Why Penn Badgley insisted on being ‘as naked as possible’ in that YOU season five ending

Penn Badgley has revealed that he fought to be as naked as possible during that tense YOU season five ending, and shared the interesting reason.

In the final scenes, Bronte lures Joe into bed and grabs a gun that she hid under the pillow, forcing him to reveal how he killed Beck. Still wearing just his underwear, they run out into the woods in the middle of the night and have a huge confrontation.

Speaking to People, the actor explained: “I actually fought to be as naked as possible in that last sequence because he needed to be as dangerously close to being witnessed finally as a sexual predator that he was.”

“He needed to be seen in that way to be kind of saying to everybody, is this what you needed to see in order to realise who he is? We withheld it from now, but is this what you need to see? And that’s, I think, a really juicy kind of engagement and question with the viewer that we’re all a part of.”

Badgley was an executive producer on season five of You, which is how he got to have to much say. In another interview with Deadline, he said the other producers wanted Joe to wear a white tank top as it would enhance the scene with the shirt ripping, visible blood and dirt.

Credit: Netflix

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“I was like ‘I feel you, I get you’ but he needs to be as close to naked as possible because he needs to look like he’s about to abuse… do the thing to her, not with her, but to her,” he said.

The scenes took two whole weeks to film, so that’s 14 days of running around a heavily forested area in upstate New York in just his underwear during August last year.

“I spent about two weeks in my underwear in the woods at night and I didn’t get a single bug bite. It was a crazy,” the actor revealed. “Not a tick, not nothing. I didn’t even have bug spray on, in the summer.”

He said the whole scene was “exhausting” to film but it was the “right way” to do it, and he’s glad that he fought to be almost naked in the Netflix sequence.

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Featured image by: Netflix