Penn Badgley’s Giving A Reality Check To ‘You’ Fans Who Are Lusting After His Stalker Character

(Spoilers from You will obviously abound here.)

Lifetime’s You series debuted last fall with Penn Badgley starring in the adaptation of Caroline Kepnes’ novel (that terrified Stephen King) of the same title. Our review from Pilot Viruet called the series compulsively watchable, although the show largely got lost in the massive sea of 500+ new shows in 2018. Well, You started streaming on Netflix over the holidays, which opened it up to a whole new audience that has swallowed it (without chewing) while watching Penn Badgley stalk and terrorize a young woman and her friends.

People have definitely noticed that Badgley’s Joe Goldberg is kind of an amplified version of his Gossip Girl character in that he’s “watching a skinny blonde girl from afar and making assumptions about her life based on what he learns while stalking her.” With You, however, Badgley’s playing a full-blown sociopath who transforms into a serial killer. Even though the series goes a little American Psycho by having Joe target some obscenely wealthy and profoundly unlikable targets, he’s a murderer. And Badgley’s using his Twitter account to point out that fact to viewers who are crushing on him because of Joe.

Still, this hasn’t stopped people from tweeting requests for Badgley to, um, stalk and kidnap them. He’s certainly not interested.

Badgley is, however, impressed by viewers who share his disbelief that people are drawn to his character, despite all the obvious downsides of being a victim of violent crime. What a world we live in.

The Internet’s gonna Internet. That’s probably why You has been renewed for a second season that will go straight to Netflix, maybe as early as fall 2019.