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Penn Badgley and Shay Mitchell reveal 7 cool things about 'YOU'
Shay Mitchell and Penn Badgley met with the local press on Monday to promote new Netflix series, "YOU."
RELATED: Joyce Pring meets YOU stars Penn Badgley and Shay Mitchell
Everything about the show has the makings of a great rom-com: For doe-eyed Joe (Penn Badgley), it’s love at first sight the moment he sees Guinevere “Everyone calls me Beck” Beck (Elizabeth Lail), a dreamy and pretty grad student and aspiring writer.
They meet-cute in Mooney’s, a hip, little bookshop in Manhattan, where he works as the manager. Their first encounter is scripted for romance; their banter is light, sparks fly. By all accounts, they’re the prototypical “couple you root for” in most, if not all romantic comedies.
Except this is not a romantic comedy. Joe has a sound-proof, climate-controlled glass chamber in the basement of Mooney’s used for storing and restoring rare edition books. On occasion, it is used as a prison-slash-torture cell.
You see, Joe is a stalker, and the worst kind: he doesn’t think he’s a stalker. He thinks he’s in love.
Then there’s Peach Salinger (Shay Mitchell)—Beck’s BFF and the Queen Bee of her tribe. She’s blunt, whip smart, manipulative…and she’s on to Joe. She genuinely wants what’s best for Beck, but only as long as it’s in line with what she wants and it sticks close to her own hidden agenda. And Joe’s on to her, too.
Shay and Penn revealed a few cool things about the series we thought you should know too!
1. Penn struggled with signing on to play Joe. Not that he didn’t want to sign on to the project, but Penn wasn’t sure he wanted to play a murderous psychopathic stalker for the period of time it would take to complete filming, possibly longer if the show was going to be renewed for another season (as it has).
“I was really resistant to the idea in a way. I actually really thought it was something I wouldn’t do. I liked the project but the idea of playing Joe day in and day out for six months…for maybe six years, I wasn’t sure.” Thankfully a conversation with Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble, the shows creators, about how they could further explore the different themes in You helped change his mind.
2. Shay welcomed the chance to play the “bad girl.” After playing nice and sweet Emily Fields for so many years on "Pretty Little Liars," Shay was ready to go to the dark side. “I really want to say it was hard [to play Peach] because she is such an…interesting girl, but it wasn’t because the writing on our show is incredible. [Her lines were so funny].”
She adds, “I get why people enjoy playing the bad girl. It is fun! And just to have that sort of back and forth with Penn’s character, it was hilarious. I really enjoyed playing her.”
3. There were days when Penn didn’t have any lines on set. Because Joe is the main narrator of the story, his lines were mostly in his head. Penn says, “Most days on set, I didn’t have to memorize any lines. I would just have to do them later, and that was quite interesting.”
4. And speaking of voiceovers, did you know that Penn did voice work on two Nintendo 64 games? When asked if he worked with a voice coach for the show, Penn says he didn’t. And he probably didn’t need to since his voiceover career began very early. “I started [doing voiceovers] when I was a child, at around nine or ten. [I did work on radio.]”
Not only did he work on radio, he did voiceovers for video games, too. “I was in two Nintendo 64 games—Mario Tennis and Mario Golf!”
5. Shay thinks Peach could have gone full Joe if she had lived. If you’ve seen the show, you know that Peach doesn’t make it to season two (RIP, Peach). But she’s such a deliciously juicy character, that we couldn’t help but speculate what would have happened if she had survived. Shay has her theories: “Who knows who she would’ve turned into had she had more life to live? We saw from that one scene, when Beck storms out of the house, that Peach was starting to unravel. If she had more life to live, [I wonder if] she would have done something very similar to what Joe did.”
6. Shay brought 5 suitcases of her own clothes for Peach to wear. “Those clothes were all mine, so hopefully [her wardrobe] doesn’t say ‘crazy bitch,’” says Shay. She brought five suitcases of her own clothes and worked with the stylist on the show to come up with a look for Peach that was different from her own personal style.
“On the show, [in the beginning] the budget isn’t huge, but because Peach is the character that she is, I wanted her to have certain things. It was important for me to look the part, so I brought [my clothes] with me, and it was really fun getting to curate her image.”
7. Nobody is interested in seeing Joe get redemption, least of all Penn. Penn is adamant that Joe receives no form of redemption. “Because he’s killed people. He’s a murderer. I’m not interested, and I don’t think the writers are interested, in Joe’s redemption.” He adds that that’s not the point of the show. "It would be too problematic. We’d just be seeing an evil white man looking for forgiveness, and in 2019 and 2020, we don’t need any more of that.”
He thinks it’ll be quite interesting to see if people will still tune in if redemption isn’t in the cards for Joe. “I think people will be wanting him to redeem himself and he’s not going to. And then we’ll see how long people will want to keep watching. It’s like an endurance test. We’ll see how long people will want to watch me do that,” he says laughing. — LA, GMA News
