It turns out that Joe Goldberg and Dan Humphrey have more in common than just the actor who plays both characters. During his You set tour with Architectural Digest, posted on April 28, Penn Badgley revealed an unexpected and surprisingly dark connection between his Netflix show, which just concluded with Season 5, and Gossip Girl, the 2008 series that propelled him to stardom.
During the tour, Badgley showed AD sets where they filmed You Season 5. It turns out that Badgley had some history with them. “A little bit of an interesting note: This is where we shot Gossip Girl,” he revealed.
Disturbing Overlap
The connection means memorable Gossip Girl locations were later used as the backdrop to some of Joe Goldberg’s most heinous crimes. One such place is the soundstage that housed his infamous cage. Hidden in the basement of his New York bookstore, it’s where he kept victims before killing them. However, the set used to serve a much less disturbing purpose.
“This is the same stage where the Waldorf suites or whatever, where they live [was],” he shared, referring to Upper East Side penthouse that was home to Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester). “It was in this stage.”
Similarly, the set used for the interior of Joe’s bookstore was another family home — one that has even more significant meaning to Badgley. “The stage with the bookstore was where the Humphrey loft was,” he said, referring the famous Brooklyn home that Dan shared with sister Jenny (Taylor Momsen) and father Rufus (Matthew Settle). “So this place is extremely familiar to me.”
So, in a way, Lonely Boy grew up, moved into his childhood home, and started caging and killing people in the Waldorf’s old apartment. Dark, right? In the video’s comments, one fan wrote, “Gettting [sic] murdered in the same place gossip girl was filmed feels wild.”
A Homecoming
Returning to the Gossip Girl soundstages, over a decade after the series concluded, to film the final season of You understandably made Badgley nostalgic. “I was just standing outside looking at the trees and I thought, ‘I’ve been looking at these trees for nearly 20 years now,’” he said. “I thought to myself, ‘Have they grown?’ So that’s just a little window into my brain.”
Badgley has previously commented on the similarities between his characters Joe and Dan (beyond the sets they filmed on), noting that both think of themselves as an “outsider” in their New York-based communities, but are clearly not.
“Any part of me that was resisting the Dan Humphrey comparison has stopped because I’ve come to recognize how much of this is a surreal progression of Dan Humphrey,” he told The New York Times in 2019. “He’s the very special white man who somehow thinks that he’s an outsider, and it’s like, ‘Bro, you're not an outsider — you are the inside; everyone else is on the outside.’”
