The Netflix drama You's journey has been almost as wild as the path that Joe (Penn Badgley) has been on, as our favorite humble book-lover (who has a bad habit of getting obsessed with and/or murdering people) continues running from his past in search of that certain special You. After Season 2 brought Joe from New York to Los Angeles, Season 3 features him relocating to a sunny Northern California suburb with new wife Love (Victoria Pedretti) and their baby Henry; while things look picture-perfect, it doesn't take long before both Joe and Love's true natures emerge, causing lots of bloody problems for the young couple.
While You has found a home on Netflix after its original premiere on Lifetime, the show's recently announced Season 4 will feature what appears to be a new change in location. Without spoiling anything, showrunner Sera Gamble talked about what Joe might face now that Love's gone, what was involved in developing the world of suburbia as well as the new character of Marienne (Tati Gabrielle), and more.
But again, pleasure to speak with you. And I'm very curious, going into Season 3, what was top of your mind, in terms of Joe's journey?
SERA GAMBLE: We were very interested in just who he is, as a husband, and who he is, as a father. He certainly has strong opinions about those roles, and he's also had such a strong desire to be that. And so, let's explore the reality for him.
Of course. I mean, there's something about the way that the season ends that brings up this really interesting question of is there a scenario where Joe could ever really find happiness? Especially because going into the season, you would think, well, he's found a woman that seems to be pretty much on his wavelength, in a lot of respects.
GAMBLE: That's such a great question. I feel like I've been alive for a while now, and I'm still not always really good at knowing what's going to make me happy. It's such a strange thing about people, isn't it? We're frequently very bad at knowing what's going to make us happy, and we run around and pursue what turned out to be all the wrong things. It's certainly something I've been thinking a lot about in the last year because of the world. But he does doom himself, I think, by his relentless pursuit of this kind of love. I think the story is kind of tragic in that way. I mean, yes, he will have intense moments of happiness along the way, but things do tend to unravel because of what he's going for.
I mean, along those lines, I mean, if one was to believe in the concept of soulmates, was Love his soulmate in whatever kind of relationship they would have ended up in?
GAMBLE: See, I think the concept of soulmates is part of the problem. I think what a ton of pressure we put on ourselves when we think that that's a thing. And by the way, I think it's also incredibly romantic, and I use that word all the time when I was younger. And maybe now I just think I have a lot of them, and some of them are just friends or something. But I also think that term of soulmate is totally part and parcel of his notion of romantic love that turns into an obsessive pursuit for him.
Are they well-suited? Incredibly well-suited. Do they have more in common than he ever could have imagined? Yes, but so much so that she forces him to look at things that I think he'd rather not. So, that's marriage in a nutshell, isn't it?
When you were planning Season 3, were there ever any alternate ways you saw the season going? Were there different ways you saw it resolving?
GAMBLE: Yeah. I mean, we did know where we were going from the beginning. We went into the season knowing where the arc of that relationship would end. And I'll even go further, we knew where this arc would end before we wrote the scene where they meet in the grocery store. Right? We always had the idea that there would be this kind of two-season arc, but you make all these discoveries along the way. And essentially, being in a writer's room is kind of like being in a think tank... When I think of think tanks, I think of Ivy League people in suits who are figuring out really important things for the weapons industry or something. But we're just people in t-shirts, eating snacks and saying, "Well, what if this happened?" I mean, everything short of what if they moved to that colony on Mars that Grimes is going to form — apparently, we didn't go that far, but almost. But then we came back to where we started.
In terms of that, when playing with kind of a various sort of suburbia as a template, were there times where you were like, "Oh, we have to pull back on the suburban satire because we need to remember that the show's about Joe killing people, or trying not to?"
GAMBLE: No. If anything, the truth goes further. This is what keeps happening. I mean, yes, we are putting Joe into these environments that are full of pretty privileged people who live in a bubble, every place he's been. But we all followed certain neighborhood apps and websites to just see what people were saying, and did our research into suburbia and all these parent cultures. And frankly, sometimes had to make things less extreme because they went too far. It was out of the tone of the show.
Talk to me a little bit about the introduction of Marienne, just because she seems very much of the type that Joe goes after. What went into developing her and making sure that she was her own character?
GAMBLE: That's always a huge mountain to climb, ever since Beck, right? Beck was the one where like, okay, just create a three-dimensional and believable character with these attributes. And by the way, the book is going to help you a ton. And then ever since it's been like everyone is going to be compared to Elizabeth Lail. We don't want to feel like we're doing the same thing twice. And so every character who walks into Joe's circle goes through a pretty rigorous process of just trying to really talk about who would be very different, and what haven't we explored that we can.
Marienne is from a totally different world than Natalie and Love. And that's, I think, a big part of why she becomes so compelling to Joe. She starts to represent a world that feels more real to him than suburbia, which is... I mean, just Google the history of the lawn, American grass lawns. Even that is sort of creepy. There's an inherent David Lynch-y kind of creepiness to suburbia that's not Joe's vibe. So he would be very attracted to somebody who was speaking his language more.
Gotcha. So looking forward, I feel like there are the jokes to be made about how Season 4 is Joe in Paris, and everything that comes along with that. Thematically though, what do you feel like Season 4, should it happen? What do you feel like it would focus on?
GAMBLE: I think Joe in Paris is hilarious. The idea of him caring about fashion, for example, would be really funny. No, that's not what we're doing. I feel like Season 3 is a season of a huge amount of just loss and tragedy for him. And we leave him having lost or felt like he had to let go of everything he cared about really. So the story from here, if we get to tell it, is about how he gets any of that back or how he finds something else, because if the Joe you met in the first scene of the pilot, where the bell rings in the book shop, and then the girl in the jeans walks in, if he had one hole he wanted to fill in his heart, now he has like 17. So we've been with him longer, so we know more about his baggage, right? So I think there's a lot of that to explore.
To wrap up: In general, just big picture, what is the message you hope people are taking away from the show at this point?
GAMBLE: I don't think in terms of... I don't try to manipulate the audience that way. I mean, manipulating is even, I know you don't mean it that way. That's maybe kind of a strong word. But I accept that I can't control what people are going to take away, because everybody is coming to everything we consume, everything we watch and everything we read. We're coming to it from our own perspective, with our own lens. So, hopefully there's enough in there, that there's something of interest to a lot of the people who watch.
I mean, I was very relieved when the first season of the show came out, and that we had pulled off the tone of the show where people understood how sort of cheeky and subversive we were being about things I considered to be pretty serious. So what I hope is that people not only enjoy it and are like, "That was fucking nuts," but also maybe have a conversation about some of the stuff inside of us that is kind of dark, and we want to judge it and say, "It's not inside us," but it's in all... People are not perfect. We're not even nice inside of our heads. Most of us don't kill anybody, but I don't know. Does it sound really Pollyanna if I say, I hope people are a little kinder to themselves about the uglier thoughts in their head? Because they're watching it, and they're like, "Well, I'm kind of charmed by his ugly thoughts."
You Season 3 is streaming now on Netflix.