#99 Penn Badgley - My Religious Conflicts With Playing a Killer

Within Reason

Alex J O'Connor

Religion, Morality, Ethics, Society & Culture, Cosmicskeptic, Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2025

⏱️ 116 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Penn Badgley is an actor best known for his roles in Netflix’s You and the popular drama series Gossip Girl. He is less known as a podcaster and member of the Baháʼí Faith, a religion which teaches that there is a historical unity between major world religions and their prophets, having itself developed out of a branch of Twelver Shia Islam in the 19th century.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Pen Badgley, welcome to the show.
0:01.1	Thank you for having me.
0:02.2	You've just finished up, Joe Goldberg.
0:05.1	You've been playing him for what, since like 2017?
0:08.0	Yeah, yeah, so just about seven years.
0:11.2	And now you're done.
0:13.6	I'm finished except for the release, you know?
0:15.6	Sure.
0:16.6	The release, which is its own kind of work, its own kind of...
0:20.1	Do you feel in character for the...
0:21.6	No, not even close.
0:23.6	The part of me that is...
0:27.6	That might match it is that there's always something grim about my relationship to the character, and therefore the whole thing,
0:41.3	because I am sort of tasked the one person throughout the entire apparatus
0:48.3	who kind of like, you know, it makes sense, I need to ground it.
0:52.9	Everyone else is allowed to enjoy it
0:54.3	as a piece of, um, entertainment or frothy pop, whatever, you know, but if I don't ground it, then it's like,
1:01.9	well, that's when I think we're in danger of consuming it in a way that is like, you know,
1:07.5	damaging to our, to our digestive system, you know what I mean? Because at the end of the day, he's a protagonist who is, who's, who's, who's, just,
1:17.3	he's, well, he's what he is.
1:19.4	He's a murderer and he's a manipulator and he's an abuser and all those things.
1:23.8	And those words are like, they're so, they're heavy, you know.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Alex J O'Connor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Alex J O'Connor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.