Penn Badgley says ‘You’ creatives resisted having Joe in only his underwear during finale

This article contains spoilers for the You series finale.

As it turns out, not everyone was fully on board with Joe (Penn Badgley) hunting down Bronte (Madeline Brewer) in nothing but his skivvies in the You series finale. 

In fact, Badgley tells Entertainment Weekly that the episode’s director, Lee Toland Krieger, and writers Neil Reynolds and Michael Foley, the latter of whom also served as co-showrunner on the series, “really resisted” the idea of Joe being only in his underwear during the pair’s brutal faceoff. 

“It was probably the only time I’ll ever fight to be in a state of undress,” the actor says. “I was like, ‘No, he’s gotta be.’”

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The show’s creatives, however, didn’t exactly see his vision.

“Funnily enough, the writers and the director — the director in particular, Lee — they really resisted this idea that he would be in his underwear,” Badgley recalls. “And I don’t remember exactly why. I think it was partly, like, they wanted the tank top on to show the progression of blood and sweat and dirt throughout the sequence. Which I get, practically speaking.” 

Still, they appear to have sided with Badgley in the end, as the heart-pounding confrontation sees Joe clad in only a pair of black boxers as he stalks an injured Bronte like prey through the woods before attempting to viciously murder her.

“My hat was really off to Penn as we were filming the finale,” co-showrunner Justin W. Lo recalls. “Unlike some actors, he just was like, ‘I just need to be awful. Can we see him punch her? Can I not have my shirt? Can I just be as awful and animalistic as possible?’ As opposed to sometimes you have an actor’s instincts for that character to be loved or protected and this and that. Which aren’t always wrong, but in this case, Penn was very much right on.”

Badgley explains that the greatest challenge surrounding Joe and Bronte’s outfits was that they needed to convey the right message.

“We didn’t want [Bronte] to be too naked and vulnerable, because that wouldn’t have felt right, but Joe needed to be naked and vulnerable,” he says. “Which is also, weirdly, his most powerful state, because he’s an abuser and a manipulator and he coerces women through seduction.”

He also notes that it was imperative to him that Joe’s lack of clothing wasn’t “sexualized” in any way, but rather used to highlight the character’s more primal side and really take away “all of the adornments that have kept him palatable” throughout the last five seasons. 

“He needed to be as dangerously close to visually becoming the sexual predator he’s always been,” he says. “We need to see him and her as close as we can get to what you really don’t want to see, so that we really finally see him for who he is.”

With Joe’s physical layers removed, Badgley says that he began stripping away the character’s metaphorical mask through his performance. “[I] wanted him to be as animalistic as he could be within the appropriate confines of the form,” he shares. “He still is Joe, but hopefully we are seeing new dimensions to him at his end.”

He recalls an instance in which he chose to alter the tone of Joe’s voice while he’s throttling Bronte on the lawn.

“One of his last moments — where he’s saying, ‘You want to know how I killed Beck? I’ll show you’ — it’s minor, and I don’t know that other people would experience it the way I did, but I thought it was important to not be in the deep, gravelly baritone,” he says. “Because that is even a tool to perform a masculinity that is seductive and powerful. But there, I think, even the voice was just stripped of its charms for a moment.” 

He also ended up doing “a lot of burpees” in between takes on set to really get his blood pumping. “He’s meant to be out of breath, he’s bleeding, he’s sweating, he’s got this mortal kind of adrenaline coursing through his veins,” Badgley shares. “So for two weeks, it was just [me] in the woods at night, in my underwear, just exhausting myself. It was just physically taxing, which is also a satisfying experience as an actor.”

The final season of You is streaming now on Netflix.

Additional reporting by Samantha Highfill.