“You” star Penn Badgley and showrunner Sera Gamble revealed more details behind their decision to scale back the Netflix series’ sex scenes in Season 4, with Gamble revealing that “it was not a very difficult conversation.”
On Badgley’s “Podcrushed” Stitcher Studios podcast, Gamble addressed the process of planning around her star’s request to no longer film intimate scenes. Badgley had previously said he feels that acting out intimacy conflicts with his marriage to singer Domino Kirke.
“It was not a very difficult conversation for me, honestly. Nobody was saying, ‘I refuse to do something.’ My job in that conversation was just to, like, pinpoint exactly what you were asking for and what was making you uncomfortable,” Gamble said to Badgley. “There’s a big difference, for example, between saying, ‘I have a problem with the content of the show you’re writing,’ and, ‘I’m having this issue around my own performance, what my job is demanding that I do specifically with my body.’ We’re not in the business of saying ‘strip down and touch someone’ if you know that’s not what you wanna do.”
Badgley then dispelled the idea that physical touch to simulate sex was the same as faking murder in the show.
“When people bring up, ‘Well, what about murder?’ It’s like, guys, I’m not murdering anybody,” he said. “At the end of the day, there’s something that you can’t simulate, which is physical touch. It just comes down to that. It’s like, not everybody has to do this in their job.”
Gamble said that her and the series star’s years working together made it easier to find common ground for Badgley’s concerns.
“The two people in that conversation are me and you. We’re making the show together. We were many years into it at this point. And it’s just like, let me understand,” she said. “My job is just: Let me understand the parameters and then come back with a plan.”
Listen to the full “Podcrushed” episode here.
