Penn Badgley Compares 'You' to 'Gossip Girl' & His Characters Are Spookily Alike
Following the news that everyone's favorite new binge-watch You will return to Netflix for a second season, Penn Badgley is opening up about the inevitable Gossip Girl comparisons he's been hearing.
??Beware: There are many spoilers ahead. ??
To refresh, in You, Badgley plays Joe Goldberg, a bookstore manager with an unhealthy obsession, whose love for girlfriend Beck drives him to commit multiple murders and develop stalking skills that put any Catfish to shame.
Previously, Badgley played Gossip Girl's Dan Humphrey, the well-meaning sometime-boyfriend to Blake Lively's Serena van der Woodsen, who was often referenced by the nickname Lonely Boy. But the glaring problem with Dan? In the finale, it's revealed that he was Gossip Girl all along, preying on New York's young women from behind a laptop or phone.
In an interview with The New York Times this week, Badgley explained, "Any part of me that was resisting the Dan Humphrey comparison has stopped because I’ve come to recognize how much of this is a surreal progression of Dan Humphrey. He's the very special white man who somehow thinks that he’s an outsider, and it's like, 'Bro, you’re not an outsider-you are the inside; everyone else is on the outside.'"
And for Badgley, he sees Joe Goldberg as an important character in pop culture, who's forcing viewers to consider toxic masculinity in a new way. He explains, "I think there’s a way of seeing Joe as the first time we’ve represented this kind of character in a responsible fashion, because to the degree that we are making him romantic and charming and glamorous, we are still being like 'Yeah, but he kills four people and then Beck. What more can we tell you about his character than that?'"
Grab the sequel to You now:
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