‘I Look in Camera and I Hump My Ass Off’

Penn Badgley is peeling back the curtain on what it’s really like to film a sex scene.

In excerpt from Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age, which was published by  Vulture, the 38-year-old actor took a deep dive into a particular memory from filming a scene in You season 3, which he described as a “fantasy sequence” where his character, Joe Goldberg, is “meant to be humpin’ on his wife, with whom he has become not only bored but also contemptuous.” In the scene, he recalled, the director “has chosen to place the camera directly in front of my face.”

In the moment, Joe is supposed to be imagining the librarian he’s crushing on (Tati Gabrielle) instead of his wife (Victoria Pedretti).

“What this means for me, practically speaking, is that the director wants a close-up of my face as my character Joe is deep in dissociative reverie mid-coitus,” Badgley wrote.

To get the shot they wanted, there wasn’t room for both Pedretti and the seven-hundred-pound camera apparatus, which left Badgley to “simulate sex by myself, effectively humpin’ on the air, on a fake bed in a fake room, surrounded by a film crew.”

“Oh, and I’ll be in the same nude thong I’ve been wearing all morning as we complete the scene, of course,” he noted, too.

The realization was not a shocking one to him, the Gossip Girl alum wrote, but he still noted his appreciation for the episode’s “thoughtful and talented” director, Silver Tree, for her “deference to me,” as she approached him before the camera department to lay out the shot.

He’s then informed that he will not be “humping the air with the camera in my face, but I’m going to be looking straight down the barrel of the lens, something I reflexively never do.”

The thought crossed his mind that the scene “may very well become a meme,” he wrote, before describing the camera set-up in detail and quipping, “This is my pretend lover for the next ten to fifteen minutes.”

When he first crawled onto the bed to get ready to film, he started to laugh, and it caught on amongst the crew, which he recalled was a “relaxing, unifying moment.”

Then, “the time has come for me to hump,” Badgley wrote.

“I’m not home, but I can imagine that I am. There is no one in front of me, but I can imagine someone is. A moment ago there was only resistance in my body to do what was needed, but upon the utterance of one word — action — I am supremely present in the face of sheer absurdity. I look in camera. And I hump my ass off.”

The actor made headlines when he revealed he’d requested to have “no more intimacy scenes” in season 4 of the hit Netflix series, though he knew that might not be feasible given he’d “signed up for the show.”

Still, Badgley, who married Domino Kirke, with whom he shares three kids, in 2017, explained, “Fidelity in every relationship — especially in a marriage — is important to me.”

In season 5, Badgley told PEOPLE he “had to throw that out the window” for the storyline.

“That was the question again. All right, what am I willing to do?” he said. “And as I always said, I said, my desire is that least as possible, but if it’s necessary, that’s the show we all sign up to make. So, let’s make sure it’s vital, let’s make sure it’s important, it’s deliberate. And we did.”

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You can be streamed in full on Netflix, and Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age is available for purchase wherever books are sold.