Penn Badgley Confirms What You Already Knew: It’s A Sexless, Sexless, Sexless, Sexless World

There are some who have speculated that we live in such a sexless time because of technology. Not just because porn made the transition to the internet, but because the human has essentially “become one” with the screen. Inferring an inherent lack of tactility that has extended into a general absence of desire for “tangible flesh.” Of course, this mainly applies to the generation known as Z, being that they’ve never experienced an era when the screen wasn’t an additional bodily appendage. And as the AI fuses into “RI” (“real” intelligence), the prospect for any interest in sex as it once existed in our erstwhile “horn dog” society continues to dissipate—and all with the sanction of those formerly most involved in “presenting it.” That is to say, Hollywood actors.

So it is that, on the heels of a Penn Badgley feature in Variety called “You Don’t Know Penn Badgley: Surviving Gossip Girl, Staying Sober with Blake Lively and Finding Himself in a Sexy Serial Killer,” the key remark many have taken away is the declaration on Badgley’s part that he will no longer “do” sex scenes. In the Kate Arthur-written article, she prefaces his aversion to a common expectation of the average mainstream actor’s job description with, “Less typically, he was also concerned [about] how inherently sexual the role [of Joe Goldberg] was, and how many intimate scenes he would have to film. In later seasons, the show has had an intimacy coordinator, but when production began in 2017, that job didn’t exist. The whole series revolves around Joe’s romantic fixations, and how he gets the women he’s fallen for to submit to his charms. You has a ton of sex.” But not so much in its fourth season, where Joe, now under the assumed identity of Jonathan Moore, has taken a shine to the “British prude” identity of an Austen character as he finds himself enmeshed in the inner circle of an elite London friend group (yes, it sounds kind of like Gossip Girl). Hence, the presence of a moniker like the “Eat the Rich Killer”—a “branding” that proves anti-capitalism is still capitalism in that it can be sold.

Among that crew is Kate Galvin (Charlotte Ritchie), a woman who initially passes herself off as “different” from the rest of her born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-their-mouth ilk but actually turns out to be the richest one among the lot (as is usually the way with rich people trying to pass themselves off as “just like us”). Before Joe finds this out, he’s already gone down the rabbit hole of his obsession with her, sidelining the one that brought him to Europe in the first place: Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle). When he follows her from Paris to London, he ends up staying in the latter city after a cover identity falls into his lap thanks Elliot Tannenberg (Adam James), a fixer hired by Love’s (Victoria Pedretti) father to find and kill Joe. Obviously, Elliot conveniently opts for a different approach to dealing with Joe, and now, “Jonathan” is on his merry way to clothed “sex” in a garden with Kate by episode three.

But, as Badgley was sure to mention in the Variety interview, “[On-set romance is] not a place where I’ve blurred lines. There’s almost nothing I could say with more consecration.” Which means he’s apparently “blurred” his memory about dating Blake “Serena van der Woodsen” Lively while the two starred in Gossip Girl together. Nonetheless, Badgley insisted, “That aspect of Hollywood has always been very disturbing to me—and that aspect of the job, that mercurial boundary—has always been something that I actually don’t want to play with at all.” And yet, if he, and more actors like him, don’t want to “play with” it, then one must ask the blunt question: what, exactly, are you being paid the big bucks for to have so many “caveats” and “limitations” in order to take on a role?

Ah, but then there is the cry of “artistic integrity” and “morals.” It is the latter category that finds Badgley hesitating on sex scenes more and more as he told Variety, “It’s important to me in my real life to not have them… [To] my fidelity in my relationship… And actually, it was one of the reasons that I initially wanted to turn the role down. I didn’t tell anybody that. But that is why.” Ironically, the person he wants to show fidelity to is Domino Kirke, the sister of Jemima a.k.a. Jessa from Girls, a show that prided itself on gratuitous sex scenes. Maybe that’s why Kirke was the one who encouraged him to do it regardless of his “misgivings.” And, after all, if Taylor Swift could loosen the reins on Joe Alwyn to “let” him engage in all the sex scenes of Conversations with Friends (which Jemima Kirke also appears in), then surely Domino could do the same. Even if Badgley might have had the option to give Joe more action through the wonders of CGI—as was the case in, of all movies, You People, when Jonah Hill and Lauren London didn’t actually kiss at the end.

In point of fact, the sudden inalienable right of the actor to become “bashful” about the notion of onscreen intimacy—at a time when intimacy coordinators are actually in existence to make everything feel as “safe” as possible—seems to open the door further for AI as an option to oust real actors from the jobs they won’t actually do. Regardless of how many millions they’re being paid to do it. Whether or not the shift in Hollywood’s willingness to “perform” stems from being a reflection of the sexless culture at large, there’s one thing that’s certain: “sexiness” as a concept has all but disappeared in large part because all mystery has disappeared. Once an industry that could pass itself off as something to aspire to with the tinsel and glitz promoted in now-defunct movie magazines like Photoplay and Screenland, the gradual decline of post-studio system Hollywood coincided with the advent of entities like television and, then, the internet. Therefore, unchecked gossip rags like TMZ and Perez Hilton that effectively dismantled any notion of “glamor” or “aspirational desire” re: being famous. A notable example of that in the 00s occurred with Britney Spears as she went from being the teen dream to a “Jezebel slut” who “deserved” her downfall, courtesy of constant media stalking that drove her to rightful madness.

Incidentally, Spears was a large part of why sexiness remained strong in the early 00s before giving way to the “trashy-chic” aura exuded in the mid-00s by paparazzi shots of her looking sloppy drunk while exiting a club or accidentally flashing her pantyless snatch as she got out of a car. Decidedly not sexy so much as sleazy because it took away all semblance of mystery. An additional factor in the assurance of sexlessness in entertainment today is the result of the post-#MeToo reckoning, with most men quaking in their boots about being accused of “untoward” behavior. Least of all portraying something that might end up being construed as “non-consensual” or “glamorizing rape.” With that in mind, the Badgley feature was also sure to point out that the actor is increasingly uncomfortable with sex scenes because “he’s also now older than his romantic interests on the show. ‘Didn’t used to be the case,’ he says.” And, where once even the vastest age gap between stars (i.e., Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina) wouldn’t have caused the slightest bat of an eyelash, in the present moment, the only person still willing to carry on with that type of shit is, well, Woody Allen.

What it all amounts to is that the overall climate of fear about doing or saying or, yes, acting the wrong way has undeniably and “subconsciously” fed into the sex scene about-face among actors like Badgley, who insist that such scenes are “superfluous” or “don’t add anything to the story.” Obviously, someone like Paul Verhoeven would disagree. But then, he’s of a different generation (and also not American). More of the Bernardo Bertolucci school of thought on “impromptu” sexual interactions (e.g., the infamous butter rape one in Last Tango in Paris), as Sharon Stone would later note of Verhoeven’s snatch shot in Basic Instinct, “After we shot [the movie], I got called in to see it. Not on my own with the director, as one would anticipate, given the situation that has given us all pause, so to speak, but with a room full of agents and lawyers, most of whom had nothing to do with the project. That was how I saw my vagina shot for the first time, long after I’d been told, ‘We can’t see anything—I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on.’”

And yet, as mentioned before, actors now have the unprecedented advantage of working on sets that would never allow for something like what befell Maria Schneider or Sharon Stone to happen again. Only to thumb their nose (or genitals, in this case) at it and declare, “No, I have my principles.” Thing is, if one is getting paid for anything, no such claim can really be made.