Penn Badgley makes an obsessive man sound reasonable for just long enough to unsettle us. His conversational ease gives You its tension and dark humour, though the writing sometimes lacks his subtlety.
Fi1m perspective
Joe Goldberg sounds as though he expects us to agree with him. In You (2018), Penn Badgley gives the bookshop manager's running commentary the ease of a conversation, even as his interest in a customer becomes an obsessive pursuit. We felt uncomfortably close to Joe's thinking because Badgley made each fresh intrusion sound, briefly, like a reasonable next step. He is funny, too, particularly in Joe's confidence that he has explained himself perfectly well. The performance keeps the threat clear without making every sentence sound like a warning.
His breakthrough came as Dan Humphrey in Gossip Girl (2007–2012), playing a Brooklyn outsider among Manhattan's wealthy teenagers. Film parts followed, including Woodchuck Todd in Easy A (2010) and Seth Bregman in J.C. Chandor's Margin Call (2011), though the latter gives him too little to do. Seth's repeated interest in how much everyone earns is useful to a film about frightened, well-paid people, but scarcely amounts to a character. We recommend the film readily; we would not choose it as an introduction to his acting.
Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti's You asks much more of him: he has to sustain our interest in a man whose account of himself cannot be trusted. The voice-over gives us prolonged access to Joe's excuses, and Badgley's casual delivery makes their entitlement easy to miss for a moment. Yet the series is less convincing when its social commentary becomes heavy-handed, and the plotting sometimes moves too quickly past difficult questions. His performance makes the bluntness more noticeable, because he has already shown how much can be conveyed without insisting on it.
There is a fair question about whether Joe remains too likeable, but we would not ask Badgley to solve it by making him more obviously sinister. The unsettling part is that his account can sound ordinary while the actions he describes are not. Take away that conversational ease and much of the discomfort would go with it. Start with You for the tension and black comedy, not for a subtle account of modern dating.
Biography
Penn Dayton Badgley is an American actor and producer. He was born on 1 November 1986 in Baltimore, Maryland.
He first gained attention for his role as Phillip Chancellor IV on the soap opera The Young and the Restless (2000–2001). Badgley is known for portraying Dan Humphrey in the series Gossip Girl (2007–2012) and Joe Goldberg in the series You (2018–2025). His film roles include Scott in John Tucker Must Die (2006), Woodchuck Todd in Easy A (2010) and Seth Bregman in Margin Call (2011).
As part of the ensemble cast of Margin Call, he received the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards.
