Penn Badgley isn’t holding back when it comes to discussing his steamy scenes on You.
In his upcoming book, Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age, the Gossip Girl alum reflected on the process of filming one of his sex scenes for the hit Netflix series You.
He shared that the series involved an excessive amount of “humping the air.”
Recalling one of his Season 3 scenes, Badgley wrote that he was involved in a “dream sequence” where his character, Joe Goldberg, is intimate with his wife (Victoria Pedretti) while secretly yearning for the librarian (Tati Gabrielle), according to an excerpt published by Vulture Thursday.
The Stepfather star shared that the director opted to shoot the scene with “the camera directly in front of my face.
“What this means for me, practically speaking, is that the director wants a close-up of my face as my character Joe is deep in dissociative reverie mid-coitus,” Badgley, 38, added.
But the actors ran into a problem — there wasn’t room for both Pedretti and the 700-pound camera rig, leaving Badgley to, “simulate sex by myself, effectively humpin’ on the air, on a fake bed in a fake room, surrounded by a film crew.”
“Oh, and I’ll be in the same nude thong I’ve been wearing all morning as we complete the scene, of course,” he continued.
Then, the scene transformed as he’s mentioned that he’ll no longer be “humping the air with the camera in my face, but I’m going to be looking straight down the barrel of the lens, something I reflexively never do.”
Badgley powered through, joking he “humped my ass off.”
Once the director called “action,” he snapped into character despite the absurdity.
He’s not the only You star to get candid about filming risqué scenes.
To note, Badgley’s Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming of Age is set to available for purchase on October 14.
