Penn Badgley is letting is all hang out.
The “Gossip Girl” alum candidly recalls the process of filming one of his sex scenes for “You,” which involved an excessive amount of “humping the air,” in his forthcoming book, “Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age.”
Looking back at one of his Season 3 scenes, the actor writes that he was involved in a “fantasy sequence” where his character, Joe Goldberg, is meant to be intimate with his wife (Victoria Pedretti) while secretly dreaming of the librarian (Tati Gabrielle), according to an excerpt published by Vulture Thursday.
He also explains that the director chose to shoot the scene with “the camera directly in front of my face.”
“What this means for me, practically speaking, is that the director wants a close-up of my face as my character Joe is deep in dissociative reverie mid-coitus,” Badgley, 38, writes.
However, the actors faced a problem since there wasn’t space for both Pedretti and the seven-hundred-pound camera set-up which left Badgley to “simulate sex by myself, effectively humpin’ on the air, on a fake bed in a fake room, surrounded by a film crew.”
“Oh, and I’ll be in the same nude thong I’ve been wearing all morning as we complete the scene, of course,” he adds.
Then, the scene changes as he’s informed that he’ll no longer 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.”
Still, Badgley as a professional, went on to perform the scene like the professional he is by humping “my ass off.”
“I’m not home, but I can imagine that I am. There is no one in front of me, but I can imagine someone is. A moment ago there was only resistance in my body to do what was needed, but upon the utterance of one word — action — I am supremely present in the face of sheer absurdity. I look in camera. And I hump my ass off,” he writes.
Badgley isn’t the only one from the Netflix series to speak candidly about filming some risqué sex scenes for the show.
In 2021, Gabrielle exclusively told Page Six that she “freaked out” while filming her first intimate scene with the “Easy A” star.
“I was so nervous,” the actress, who starred in Season 3, said. “I told Penn upfront, ‘Hey, I’ve never done this before.’ And he was like, ‘It’s gonna be OK.’”
“We had a great intimacy coordinator on set. So we were able to walk through everything and have a good idea [of what to do],” she continued.
“It became more of a dance, like a choreographed dance than it was, like, having to feel that nervousness and be awkward or weird.”
Badgley’s “Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming of Age” will become available for purchase on Oct. 14.
