Penn Badgley: 15 Things To Know About The You Actor

Penn Badgley was born in Baltimore, Maryland on November 1, 1986. He grew up near Richmond, Virginia with his mom and dad, who was a carpenter. "You know, as an only child, you're kind of in a bubble, and there are all sorts of things about my childhood that I still can't really place," he told Vulture. Badgley then moved out to Washington state and he landed the role of Winthrop in the Seattle Children's Theatre production of "The Music Man" when he was 8 years old. 

This was all after an impressive health rebound following his birth. Badgley was born two months premature and as a result, he spent his first weeks of life in a neonatal intensive care unit. "My heart and lungs would stop repeatedly throughout the day, so I was on a heart monitor," he revealed on the "HypochondriActor⁠" podcast. "So my mom had to learn how to resuscitate me." Upon leaving the hospital, she had to subsequently administer continual attempts to revive her son for the first year of his life. 

Badgley's parents divorced when he was 12 years old. But, even after becoming a famous actor, he stayed well-connected with his mom Lynne. The mother and son were spotted together at a launch event for Lynne's jewelry line Badgley-Sneed Designs. "Anything that I can support her in, I will," the actor told People about his mom. According to Lynne, she and Badgley had remained close and would often talk on the phone together.

Long before becoming a teen heartthrob, Penn Badgley began his career as a child actor. Alluding to his future success with his distinctive voice, the actor's first role in entertainment was on a children's radio show in Seattle when he was around 9 or 10 years old. The show was called "Kid Star," and according to Badgley, it involved storytelling and roles like playing a fake newscaster. "It was more like a training grounds," Badgley explained about the program on "Jimmy Kimmel Live." 

A few years later, starting at age 12, he began to land jobs in Los Angeles. "The roles I was playing weren't the cool guy. I'm known for playing awkward people — that's my bread and butter, playing the awkward nice guy," Badgley told The Guardian. Admittedly, that made auditions even scarier. "The kind of insecurity I experienced was heightened," he noted.

In 2001, Badgley landed his first film role in the movie "The Fluffer." The film follows a male pornstar and as Badgley remembers, he quickly learned adult terminology as a kid. "When I read the script, neither my agents, my mom, nor I knew what a fluffer was — and I was the first one to find out because I read the script first," he recalled to Variety. While maybe not entirely suitable for a kid, the job helped put Badgley on his acting path, starting with TV shows like the soap opera "The Young and the Restless" and the WB series "The Mountain."

A central arc of "Gossip Girl" was the relationship between Dan Humphrey and Serena van der Woodsen, played respectively by Penn Badgley and Blake Lively. The on-screen chemistry was clearly not just acting, as the two dated in real life. "Having a relationship with someone you work with might not always be the smartest move," he told Men's Health about linking up with his co-star. "But it's wonderful to be in a relationship where we can both identify with what the other is experiencing."

Awkwardly, the two broke up while the show was still filming but the exes were good at separating their professional and personal lives. Joshua Safran, an executive producer for the show, told Vanity Fair, "The shocking thing was, I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up months before." A source confirmed to Us Weekly that the split appeared to be amicable between the two actors and that both remained friends.

Looking back on the relationship, Badgley admits it was a wild experience to have such a public relationship, especially in its connection to the hit teen show. "It was intense, but it served to make everything feel pretty strange ... We all fell in and out of love a lot at that time," he told The Guardian. He also suggested to Variety that his relationship with Lively may have kept him from taking a dangerous, hedonistic path to deal with his newfound fame. 

The TV series "You," based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Caroline Kepnes, originally premiered on Lifetime in 2018. The network picked up the show for a second season but it was also dealing with low ratings. Yet, for international viewers, "You" had always been on Netflix. The show was ultimately passed from Lifetime to Netflix, which launched the second season. 

Thanks to the central performance by Penn Badgley, the show became a massive hit for the streaming platform. The format of the show relies heavily on the hypnotic internal monologues by Badgley's character. In fact, the actor revealed that about 80% of his lines on the show are narration. "Most days I go to work and I actually don't have any lines often. I'm just looking," he told "Jimmy Kimmel Live." 

When first learning about "You," Badgley explained how it felt somewhat familiar with a focus on social media to his roles in "Gossip Girl" and "Easy A." "I definitely saw the similarities," he told InStyle. "I think I was really caught between being able to appreciate how that's an interesting progression of things for me, but also how it's not." The show was a hit but Badgley also admitted it's a bit odd becoming a famous serial killer on screen. To play the part, he approached it from a less villainous point of view. "I personally am not remotely fascinated with murder or serial killers," he told Interview. "I'm interested in why, collectively, there's a fascination with them."

