This article contains spoilers for theYou series finale.
While Penn Badgley is content with where Joe Goldberg ends up in the You series finale, he knows that some viewers may have wanted to see his killer character go out in a much darker way than spending the rest of his days behind bars.
“The finale, to me, it’s doing everything that could possibly be done in a satisfying manner,” the actor tells Entertainment Weekly. “I think he’s delivered to his truly appropriate end. And then the only thing left is to realize [that] there is no ending that could satisfy anyone 100 percent, because justice for a man like Joe isn’t in and of itself satisfying. I mean, he’s an abuser. He’s a killer. He’s a bad person. So I think being satisfied is a positive thing.”
The final episode of the hit Netflix thriller sees Joe finally arrested and brought to justice for the murders of Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) and Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). In its last scene, Joe laments over his insatiable loneliness while locked within a new kind of cage: his jail cell.
Badgley as Joe on ‘You’. Courtesy of Netflix
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Badgley explains that a more gory, dramatic ending for Joe — who, at one point, begs girlfriend Bronte (Madeline Brewer) to kill him before he can be taken into custody — would’ve only succeeded in giving him the victimhood that he was craving and bringing the show’s heroines down to his level.
“With Joe, we’re brought to finally, possibly, like, a neutral place in the end,” he says. “Because if we were to be satisfied by his end too much, I think that would be bloodlust. That would be like you want to see him be torn apart; you want to see him tortured; you want to see him killed brutally by the women who’ve hurt him. But that would be horrible for them. That would be off. That would be bringing them closer to his level and us.”
The 38-year-old admits that only “time and perspective” can “bring the bit of satisfaction we’re unable to deliver” through Joe’s final moments.
“If you were to think of this as a real man and a real story and real victims, the only thing that can truly heal and satisfy is time, as long as justice has been served,” Badgley says. “And I think, in the case of Joe, justice has been served — especially because of the extra little twist of the blade with the removal of his genitalia.”
After begging Bronte to shoot him, Joe does end up getting his wish — just maybe not in the location he would’ve wanted. She shoots his penis off just moments before he is arrested.
Badgley considers the body part loss to be a fate worse than death for Joe. “He does his worst damage not in the cage, because in the cage he’s actually transparent about who he is, or he’s the most transparent about who he is,” he says. “And he’ll actually put anybody in the cage who needs to be — men, women, old, young, whatever — but he will not bring just anybody into the bedroom. The bedroom is a state of mind: he has a very specific kind of idea of prey, and he refuses to admit that he is a predator.”
Badgley and Madeline Brewer on ‘You’. Courtesy of Netflix
It’s why he believes Joe “had to be undeniably captured and revealed as the predator that he is” on a much bigger scale instead of dying his infamous glass cage.
“That was super important, I think, that he wouldn’t meet his end in a cage, as probably people were expecting, but for him to meet his end…. The process begins in bed, in a state of undress, where, for the first time, I think you see him engaging in the act and you don’t want it to happen,” he says. “The whole point is that all throughout the show you want him to have this romantic experience. And so finally, the last love scene he’s a part of is the first one that is, I think, truly turning your stomach.”
The final season of You is streaming now on Netflix.
