Yous showrunner gives the lowdown on the low-down stalker-murderer we cant stop watching.
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This conversation contains many specifics ofYou, includingall kinds of spoilersabout who dies and who doesnt.
But you would be wrong.
(Joe just calls it white-picket purgatory.)
I loathe Joe Goldberg.
But I cant stop watching him.
Joe is just the very extreme version of impulses many of us have.
Has any reaction surprised you?There is always going to be a point of view you didnt expect.
Theres no way to predict what all those different brains are going to think.
And what are you trying to say?[Laughs.]
More than one thing.
Because Im a woman.
Because I walk down the street and worry for my safety.
and have the answer be no.
And that includes third-degree black belts.
This is just a part of what women and femme people carry.
We dont feel safe.
And I think that theres a relief and a bit of a thrill in deep-diving into it.
And she was like, Yes, yes it was.
It was sort of like the universe saying, hey talk about this.
like open up the conversation so people can talk about it.
It really is about toeing a line of safety.
It felt necessary to have Love be this stalking, murderous person as well.
Season one is not the kind of thing you could repeat.
But you have Joes number by the end.
What did Victoria Pedretti bring alive from the page what did she make her own?
In blunt terms, we need a really charismatic actor whom we want to watch for a long time.
She is reliably surprising; she brings twists and turns and depth to each scene.
Its her facility as a performer to find colors that you dont expect.
As soon as you start seeing dailies from an actor, you start writing toward their strengths.
It becomes a real-time collaboration.
It was exciting to have those conversations with her, and also with Shalita, this season.
Lets talk about Shalita Grants Sherry.
That character hit some very real-life tropes about moms and motherhood, social media, and privilege.
The needle is kind of impossible to thread for women.
That was a huge part of what we were trying to say with Becks character in season one.
The online chatter about being a mom is pretty famous for always being controversial.
I think we just eat mothers alive as a culture.
She sort of confesses.
And that was her solution to being judged harshly.
No matter what she did, she was picking and choosing the aspects of herself that she would expose.
And in that way, shes creating actual privacy and control for herself.
and then we zoom in.
We start planting flags and then we zoom in closer and closer until we know what each episode is.
Nobody is actually perfect, every family has problems, and no marriage is perfect.
Ah yes, that disastrous foursome.
And even thoughswingerssounds a bit old-fashioned, its still one of the terms used for that lifestyle.
We certainly have no intention of telling people to not open their relationship up.
Sometimes its the perfect solution for people for people who are in a relationship with honesty.
But Joe and Love, with the number of secrets they have, no.
How about adding in other contemporary, real-world issues?
You have that anti-vaxxer storyline, which feels so right for the moment.
The last day of being in the office, we were breaking that very episode.
Its so perfectly placed, though.Look, we had no idea what the pandemic was going to be.
What would inspire them in the moment to knock somebody over the head and lock them in a cage?
There also had been some recent measles outbreaks in California communities like the one we were writing about.
The story remained the same.
But the logistics of every single scene changed.
We filmed from October or November of 2020 to April of 2021.
The biggest spike of positivity in Los Angeles happened during our shoot.
All credit goes to our production team and to the support of the studio.
There was a very strict, mandatory PPE, social distancing, daily testing.
There is no show if people never kiss or occasionally get in very close quarters to one another.
What is your comfort level, and can we even do this right now?
Every actor embraced a high level of personal responsibility to keep one another and everyone on set safe.
This show has more voice-over than any other show or film that I can think of.
Writers like to say that VO is a crutch that, like,goodwriters dont use VO.
The voice-over has to tell us the truth of whats in his head.
Because the book takes place inside his head.
Thankfully, Penn is a genius of voice-over.
Like, if he didnt do it well, the show would not work.
Im very curious about the timing of when Badgley records and how it works on set.It is complicated.
Its a process that were refining until we lock the final cut.
And I cant say enough about how great Penns instincts are.
On the day, Penns stand-in, Danny Watters, reads the lines from off-screen for get the timing.
Is that a nod to the VO?
By the middle of the last episode, were wondering if Love is going to kill Joe.
Was that twist always the ending in mind?Some version of it, yes.
We all kind of think of this show a little bit in horror-movie terms.
We have to talk about Marienne, played by Tati Gabrielle.
And that makes for good TV!
But she also has to be really different than the last love interest.
Was Gabrielle always the person you had in mind for that role?No.
We auditioned a lot of incredible actors for this role.
As soon as we talked to Tati, though, we were like,Oh, of course.
We had to do her and Penns chemistry read over Zoom.
I think Penn was in a national park and Tati was in Europe.
Can we assume that the next season will be about Joe stalking her in Paris?
I mean, how are you thinking about the long game of the show?We have some ideas.
I dont think were done telling the epic tragedy of Joe Goldberg.
Theres a lot of gas left in the tank.
Thats a really good place to start.
Were very attracted to dropping our little fish into those waters.
Its not just them, but its certainly the mistake they both keep making.
Which, I would watch that show.
But its not this show.
