Penn Badgley says Joe is 'unhinged' at the start of YOU season 2
Joe Goldberg might technically be a serial killer, but that doesn’t mean he’s good at it. As YOU showrunner Sera Gamble puts it, “He doesn’t relish doing bad things. He just sees them sometimes as justified. But something that trips this character up over and over again in a way that’s kinda human and doesn’t seem so outlandish to me is that he just can’t quite admit to himself that there might be a reason why he is constantly in these situations. He’s sort of taking them as they come and what’s really fun about that for the show is he doesn’t usually plan to do a bad thing, so therefore those bad things are not very well planned. It’s a show about a guy cleaning up a series of messes that he’s made for himself.”
And after YOU‘s first season ended with the return of Candace, the ex-girlfriend Joe thought was dead, he’s got a whole new mess on his hands in season 2. “In the first episode, he’s struggling to conceive of the fact that she’s alive,” Penn Badgley says. “He’s unhinged because of how much he doesn’t understand about what he’s done and who she is.”
However, Candace’s arrival won’t stop Joe from finding love. Or rather, it won’t stop him from finding Love. Played by The Haunting of Hill House‘s Victoria Pedretti, Love is very different from Beck in a variety of ways. “Maybe what’s different about Joe this time is he actually has somebody who wants to be with him, “Badgley says. “Whereas in the first season he really does lure Beck in, in season 2, the tables have turned.”
And Love isn’t the only new person in Joe’s life in season 2. There’s also Forty (James Scully), Love’s twin. “He has a male friend that he never had in the first season,” Badgley says. “He actually has a male counterpart, and for a while their relationship is more substantial than the one with Love.”
YOU season 2 hits Netflix on December 26.
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