YOU fans, brace for some serious surprises ahead in the next leg of Joe Goldberg’s (Penn Badgley) nefarious journey. Actor Charlie Barnett, who joined the cast for Season 2, talked to TV Guide about the upcoming season and indicated that even readers of Caroline Kepnes’ 2014 book and the 2016 sequel, Hidden Bodies, are in for some unexpected twists when the show returns to the streaming scene.
Barnett — whom TV fans might also know from Chicago Fire, Russian Doll, and Tales of the City and who also stars in Arrow‘s final season — joins the second season of the dark crime drama as Gabe, the best friend of Quinn Love (The Haunting of Hill House‘s Victoria Pedretti). And the actor knows that audiences of the first season are already drawing up his obit just based on that limited description of his new character.
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“It’s so funny because online people are like, ‘Oh, you’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re friends with the girl? You’re definitely going to die,'” he joked.
Charlie Barnett and Natasha Lyonne, Russian Doll
Whether the character’s statistical chance of survival is slim or not, Barnett still thinks fans are going to be pleasantly shocked by what they see.
“It’s gonna be a really exciting season,” he teased. “Victoria is an unbelievable actress. Penn is an unbelievable actor. And I think the writers and just that production team and crew picked it all up 100 percent. Also while they’re following close to the book, there are some extreme turns that are so beautifully laid in. As an audience member, I’m really excited to see those episodes play out.”
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Showrunner Sera Gamble has previously teased some new directions for the series in Season 2 as well, including at least one moment of extreme gore. It’s expected that Joe’s upcoming move to Los Angeles will see him try to escape the consequences of his past, but thanks in part to the sloppiness of his crime scenes, find that his previous ills will still haunt him.
That dynamic is also expected to give way to a bit more of a rote murder investigation feel than we saw in Season 1, which Barnett can confirm. “It does have more of a True Detective quality,” he said. “You see a little more of the crime and punishment end of it just from our character outlets, from the people who are being added to the story.”
However, the actor also has good news for anyone who just so happened to enjoy the original season’s intense inner monologue styling surrounding its cyber-stalking and neurotic antagonist. Barnett said that the new season “also has that kind of twisted dark cynicism included with it. With Penn’s character … we are first-hand experiencing his thoughts as an audience. I think it just inevitably feeds into that twisted kind of darkness.”
YOU Season 1 is available to stream on Netflix.
Penn Badgley, YOU