‘You’ creator on Season 4 and having fewer sex scenes: ‘There’s no morality panic’
LOS ANGELES — Sera Gamble understands your Joe Goldberg conundrum. As the hopeless romantic and serial killer at the center of Netflix's popular series "You," Joe, played by Penn Badgley, is a thorny protagonist to follow: You love him! You're weirded out by him! He's toxic! Wait, you're rooting for him to change?
"It feels like that in the [writers'] room, too," says Gamble, the showrunner of the psychological thriller. "On any given morning, someone will be like, 'We need to shove him off a building instead of some innocent victim this time.' And then somebody else would be like, 'Oh, I feel like he's been really sweet to [love interest] Kate [Charlotte Ritchie] this season.'"
Joe has been wrestling with himself too.
After escaping death at the hands of his equally murderous wife, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti), Joe headed overseas. Season 4 — split into two installments, with Part 1 released last month — started off as a whodunit satirizing the British class system, with Joe posing as Jonathan Moore, an American literature professor in London drawn into the mystery of the Eat-the-Rich Killer. As we learn in Part 2, now streaming, all is not as it appears: Joe himself, in the midst of a psychological break, is the culprit, and has his former obsession Marienne (Tati Gabrielle), thought safe from harm in Paris, locked in a glass cage.
Joe's unraveling felt inevitable, Gamble says. "It's wearing on him.
"Writers in the room all day, every day, talking about Joe — they have some pretty harsh judgments of him. And regularly, they're like, 'When are we going to punish this guy?' Penn too. Penn is like: 'How self-aware can you make him?'"
After going
