In a rich interview with the “Guardian”, Penn Badgley returns to the “You” series where he plays a serial killer, a role that marked him psychologically. He also confides in his childhood as an early actor, his fight against dysmorphia, his complex relationship to celebrity and his commitment against sexual violence.
For 5 seasons, he will have played Joe Goldberg, the psychopathic killer and intellectual from the Netflix series “You”. “It was therefore he who officially defined my thirties,” smiles Penn Badgley in the long interview he gave to the Guardian. A role however in contrast to the personality of the actor revealed by “Gossip Girl”. Married since 2017 to the singer Domino Kirke and dad of a little James, born in 2020, he is also the stepfather of Cassius, born in 2009 from the previous union of his wife with Morgan O’kane. And the family circle will soon grow since Domino Kirke announced on Instagram on February 27, being pregnant with twins.
Paradoxically, embodying a women’s killer had a beneficial effect on the way he plans his role as spouse and father: “It is possible that [Goldberg] made me become better because he has aroused a lot of reflection, ”he explains. “There has never been a question of drawing up the clinical portrait of a serial killer. In reality, the series deals with received ideas and modern myths on love and masculinity. I was thinking about love, what it means to be a man, a father and a husband, while all these things were starting to happen to me in real life. »»
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Penn Badgley dans “You”
© Netflix
A reflection that extends to all areas of his life. Both tormented and resilient, the ex of Blake Lively says she suffered in his childhood from a “body dysmorphia” – not diagnosed: “I knew that I hated my body and that I just wanted another. »»
Become an actor from the age of 12 and eager to resemble the male stars he admired appeared to him as therapy. But the remedy almost turned out to be worse than evil: “I would certainly not recommend it to anyone. »» […] “There was a period when, leaving depression and isolation, I voluntarily launched myself in this world where the more beautiful I seemed, the more I could succeed, the more value I had. »»
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At 25, he turned to Bahaism, a religion born in the 19th century
Around 25, when “Gossip Girl” earned him an international renown, he no longer supports the fictitious nature of the world in which he evolves and thinks of putting an end to his career. “What was this series, apart from its aesthetics?” It was his thing, our appearance to everyone. I did not particularly appreciate the superficial aspect of celebrity and the way I was perceived. Penn Badgley then turned to spirituality, in particular, Bahaism, a syncretic religion founded in Persia in the 19th century. “This is what allowed me to persevere despite the disillusions […] With, I hope, an inner transformation, ”he said.
Tireless fighting against sexual violence, he does not hesitate to translate his commitments into his work, to the point of asking the “you” showrunner to reduce sex scenes in the series as much as possible. And it is not by Puritanism: “Sexual violence has been omnipresent for a long time, there are inequalities between the sexes, there are many reasons to be concerned with sexuality and wanting to explore it in a much more significant way than we have done so far, but a sex scene does not do that” he asserts in the Guardian.
Today, he seems to have found a balance between his work and his family but also through his commitments of a rather rare depth in the world of the show-bizz that he also expresses through his podcast, Podcrushed where he welcomes personalities who, in turn, come back to adolescence and horns. This time not so overwhelmed for Penn Badgley.
