In the stalker drama, Joe often secretly watches the women he stalks, while masturbating, and Badgley explained that his directors always ask him to make it less creepy.
“I’ve now done it so many times on camera. It’s a strange—you don’t think it’s going to be that big of a deal,” Badgley said in an episode of the Podcrushed podcast.
“And then you discover in front of a crew of people with a camera on your face, knowing that, in all likelihood, millions of people are going to see this, you’re simulating masturbation.”
He added: “I’ve always gotten the note to make it less creepy. They say like, ‘Close your eyes or go faster or go slower.’ I’m like, ‘What? This man is f****** murder people, and he’s masturbating in the street. You’re saying I’m making it creepy? How is it I’m the one making it creepy?’”
Badgley revealed that director Lee Toland Krieger told him: “Buddy, I think you gotta close your eyes.” But the actor revealed he has a problem with this note, insisting that such scenes are supposed to be creepy.
He said that being creepy is “the f****** point”, and criticized the show for attempting to balance “toxicity… while also trying to be sexy.”
He described this choice as the “strange line that we’re always walking on our show.”
Ahead of Season 4, Badgley previously joked to Newsweek: “Joe’s toe is just going to come back. If Joe’s toe were to come back where would he be?”
Reflecting on Joe’s journey in Season 3, Badgley described Joe’s journey as “downward.”
He explained: “So, what I love about Joe is that he’s essentially, I mean, this is the best way… he’s like, he’s a caricature or he’s like a deep living allegory for what we all experience in relationships which is like struggling to overcome our sort of primal competitive animal nature, which is evolved for millions of years to simply survive.
“Whereas, you know, our more sort of elegant and refined human nature is hopefully progressing towards something more collaborative, you know what I mean? So he makes the same mistakes in relationships that I think everybody does, but of course, he follows them to you know, the very most extreme.”
