Books
One Nightstand With Penn Badgley
The Gossip Girl and You actor reflects on faith, family, and the books that shaped him along the way.
Penn Badgley doesn’t go on X anymore. “All that is is people just being like, ‘No, actually you’re wrong about that; no, actually there’s something you haven’t perceived in that actually; no, you’re actually stupid,’” he says. “It’s like, ‘My God, guys, it’s a YouTube short of a man doing a backflip.’”
Badgley may be partly offline, but he continues to dominate cultural discourse. His work as Dan Humphrey in the CW’s blockbuster hit Gossip Girl defined television for a generation of nascent millennials, while his work as Joe Goldberg in You has raised the age-old question: Just how attracted can I be to a serial killer? Lately, though, he’s found new fans via his podcast, Podcrushed, which he co-hosts with Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari, tackling the drama of middle-school problems. The trio’s debut book, Crushmore, out last month, offers a collection of essays from each author reflecting on those difficult transitional years between childhood and fully fledged adulthood.
“It was a pretty deeply moving experience,” says Badgley of writing his chapters, which range from his years as a child actor in Hollywood through to his breakup with his teenage girlfriend who later died due to the impact of alcoholism. “I learned a lot just as a writer. I mean, I had to. I have a great work ethic when I’m on set. I’m very professional and can work kind of ceaselessly for long, long, long hours, months on end, years on end. This is the kind of work I hadn’t done.”
The challenges of the creative process came out in unexpected ways. “I gained 20 pounds,” he says. “I’ve since lost it, but it was a cold, cold winter. My wife then got pregnant with twins and had tough symptoms in her first trimester. She was so nauseous, and our child care had fallen out for our 5-year-old. It was a tough convergence of many things.”
Books, though, remained a grounding force. Discover Badgley’s four favorites below.
Badgley’s first selection is The Complete Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson. “I’ve had this stack for 20, 25 years,” he says. “I think that my mom might’ve gotten it for me as a birthday present when I was 16 or 17. But my 5-year-old just picked it up, and I read some of it to him, and I was just awash with all of these sense memories.”
Before getting his own collection, Badgley would read it in the paper. “I can recall in Virginia when I was 5 and 6 probably doing it, and then I think by the time I was a bit older — 8, 9 — that’s when you could get some of the books,” he recalls, noting that the physical elements were attractive to him too. “The way that Bill Watterson paints the natural world around them is stunning.”
His second book is The Hidden Words by Baháʼu’lláh, the founder of the Baháʼí faith, of which Badgley is a practitioner. “The Hidden Words is meant to be a distillation of the truth of all past religions,” Badgley explains. “There’s two books within it. One is in Persian, and one is in Arabic. They have different characters. As I understand it, the Persian language has this sweetness to it. Arabic has this sort of deep comprehension to it. So I’ve always tended a bit more toward the Arabic, personally.”
His connection to works like this began with the Coleman Barks translations of Rumi. “There’s a lot to be said about the Coleman Barks translations that is positive, and then also could be maybe constructive criticism in that what Coleman Barks has done, and what most Western interpretations of Rumi have done, is removed his devout Muslim life,” he says. “They’ve removed the Islamic devotion from Rumi’s poetry because they don’t understand it.”
As part of his faith, Badgley prays every day, often with his children. “My 5-year-old… doesn’t love to say prayers on his own, but he will ask me to pray, and I sing my prayers a lot,” he says. “In the morning he wakes up at 5 o’clock, like clockwork, every day. He’ll want me to say ‘The Long Obligatory Prayer,’ [which] takes about 11 minutes to say at a clip.”
For his third pick, Badgley chose James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. “He was the first thinker who introduced the idea to me of people who believe they’re white,” he says. “He’s the first person who introduced the notion that race is truly not a real thing. It’s a social construct.” He continues: “I can’t remember the particulars about the book because I read it so long ago, but that’s the mark it left.”
“When I first was becoming Baha’i, I thought of Baháʼu'lláh as a Black or brown revolutionary. I started to think of all the prophets of God that way. These are the people who somehow speak [to me],” he adds. “I would love to say there’s a white artist who really touched me,” says Badgley. “I happen to not have that. I happen to just not have it. And I am like, please do it. Please come move me the same way. But there’s an interesting limitation. That’s the strangeness of whiteness.”
His final selection is Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut. “It’s the one I have the dimmest memory of because I read it at 16 and loved it,” he says. “There are other books of his that I loved, but somehow Galapagos is really part of [my] formative years.”
Despite Vonnegut’s own experience as a prisoner of war in Germany, Badgley finds his work to be hopeful: “He’s very hopeful. He has this bubbling sort of hope and love in his writing that other writers [don’t]. For instance, when you read other great literary giants from the ’40s and ’50s, white men who I think are more cynical and don’t have hope, I have no tolerance for them.”
Watch the full interview below.
