Based on Caroline Kepnes' best-selling novel of the same name, YOU is a 21st century love story that asks, 'What would you do for love?' When a brilliant bookstore manager crosses paths with an aspiring writer, his answer becomes clear: anything. Using the internet and social media as his tools to gather the most intimate of details and get close to her, a charming and awkward crush quickly becomes obsession as he quietly and strategically removes every obstacle - and person - in his way.
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You actually started life on Lifetime back in 2018 and flopped hard enough that the network dropped it after one season. Netflix had only bought the international rights at first, but once they saw how the show performed on their platform they bought it outright and turned it into a full-blown Netflix Original. Producer Greg Berlanti has said it went from one of the least-watched shows of his career to the most-watched almost overnight.
Penn Badgley wasn't sold on playing Joe Goldberg when the part first came his way. He's talked about feeling genuinely conflicted, worried that the show would end up romanticising a killer instead of exposing him. It was long conversations with creators Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble about Joe's psychology that finally talked him into it.
Before she ever played Love Quinn, Victoria Pedretti tried out for the role of Beck in season one and even got a callback. She didn't land it, but she's said she's glad it worked out that way since it freed her up to do The Haunting of Hill House, which is what eventually brought her back into Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti's orbit for Love.
Theo actor Dylan Arnold has one of the funniest audition histories on the show. He first read for Joe in season one, then came back to try out for Forty in season two, and only landed a part on his third attempt when he was cast as Theo in season three. He even went to college with Elizabeth Lail, who played Beck.
All the gruesome bloodshed in You comes from a sticky homemade mix of sugar and red food dye that gets pumped through rigged machines. Victoria Pedretti has described filming those scenes as feeling weirdly mechanical rather than emotional, partly because the crew sometimes had to stop and fix a blood machine that wasn't spraying correctly.
When Jasper cuts off Joe's finger in season two, that wasn't Penn Badgley's real arm on screen. He wore a prosthetic limb built specifically so it could be sliced open convincingly for the camera, letting the effects team get the gory shot without anyone actually losing a finger.
For the meat grinder scene in season two, the production built a full-sized prosthetic corpse so lifelike it unsettled Penn Badgley to even touch it. Every strand of body hair on the dummy was individually applied real human hair, and the whole thing was rigged to bleed once the effects team started cutting into it.
James Scully has revealed that a key emotional moment between Forty and Joe in season two wasn't fully scripted. He and Penn Badgley talked at length about the strange, intense bond between the two characters and built part of the scene themselves, aiming for something intimate that wasn't romantic or violent, just two men being unusually honest with each other.
Sweet, troubled Paco and his mum Claudia were invented purely for the TV adaptation. Showrunner Sera Gamble has said Paco exists to show Joe's gentler, more protective side, feeding him, keeping him out of trouble, teaching him to read. It makes his betrayal at the end of season one, when he lets Beck's escape attempt fail, land even harder.
Fan favourite Ellie, Delilah's teenage sister, doesn't appear anywhere in Caroline Kepnes' novels. The writers added her to give Joe a relationship that felt uncomplicated and almost paternal for once, which makes it all the more unsettling once his usual manipulative streak starts creeping into it.
