This Netflix hit sold us a likeable serial killer. Now it's pointing the finger at you.
What is it about murderers like Joe that keep luring us in? Well, like Dexter, he's a layered character sprinkled with some redeeming traits. He's chivalrous (however misguided), and kind towards young people. He's also intelligent, made painfully obvious by his constant reference to classic writers. A man who can accurately quote Emily Dickinson on request surely can't be that terrible, right?
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Add that to the fact that the show is filmed like a romcom, and it's clear how we became ensnared in this man's web. You is a collection of romantic slow-motion shots, scenes lit with an amber glow, and boppy pop songs. The actual murder scenes are grittier, but everyone looks better in the radiant light of day – even a serial killer.
Importantly, Joe is also at the centre of this story. He narrates every season, manipulating the audience as much as the women he lures into his creepy underground cage. His objectively atrocious crimes are overlaid with his non-stop rationalising – 'I'm killing for love, I'm killing to protect her, blah blah'.
When he isn't rationalising, he's expressing regret. After moving back to New York, Joe repeatedly hints at his 'changed ways', attempting to convince himself that he is redeemable. It's difficult not to sympathise with someone who expresses a desire to improve. After all, we've seen enough romance movies to believe it's possible to 'fix them'.
Joe, however, is far beyond fixing. By the mid-point of season five, this becomes apparent. His narration is less apologetic, instead embracing and justifying his violent tendencies. But even when Joe is running around the woods half naked and growling, tracking Bronte down to murder her, he's somehow still just as enthralling.
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This is because we constantly romanticise, even fetishise, violence. Sexualised killers like Basic Instinct 's Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) have long titillated us, along with some real-life killers such as Ted Bundy. When Zac Efron played Bundy in the 2019 film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Netflix had to remind viewers to stop lusting after a character who was in reality a convicted serial killer.
Casting someone like Penn Badgley – known as Dan Humphrey, the romantic lead from Gossip Girl – as a man who kills 'for love' was bound to excite. And excite it did. The lustful response to Joe reached such a fever pitch at points that Badgley himself took to social media to remind viewers that Joe is a murderer.
'You're supposed to see past my face to the crazy shit,' he wrote on X in 2019.
Romanticising a serial killer is ethically dubious at best. But that has always been the point of You. It's not endorsing murder, but forcing us to question why we're so easily convinced to ignore it.
This is hinted at through the final series, especially when Joe is accused of multiple crimes on social media. He's able to escape the allegations relatively unscathed largely due to his diehard supporters, those still referring to him online as their 'Prince Charming' and thirsting over his good looks. The show may as well have been showing snapshots of real tweets and TikToks.
To really drive the point home, creators Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo then fully lifted the curtain. By shifting some of the narration to 'final girl' Bronte, the show finally presented Joe as the full-throttle maniac he has always been. And the shot to the crotch left him stripped of his power, deprived of the thing that drove his every sick decision.
By the final scene, we're forced, once and for all, to question why we've been so transfixed by this man for five seasons. Joe, locked away in a prison cell, tells us what we've been avoiding all along: 'Maybe the problem isn't me. Maybe it's you. '
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Man of Many
8 hours ago
- Man of Many
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There's no shared characteristics of any roles , I often look for something that when I read it I get inspired, or I get excited by the idea of doing it. These roles can be completely different, but the thing they share is that I think I can bring something to the project: it has to ignite my imagination, reading it. Those kinds of jobs are few and far between, that make you excited, and this was one of those jobs. I've played quite a lot of villains in my career so far, but that's just coincidental and because of the material I've been given. How do you find your characters? When you're given a script or a treatment, how do you go about turning those words into action? For me, I try to keep it as simple as possible. I don't properly believe in the idea of 'character'. It's useful to use it in terms of referring to the character of Kieran, for example, but his 'character' is just the sum of a whole bunch of little moments. So I try not to look at things through a wide-angle lens, you know? And sometimes I watch the final product of things and find that 'oh wow, he's an entirely different person to how I had imagined him', because I tend to approach it from a moment to moment basis, and react to the circumstances he's in, and try to play to each moment truthfully, and then that paints a bigger picture of this character's life during the time period on screen. The only thing you have to be mindful of, I guess, is to think of the journey of the character throughout the show, but the specificity of each moment we see creates the 'character', I think. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix Beyond being able to come back to Australia, what was the highlight of the filming process for The Survivors? There were so many. I loved being able to be in a really special place, Tasmania, that I'd never been to, with a whole bunch of amazing actors and creatives. 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I had no idea what I was doing, and throughout Uni I was doing amateur theatre productions. Melbourne Uni has this amazing theatre called the Union Theatre, so I did a lot of work there. Eventually, I drummed up the courage to do it, and that changed my life. I thought, maybe I should just have a go at trying for a drama school because I really didn't know what I was doing. The school I went to, the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, they come and do audition weekends in Sydney, and I decided I was going to go to it. I flew up and didn't tell anyone because I was afraid of telling people I auditioned and I didn't get in, so I did the audition over a weekend and then found out six weeks later that I'd got in, and then had to decide whether I wanted to uproot my life or did I want to wait until the end of the year and maybe try some of the Australian schools. 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