Hey, you. The fifth and final season of the Netflix hit show You is out, so we spoke to Penn Badgley (Joe), Charlotte Ritchie (Kate), Madeline Brewer (Brontë), Anna Camp (Reagan/Maddie), and Griffin Matthews (Teddy) about the very wild ride the finale took us on.
Here’s what we learned (massive spoilers ahead, obviously):
1.
Frankie DeMaio, the child actor who plays Henry, was given a different version of the script, which had no swear words and reduced violence. He won’t be watching the show.
2.
Penn is not the kind of actor who spends all day in character as Joe — he’ll usually just take a second before a scene starts to get worked up into the red-faced, vein-popping state.
3.
Before shooting, the cast met up for a picnic in Williamsburg (apart from Penn, who had a scheduling issue). Nobody came over to say that they recognized them.
4.
Meanwhile, on one shoot inside a building in the West Village, the street outside was suddenly full of You fans. It’s not super clear how they found out about the filming inside.
5.
Playing Maddie impacted Anna’s self-esteem to the point where one day she became paranoid that Charlotte was mad at her.
6.
Anna helped cast her double, Sarah Helbringer, who would act alongside Anna as one of the twins in shots where her face wasn’t visible.
7.
And Griffin requested that his on-screen husband be Black, as he’s always had white actors play his television spouses.
8.
Charlotte initially “judged” Kate for being so cold, and noted that she used “Joe as a physical manifestation of her own redemption.”
9.
The script would be changed based on Griffin and Charlotte’s input in order to make their characters sound more authentic from Harlem and England, respectively.
10.
And Charlotte has looked up fan theories about the show’s ending on Reddit, spotting a few that were right on the money.
11.
Penn was 30 when he took the role of Joe — and now he’s about to turn 40. The cultural shifts in how we talk about gender-based violence have impacted how he talks about the character in the press.
12.
To film her scenes, Tati Gabrielle had to fly back and forth between New York and Winnipeg as she was also working on The Last of Us.
13.
For the sequence when Mooney’s burns down, Charlotte wasn’t actually near any real fire.
14.
The final episode took 16 days to film, with both intimacy and stunt coordinators joining the “heavily choreographed” sequence.
15.
The finale was also mostly shot in sequence, with stunt doubles taking on the most dangerous tasks.
16.
Penn thinks the show purposefully “withheld the audience” from seeing Joe “explicitly as a sexual predator” until the final episode.
17.
Despite the heaviness of the topic, Madeline and Penn agreed that they found moments of levity and “laughed a lot” throughout those final scenes, which wound up being more graphic without the lighting effects. As such, Penn found it especially difficult to act as if he was punching Madeline’s face.
18.
There’s one line that Madeline thinks sums up the show:
19.
Penn thinks the last lines of the show have a double meaning depending on whether or not you take them literally.
20.
And that Joe couldn’t have ended the show in the box, as he tends to wind up there every season.
Thanks for talking to us! You Season 5 is now available on Netflix.
