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So deeply is Penn Badgley’s face imprinted upon the cultural psyche that even our breezy lunch in NoHo, partially ensconced within an outdoor dining shed, prompts enough double takes to land him on Deux Moi two days later—as just one of three Lonely Boy sightings reported that week. For even the most indifferent New Yorkers of a certain age, recognizing Badgley out and about in the city feels like accessing an inside joke, or claiming your spot in an ongoing Gossip Girl live-action role play of your preteen dreams. It’s not entirely a stretch to say, for millennials who grew up in Dan Humphrey’s heyday, that to see Penn Badgley is to be reminded of our youth.
For Badgley, this kind of cryogenic freeze of boyhood has loomed over the ensuing last decade of his post-G.G. career—how much harder can a guy pivot than going full bore on Joe Goldberg, international murderous creep at large, on You? So, this summer, the 35-year-old actor is reluctantly leaning into the nostalgia and trying something new (and perhaps fulfilling a true Brooklyniter’s arc): podcasting.
Launched on Stitcher last month, Podcrushed taps into Badgley’s could-lure-you-to-your-demise voice and Rolodex of celeb friends to pore over listener-submitted stories about the horrors of middle school. Where it gets interesting, though, is when the conversations springboard into pretty personal territory—there’s Leighton Meester reflecting on Hollywood’s warped concepts of age, Drew Barrymore squaring up her experiences with early fame with day-to-day challenges of parenting. Badgley, who cohosts the show with his friends Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari, provides a slight edge of darkness throughout the show with allusions to his own experiences as a child star. As Badgley makes apparent over the course of our interview, the topic of adolescence isn’t so much fun fertile memory lane material as it is an origin story to be examined in order to understand the rest of your life.
Below, Vanity Fair speaks with Badgley about his new medium, the misguided ways we fixate on adolescence, and what 12-year-old Penn was like.
Vanity Fair: So, Penn, have you always wanted to be a podcaster?
Penn Badgley: I had been interested in it for a while; I am very much a podcast listener. Radiolab—it’s not just my favorite podcast. It’s one of the most influential pieces of work in my life in the realm of literature and journalism. I mean, it’s a podcast, so it’s not literature, but it’s not not literature.
Wow, so you’re like a Radiolab superfan.
I regularly cry listening to it. It got me through some tough times over the last 10 years. The only two things I would even reference in the same breath as being that influential for me are D’Angelo and Radiolab. They’re the only two things that I have a singular love for. Everything else I’m like, moderate.
When do you usually listen to podcasts?
I actually don’t listen to it in the background. I sit down, and I listen. The one caveat is doing the dishes. In the pandemic, our dishwasher was broken for a long time, so I did a hell of a lot of dishes. That’s one memory of the pandemic for me, listening to podcasts and doing the dishes and getting back into Radiolab.
Do you think you’ve listened to every episode?
Oh, I know I have. I bet you I’ve listened to at least 40% of them twice, or more. I just relistened to one episode called “Debatable” two weeks ago, and again, I wept. They just tell—ah! They’re just so compassionate and empathetic and sensitive and courageous, this mix of sonic soundscaping and journalistic storytelling and scientific inquiry. It’s so meta in a lot of ways.
Podcasting makes a lot of sense based on your voice acting work too. Much has been made of all the narration you do in You. I also read that your first work as a child actor was doing voiceovers. When did you first realize your voice was special?
That’s funny you say that. If that’s true, I’m realizing it now in a different way. To take your words, I did not think my voice was special. But I always loved to sing. That was my first love. And I think the power of a sensitive narration is just—it’s a lovely thing, you know. I didn’t really think of myself as having a narrative ability until recently.
I’m curious about the way Podcrushed focuses on the middle school experience when so much of pop culture is mostly fixated on the high school, official teenage mode. What intrigued you about this specific part of adolescence?
If I think back to when I was 12, in a lot of ways, I almost feel the same now. Like, it still feels like it’s the same lifetime whereas childhood doesn’t. It’s the same mental space. Once you get into adolescence, there are parts of you that suddenly can just leap into consciousness that remain in a lot of ways the same.