this already but @PennBadgley is breaking my heart once again as Joe. What is it about him?” And Penn readily answered: “A: He is a murderer.”
If you haven’t seen season 1 of You yet, Penn plays Joe, a bookstore manager in New York who sees a stranger in his store one day and decides to follow her, steal her cell phone, stalk her friends (including Shay Mitchell’s character Peach Salinger), and more to make her fall in love with him. The show aims to turn romantic comedy tropes on their heads, reminding viewers at every turn that Joe’s relationship with Guinevere Beck is anything but healthy. Part of the trick, of course, is that at times Joe and Beck seem cute together (isn’t it great how we’ve been conditioned to believe stalking can be flattering?) — until you remember Joe is actually a violent, obsessive dude who entraps women under the guise of being a woke, sensitive, literary-minded boyfriend.
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