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“I Can’t Unsee ‘You’ Season 5 the Same Way—These 20 Juicy Cast Secrets Will Mess With Your Mind (and Your Horoscope)”

Is it just me, or does bingeing the final season of You feel a bit like Mercury retrograde in Scorpio—intense, twisted, and full of secrets you really didn’t want to uncover? Just when you thought Joe’s stalking game had peaked, Season 5 storms in with a whole new brand of chaos, and thanks to some juicy behind-the-scenes tea from Penn Badgley, Charlotte Ritchie, and the gang, I’m never gonna see this show the same way again. Did you ever stop to wonder how much the cast’s real lives bled into their characters, or how a picnic in Williamsburg could be so cloak-and-dagger that not even a fan dared approach? Well, grab your fave midnight snack and settle in — because these 20 wild facts reveal the enchanting, exhausting, and downright surprising truths behind You’s last act. After all, with the cosmos nudging us toward truth and transformation, isn’t it about time we ask: can a guy like Joe really be just a “romantic icon,” or is he the ultimate cautionary tale?

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You Season 5 Behind-The-Scenes Facts, Cast Interview

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):

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Playing Maddie impacted Anna’s self-esteem to the point where one day she became paranoid that Charlotte was mad at her.

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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.

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And Griffin requested that his on-screen husband be Black, as he’s always had white actors play his television spouses.

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Charlotte initially “judged” Kate for being so cold, and noted that she used “Joe as a physical manifestation of her own redemption.”

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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.

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And Charlotte has looked up fan theories about the show’s ending on Reddit, spotting a few that were right on the money.

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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.

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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.

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For the sequence when Mooney’s burns down, Charlotte wasn’t actually near any real fire.

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The final episode took 16 days to film, with both intimacy and stunt coordinators joining the “heavily choreographed” sequence.

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The finale was also mostly shot in sequence, with stunt doubles taking on the most dangerous tasks.

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Penn thinks the show purposefully “withheld the audience” from seeing Joe “explicitly as a sexual predator” until the final episode.

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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.

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There’s one line that Madeline thinks sums up the show:

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Penn thinks the last lines of the show have a double meaning depending on whether or not you take them literally.

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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.

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