-You know our next guest for his work on
"Gossip Girl" and "Easy A."
He returns to star in the fourth season of "You."
Part 1 begins streaming globally
on Netflix February 9th.
Let's take a look.
-Whose coat is this?
-Easy does it.
Time to get this one home.
Couch, couch, couch.
-Malcolm got me home.
Do I need to thank him? No.
If I'm rude, maybe the misogynist with a drug problem
will leave me alone.
New day.
No more craziness.
Back to the quiet.
[ Ominous music plays ]
-Please welcome to the show, Penn Badgley, everybody!
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
I'm so happy to have you here!
-Yo!
[ Cheers and applause ]
Alright, I think this is the first studio audience
since like, 2020, since COVID.
-Is it jarring to be back in front of human beings like this?
-I mean, well, like this, it's always jarring.
-Right, right, yeah.
-It's not --
-It's not a natural state of things.
-Yeah, it's nothing on you. All on me.
-This is a show, as evidenced by the reaction when you came out,
with a very devoted fanbase,
but also, you play a very terrible person.
-Yeah. -Is that confounding to you,
that this is where people are like,
"We love watching Penn do this."
-I mean...
So, yes, I mean, I somewhat famously played
a cultural ref back when it first came out,
and I was like, you know, "He's a murderer!"
But I think now I'm just like, that's also on us a bit.
We designed him. -We're drawn to it.
-We designed him that way.
But it's, yeah, man.
I feel like I have a front row seat
to this particular kind of...
that thing, you know?
The obsession thing, and so, you know,
I bear witness and it's cool.
-There's some pretty gnarly scenes in the show.
I would imagine it gets pretty gross with the special effects.
-Yeah. -Are there times where
you have to take a minute?
-Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm not precious about my process in any way,
but there have been a few times where I've spontaneously
become nauseous.
Just in this last season --
when you don't finish a scene on time in the day,
you have to go back and do pick-ups,
and so I was in the middle of something else.
I'm like, "Yeah, we're gonna go do pick-ups for this scene
from the second episode or first episode.
Sure, yeah, yeah."
And then I got to strap on this jumpsuit,
and then I'm like, "Oh, right."
And then they spray me down with blood, like,
fully, fully.
I have goggles on and I'm just like,
"Okay, alright."
And then I walk into this room they've created
to make it look like the place we were in,
and it's full of smoke and dark, fake blood
all over a table, and a table saw with meat on it.
[ Crowd groans ]
-Yeah, that's -- yeah.
And, um, and I remember just being like -- [Shudders]
It's not, um --
Your nervous system is just like, "No!"
-Yeah, right.
And I would imagine, too, when you're like,
"Alright, now what's this character thinking?"
that's not a nice place to go, either.
-Well, you know what's nice is that
he's meant to be --
he's your likeable serial killer.
He's your clumsy, like, killer next door.
-He's a little, bumbling --
-So I just let the nausea come through.
-Now, obviously, this was
a highly anticipated season,
and this was the art that you put on social media.
But I've heard -- well, you actually shared
after you posted it. -I did.
-You had posted it maybe before you were allowed.
-Yeah, before the embargo was lifted.
Which makes it feel like I'm an ambassador or something.
Like, "embargo." -But a Netflix embargo,
I would imagine that's a real deal.
-It is, yeah.
To be honest, I don't post much on social media.
My batting average is high, but I do not actually post.
I do not actually post that much.
-It's very good to wait for a big announcement like that.
-And even there had been bigger announcements
about this season.
I hadn't posted.
But I just thought, "You know what?
I'll do it this morning."
And I had a lot to do with my son, and I was just like,
"If I don't do it now, I'm not gonna do it."
It was 9:00 in the morning.
And I went to this, like,
there's this secret spreadsheet from Netflix.
It's very confidential.
It made me quite nervous, actually,
and I second-guessed it, but then I found it.
It was all very complicated. And I posted.
-As a fellow performer,
if I look at a spreadsheet, I also get very nervous.
-Yeah, it's just --
-A lot of the spreadsheet stuff in school
was not my forte.
-But I posted,
And I'm posting it on Instagram and I'm thinking,
"What's a cute caption?
'Felt cute might delete.'"
[ Laughter ]
And I felt cute about that.
-You were being honest.
-Yeah, no. I felt cute,
and I had no intention of deleting it.
-Yeah.
-And then I go back to the spreadsheet --
why, I don't know --
and it says,
"Do not post until noon."
And I was like...
I mean, it's 9:00.
[ Laughter ]
Is that a big deal? Three hours?
Like, does that matter?
And I'm thinking to myself, like,
"Okay, who cares? Should I?"
But then I was like, "No, I'm gonna..."
And I deleted it, and then I realized...
...I felt cute and I deleted it.
-Yeah!
[ Laughter ]
-And then -- no, and then --
So at this point, the post doesn't exist
except to the few, I don't know,
100 or maybe 1,000 people who saw it,
and I thought,
"That was brilliant."
-Yeah!
-To them, the few!
And then I thought, "Do I leave it like that
or do I follow through and post the post
that I was gonna post because I'm trying to be a team player?"
And so then I posted it, and believe it or not,
I posted all of this in a caption.
-Yeah. What you just told us.
-I might have told the story better in that caption.
So you can go check.
-You know, if your phone has the megabytes
to download the whole post.
It's a really cool show.
Thank you so much for being here.
We really appreciate it.
You guys, that's Penn Badgley!
The first part of Season 4 of "You"
begins streaming today on Netflix.
We'll be right back with "Late Night."