While many celebrities in Hollywood like Tom Cruise have joined the Scientology faith, Penn Badgley is part of an even less well-known religion. He is a part of the Baháʼí Faith, which began in the Middle East. Badgley first discovered the religion towards the end of his run on "Gossip Girl," when he admittedly felt lost spiritually. Travels took the actor to Colombia where he met another guy from New York City, and the two remained unexpectedly connected with a common interest in spiritual teachings. Later, this man recommended that Badgley read poetry by the founder of Baháʼí Faith — they profoundly resonated with the actor.

A few years later, with the Black Lives Matter protests as a catalyst, he found his way back to the religion. "I was thinking a lot about social change, social action, social transformation — but also my own transformation, my own change," he told Variety. By 2015, Badgley officially became a member of the Baháʼí Faith — which focuses on abolishing intolerance and divides related to class, race, and religion. "[I discovered] a deepening in my understanding of the oneness of humankind and the inherent nobility of the human being," he told Page Six. As an active member, Badgley also used his celebrity to bring awareness to others in the faith that he felt were being discriminated against, including people from Iran, one of the birthplaces of Baháʼí.

Following his run on "Gossip Girl," Penn Badgley was basically couch surfing around — traveling and staying at various places. One day, at a meatball shop, he met a woman named Domino Kirke who offered a room rental at her place. Admittedly, she had never watched "Gossip Girl" and had no idea about Badgley's fame. At the time, she was also raising a child but confessed to thinking it would be nice to have a cute roommate. While Badgley didn't move in, the two exchanged numbers and continued to talk. On an episode of his podcast, "Podcrushed," she quipped, "[At one point], I sort of lost interest." Regardless, there was clearly a special connection between the two.

In 2017, Badgley and Kirke were married in a courthouse in Brooklyn, followed by a reception in upstate New York later in the year. The couple began working on growing their family and after two heartbreaking miscarriages, Badgley and his wife welcomed their son James in 2020 in the midst of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions. "I don't know what it's like to be at least a biological father outside of the pandemic," Badgley told InStyle. "It's just been us, my wife and I, taking care of him." While he was happy to have all this alone time with his newborn, Badgley also admitted it was hard work being a father. Fortunately, he and Kirke-Badgley have still made time to enjoy date nights together.

Part of the strange appeal for Penn Badgley's character, Joe Goldberg, in "You" is that despite his murderous tendencies, there is still something to love about the fictional serial killer. The characters on the show are likewise often entranced by Goldberg, leading to scenes of intimacy. These on-screen relationships are nothing new to the actor, who of course was regularly part of romantic drama during his time on "Gossip Girl." Yet, when it comes to filming sex scenes, Badgley would ideally avoid them altogether. "That aspect of Hollywood has always been very disturbing to me. And that aspect of the job, that mercurial boundary has always been something that I actually don't want to play with at all,' he revealed to Variety. 

According to Badgley, one of the biggest reasons he feels uncomfortable being intimate with other women on screen is because of his marriage to Domino Kirke-Badgley. "My fidelity in my relationship. It's important to me. And actually, it was one of the reasons that I initially wanted to turn the role down," he explained. In the end, it was Kirke-Badgley who convinced her husband to join "You." While the early seasons featured several steamy sex scenes, by the time the fourth season premiered in 2023, he was fully clothed in any intimate moment. As Badgley explained on "Podcrushed," this was because the actor asked series creator Sera Gamble if they could remove most intimate scenes from the show and she happily obliged.

Penn Badgley has spent considerable time supporting organizations and social movements in his career. For example, in 2011, he joined protestors on the streets of New York as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, to help raise awareness of economic inequality in America. "I mean, listen, it's cheesy, but I want to do whatever I can. Let's be honest: I'm on f***ing 'Gossip Girl,'" he told Capital. "... It's absurd that celebrity power is what it is, but, like, use any tool you have, you know?" 

In fact, Badgley has long been open about his privilege in terms of celebrity, gender, and race when it comes to getting cast. Speaking to The Pink News about the casting process for marginalized characters and those from underrepresented groups, he proclaimed, "Let's make damn sure that they're being represented by the people who have lived this experience."

More than just sticking up for other actors, Badgley also happens to be an advocate for the National Center for Human and Civil Rights. He also works with the Tahirih Justice Center, an organization that helps immigrants and focuses on ending gender-based violence. As well as being friends with the center's founder, he told Teen Vogue, "The seed of this is ... the shared ideals that we hold sacred, including equality among women and men." According to Badgley, he felt especially moved to help the organizations due to his fictional but violent character in the series, "You."