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The Netflix serial killer social satire and Penn Badgleycreepazoid thriller seriesYouhas a new release structure for its fourth season.
This structure also created a challenge.
Now that the full season has been released, were republishing the same conversation in its entirety.
This is everything, including ALL the spoilers about some wild part-two twists,rendered in blue text.
(Its not a link!
We know your brain might think its a link!)
You have been warned!
And it just so happened that the season split very cleanly down the middle.
Its exciting that people can watch your whole story, but its a bummer that its over so quickly.
We knew we had a couple of big structures that we were going to use in the season.
Why London?We had to start on those decisions last season.
Most of the writers are American, and we were thinking about how Americans think of British aristocrats.
How did you determine his targets?We wanted to do a bit of mixing and matching.
Thats why Adam is such a central character.
He was like, London, foggy, cold, London murder mystery, whodunit.
Immediately so many things fell into place.
But that in and of itself is not ten episodes worth of plot.
So these would marry well.
How worried were you about spoilers leaking this season?A little bit more worried than usual.
it’s possible for you to really torture yourself with worrying about leaking TV in 2023.
And then the studio was kind of monitoring and helping.
I think it would be a bummer for that to come out.
And by the way, someone will always guess.
Your story cannot stand on surprise alone.
A couple of people have already jumped on my social media to give me this particular theory.
you’re able to call itFight Club.
Everyone has seen it before.
It is notorious for being a twist thats hard to pull off.
The thing thats particularly fascinating to me is how baroque his justifications have had to become.
In season one,hes hit on the head by accident and hallucinates his ex-girlfriend.
Part of the reason we did that is because we knew we eventually wanted to do this.
You cant make a TV show and only do the safe stories youre sure people wont criticize.
But the story for this show has been heightened from the beginning.
Our philosophy is that the characters have to make very recognizably human choices.
The justification is their motivations and the way they treat one another.
That part is not actually heightened.
When did you tell Penn about the second half of the season?
How did you have people playthe early scenes, andthen again later?
Penn knew from the beginning.
It was a long conversation, but we always chat several times before the season begins.
Then I say, When we know more or if something changes, lets chat again.
So we did all of that.
And then I said, Rhys Montrose exists, but you possibly havent ever met him.
And he was like, Oh, yeah, of course.
That makes sense for Joe.
And then to the actors who were auditioningto play Rhys, we said nothing about that.
It wasnt until we cast Ed that we told him.
The writers job is, among other things, to track everything backward and forward and in four dimensions.
So we had someone tracking every version of every murder.
But for the actor, you have to hand them something they can play or youre done.
They cant get in front of a camera and play an idea.
Theres not going to be any tricks.
Because thats what hes trying to impart to Joe.
But also what is Rhys, who sprung out of Joes unconscious?
What is he trying to do?
And I said, You are always trying to help Joe.
Sometimes its very tough love, and the two of you do not have the same sense of humor.
But you are a grotesque manifestation of the kind of survival tactics this person had to develop.
Why did you knowEd Speleerswas right for the role?Hes a really compelling, charismatic actor.
You have to believeboth sides of it.
And then you also have to believe thathes done these things to people and not felt bad at all.
And then scenes where I was like, Am I terrified?
Do I think he would kill me?
We had appendix pages for every episode.
And then you’re gonna wanna sub in Rhys.
There are a lot of pieces.
A writers room has never looked more A Beautiful Mind than ours.
Dont worry about all these details.
It will very quickly start to break your brain.But Rhys did it.
But Rhys isnt real.
But Joe did it.
But his scenes with Joe play even better when you finally understand why hes really saying these things.
And we dont really linger on them.Theres a copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde lying around.
For this season, we wanted to situate them in the university where he was working.
He doesnt know the whodunit tropes because he hates them and thinks hes above them.
Joe usually has paternal, caring feelings toward characters who are much younger than he is.
The big concern was we didnt want you to think that they were going to sleep together.
She becomes the key to how part two unravels.
Did you already know Nadia was going to be doing both sides of that?
He would put himself in hot water to help her because he cares about her.
Shes going to be the key in the lock of the whole thing.
I feel the same things when I see her poking around.
Then the person to save in the second half ended up being Phoebe.
At the end of the season, there is a level of being honest with himself thats higher.
He does it well.
Were going to end up in prison or dead.
So what happens if Joe the Killer levels up?
Joe the Romantic, Joe the Mentor, Joe the Good Guy, thats all still there, too.
But we wanted to really change his own relationship to what he needs to do.
The other major shift is that nowhe has money.
Where did that idea come from?
He has his name back.
That is a huge double-edged sword for him.
And its dangerous because he can get away with more.
But theres also a level of anonymity that he never had to question before.
Thats different if hes married to one of the most powerful CEOs in the world.
It lines up really elegantly with something thats very true in our culture.
The first season premiered at the same time everybody was talking about Me Too.
Now its the morning after and everybodys a little deflated.
And Joe isnt having the most restful possible lifestyle possible, but its fundamentally working for him.
Im curious about how you thought about making that a part him forever this season.
This is notCSI: Joe Goldberg.
He changes over the course of the show.
And theres a point where were done.
When is that point?I wont say.
But you know.I am superstitious about that.
Im the person who ran the show right after we said we would be done.
We all learned from that.
I wouldnt do that to another person.
Is it imagination?The goal that Rhys pitches to him is integration.
Joe has always been pushing away this part of himself.
It got harder and harder until it finally did completely split off.
He was unaware of what he was doing.
But you realize in the second half that the You of the season is Joe all the way through.
This is the season where Joe faces himself.
There is an unlimited amount of porn on your machine that will give you much more convincing sex.
I have written sex scenes that were about how a character was feeling self-destructive or impulsive or vulnerable.
What will look the best?
What will tell the most in the least beats?
We are making a show about a guy who violates boundaries.
This is not a love story.
Were poking at the classics.
Were ripping the skin off romantic comedies and wearing it likeSilence of the Lambs.
Its Joes gaze, in this case, but the shows gaze is not the lecherous male gaze.
Its very important to us that, if were going to do it, we do that right.
Going back to the pilot, his inner monologue is talking about Becks body.
When he is watching her through the window, there is a classic peeping-Tom aspect to it.
And we see much more of that actors body in those shots.
I feel a little sense of deflation.
As a director, shes taking the script apart on a shot by shot basis.
The point of view of the show is that Joe is unhinged and his behavior is criminal.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
