In a new essay, Penn Badgley shared what must have been one of many surreal moments from the making of his hit Netflix series You.
In Crushmore— a collection of essays from Badgley and his Podcrushed cohosts, Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari, on sale on October 14 — Badgley recalled humping nothing but air while in character as serial killer Joe Goldberg for a scene in You’s third season.
“My character is meant to be humpin’ on his wife, with whom he has become not only bored but also contemptuous, so he is imagining he’s having sex with a librarian he’s been flirting with, and whom he will later attempt to kill,” Badgley explained in an excerpt Vulture published online. “What this means for me, practically speaking, is that the director wants a close-up of my face as my character Joe is deep in dissociative reverie mid-coitus.”
Noam Galai/Getty Images for Netflix
But because the camera was so large — “a very large apparatus weighing just about seven hundred pounds,” Badgley wrote — there was no room on the bed for anyone but him as he shot the scene.
“This means that rather than simulating sex with her and looking at her while the camera watches us together, I’m going to have to simulate sex by myself, effectively humpin’ on the air, on a fake bed in a fake room, surrounded by a film crew,” the actor wrote. “Oh, and I’ll be in the same nude thong I’ve been wearing all morning as we complete the scene, of course.”
In another indignity, Silver Tree, the director of that episode, told Badgley that he’d have to stare into the camera during this one-person sex-scene shot. And as he got into position on the mattress, Badgley thought he’d hit an impasse.
“I realize as I try to look into the lens that, for a moment, I can’t,” he recounted. “I simply cannot. It’s too bald, too bold, too bawdy; and I feel naked because I am almost naked. I really can’t take this seriously. I start to giggle, and then I laugh, quaking on all fours. Every part of me that can jiggle is now jiggling. Our camera operator starts to laugh, and so does the sound guy holding a boom mic just above my head. We all laugh, and it’s a relaxing, unifying moment.”
The saving grace for Badgley was the matte box — a metal frame with visors to shield the camera lens from light — which made it so he couldn’t actually see the lens. And when Tree called “action,” the actor went to work.
“A moment ago there was only resistance in my body to do what was needed, but upon the utterance of one word — action — I am supremely present in the face of sheer absurdity,” he wrote. “I look in camera. And I hump my ass off.”
You, All Seasons Now Streaming, Netflix
