Penn Badgley reacts to Joe and Love's ending in YOU season 2
Warning: This post contains spoilers from the entire second season of YOU.
Just when Joe Goldberg thought he’d met his perfect match … he was right? Only, he’s not so sure.
In the final episodes of YOU‘s second season, it was revealed that Love (Victoria Pedretti) has a dark side, much in the same way that Joe (Penn Badgley) has a dark side. (Translation: She kills people too.) Not only did she take out Delilah (Carmela Zumbado) — a change from the source material — but she also slit Candace’s (Ambyr Childers) throat when she threatened her man and, more than that, her family. Because Love also revealed that she’s pregnant.
“With this one, it was actually a bit of a reveal for me,” Badgley tells EW of Love’s murderous tendencies. “I was only able to get through the second season because I was like, ‘Well at least they’re made for each other in the end.’ If I had gone through a second season knowing that anybody was going to die, it’s hard.”
But that doesn’t mean Badgley was happy with the ending, at least not at first. “When I found out where it was headed, I was kind of crestfallen because, just selfishly, I wanted there to be a more positive resolution,” Badgley says. “But just like Beck dying in the first season, I realized that this was the most accurate, the most reflective of reality, the most responsible to be like, ‘No, Joe doesn’t get to have that.'”
Not only can Joe not have that, but Badgley doesn’t think he actually wants that. “Joe is not actually looking for true love,” he continues. “He’s not actually a person who just needs somebody who loves him. He’s a murderer! He’s a sociopath. He’s abusive. He’s delusional. And he’s self-obsessed. You can’t fool yourself into thinking that he just needs somebody who’s right for him. Nobody’s right for him! So actually, the ending’s perfect. This is the way it has to be because he has an irrefutable problem and if it was just like, ‘They were made for each other, all he needed to find was somebody who kills people too,’ that’s not justice. I think it’s reflective of reality because I don’t think people who kill are like, ‘I just need somebody who can do the same.'”
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