Penn Badgley Got Candid About “Humping” While Filming Sex Scenes
“The time has come for me to hump.”
Penn Badgley’s thoughts on sex scenes are very well-known. Ahead of You Season 4, which aired in Feb. 2023, he famously requested “no more intimacy scenes” for his character Joe Goldberg. He didn’t exactly get his wish — the show continued to have plenty of NSFW moments — and now Badgley is opening up about what it was like to be “humping” in front of cameras.
On Sept. 25, Vulture published an exclusive excerpt of Badgley’s essay in Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age. The book of essays, written by Badgley, Sophie Ansari, and Nava Kavelin, is coming out on Oct. 14.
In the snippet, Badgley details filming a sex scene in You Season 3, which required him to look directly into the camera. As he put it, “I look in camera. And I hump my a** off.”
The director had a specific vision for the scene. “My character is meant to be humpin’ on his wife, with whom he has become not only bored but also contemptuous, so he is imagining he’s having sex with a librarian he’s been flirting with, and whom he will later attempt to kill,” Badgley explained. For that to work, the director wanted “a close-up” of Badgley’s face to show that “Joe is deep in dissociative reverie mid-coitus.”
Instead of filming with his onscreen wife Love (played by Victoria Pedretti), Badgley had to do the sex scene alone. “This means that rather than simulating sex with her and looking at her while the camera watches us together, I’m going to have to simulate sex by myself, effectively humpin’ on the air, on a fake bed in a fake room, surrounded by a film crew,” he wrote. “Oh, and I’ll be in the same nude thong I’ve been wearing all morning as we complete the scene, of course.”
Typically, actors avoid looking in the camera — another mental hurdle for Badgley. “Not only will I 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,” he added. “Looking in camera ruins a take.”
According to the actor, he wasn’t too focused on the logistics of the scene until right before filming when a “giggle” won out. After calming down, the director said, “Action,” and Badgley shared his mindset: “The time has come for me to hump.”
