Joe Goldberg always manages to find trouble wherever he goes, even if he heads all the way across the pond. HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with You showrunner Sera Gamble about all the major developments of You season 4 part 1, including Joe letting Marienne go when he finally tracked her down. Will we see her again?
“I mean, hopefully not. To me, it’s like when people ask is he really trying to be better? Is he turning over a new leaf as it were? I think the biggest step is what he does in the first episode with Marienne. Everything about the season springs from that moment,” Sera said.
The end of part 1 featured the epic twist that Rhys Montrose, one of Joe’s new acquaintances, is the Eat the Rich Killer. Sera explained why Outlander alum Ed Speleers made the perfect new adversary for Penn Badgley’s Joe.
“I also really liked him on Outlander. I watched that season, so as soon as I saw his name come up for this I was excited to see him,” Sera told HollywoodLife. “He brings an interesting version of some of the same things I really like about Penn in the role of Joe. I really feel the character’s desire to do better and to better himself and then he really struggles with his own dark side. We needed to cast someone who really felt like you could go off with them and they would be the lead of their own show. They needed to hold their own in so many scenes with Penn. We always said that the ‘you’ is the most difficult role to cast, and we had two of them this season.”
There were never any other candidates but Rhys for the Eat the Rich killer, according to Sera, because they were “always working backward from the idea of Rhys because of all of the stuff that is to come in the second half. Because now that we have moved you through the whodunnit, now we’re in the story of a relationship between these two people who have such different life philosophies.”
Over the course of the first 5 episodes of season 4, Joe finds himself inevitably drawn to Kate Galvin. At first, Kate is extremely suspicious of Joe, who she only knows as Jonathan Moore. Sera revealed why Joe is so drawn to Kate after very different past romances.
“At first, he sees a potential nemesis and problem. She seems a little too smart and capable for his own good because he’s hiding so many things, but I think when he gets to know her he realizes they’re both people who are trying to rise above the circumstance they came from,” Sera said. “What’s interesting is that their circumstances were so different, but in the most important ways they were the same. I think it’s the kind of thing where when he sees what she’s like on the inside as it were, underneath the proud b***h moniker that she carries around, there’s just a really interesting three-dimensional person who is also mature and different. She could not be more different from Love.”
Sera admitted that she didn’t know initially that the season would be split in half, with Part 2 being released on March 9. “Netflix called and offered this as an idea, and we were well into making the season,” she said. “But we had cleanly broken the whodunnit in the first half, so I was excited immediately. So were Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter. We all got on a call together and felt it was perfectly engineered because we kind of figured out a season of TV the old-fashioned way as I call it. Even though we’re making it for a streamer, we still like to know that there’s a big midseason cliffhanger. We still break things into acts. We still have those little blackouts. We want it to feel really tight and propulsive so it was engineered to work no matter when you split this up.”