18 "You" Behind-The-Scenes Facts, Including How *That* Reunion Scene Came Together

"We combed through the whole first half of the season, so that it worked several different ways."

🚨 Warning: HUGE spoilers for the ENTIRETY of You Season 4 (i.e. both parts). 🚨

If you're a fan of the Netflix show You, then one of the folks you have to thank is Sera Gamble. As well as being the showrunner, she's also acted as an executive producer and writer on the series.

Jim Spellman / Getty Images / BuzzFeed

So, as a long-time lover of You, I was elated to get to (virtually) sit down with Sera and talk about how Season 4 came together. Here's what I learned:

Once again: HUGE spoilers ahead.

1. Season 4 was inspired by two things: The need to have Joe "look himself in the eye" and a desire to try a murder mystery.

Courtesy of Netflix

Sera began by saying, "One was that we just didn't think we could do another season where Joe continued to completely lie to himself about his shenanigans and the consequences of Season 3 — losing his son and the tragic death of his wife — we felt like Joe would at least be really trying to look himself in the eye and figure out how to break patterns. On a character level, it was that.

We do a different kind of love story every season, but we also do a different kind of thriller every season. I went to dinner with Greg Berlanti between the seasons, and I sat down, and he's like, 'Okay, I have an idea. I have this tiny little idea: A whodunit murder mystery.' It was a perfect thing to be able to have another killer who was very different. But I also did not know what I was signing up for because I have never written a whodunit that was longer than a single episode. I signed the writers up for the most difficult writing experience of the whole series."

When I pointed out how timely this was, given the release of properties like Glass Onion and Poker Face, Sera continued, "That's all Greg. I'm not surprised that I had dinner with him a year ago, and he knew that we'd all be talking about Agatha Christie now."

2. The most "rigorous process" in casting Season 4 was to find who would play Kate and Rhys.

Courtesy of Netflix

"They were all, if not easy, a pleasure. I don't know if you've heard, but they're really quite good at acting in London," Sera joked [Author's note: I am English]. "The roles that we were the most focused on were certainly Kate and Rhys. It's sort of like casting two love interests, in a way."

3. And the easiest person for Sera to cast was Lukas Gage as Adam.

Courtesy of Netflix

"This list of auditions came through, and before I had opened the email from our American casting director, David Rapaport, I got a text from Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter (the Executive Producers of the show), saying, 'Just skip down to Lukas Gage.' Actors have put themselves on tape, and I want to watch their work — but also I watched him first, and I saw what they were saying," Sera recalled.

4. Actors were encouraged to pitch their own lines — especially to make the dialogue sound more authentically British.

Courtesy of Netflix

Sera explained, "We had a new writer and producer this season; he was British and started his career on British television [Author's note: This is likely Leo Richardson]. I used to joke with him: 'I'm about to send you a draft so you can British-it!' And he did. The actors also occasionally asked a question about a turn of phrase, because they wanted to pitch an alternative, and it's always fine with me, including when they're American."

5. And there was one instance where the difference between the British and American understanding of "suspenders" caused confusion in the costume department.

Courtesy of Netflix

"When Joe is in the country house, and he's in costume, we wrote that he was just in his suspenders, which to Americans attach to your pants and go over your shoulders — but to a British costume designer, holds your socks up on your legs, and what we were asking for was braces. I think it made it all the way to shooting day before somebody said, 'Oh, we should ask because I think the Americans might have meant something else,'" she added.

6. You uses intimacy coordinators, who will have conversations about any intimate scenes with the actors, ideally meaning that "They have no reason to say that they're comfortable with something they're uncomfortable with."

Netflix

Sera said, "They received the script as early as possible, usually at the beginning of prep. They go through the script, and they flag anything they think might be intimate in some way. Then, we have a conversation where they ask, 'What do you mean by kiss? Like, how deep is the kiss? Is it less than a second? Are they making out?'"

Indeed, the intimacy coordinator will even cover moments that might not seem overtly sexual or contact-heavy. "The thing that's great about the intimacy coordinator is that they go and have a conversation with the actor, versus me, their boss, calling them and saying, 'Are you okay to take your shirt off?' The idea is actually to take that pressure off of the performer," she continued.

"If there's something that needs to be rehearsed or choreographed, they help us do it ahead of the day. They have incredible kits, where they pull out all of these barriers and strange items, all of them just to make the actor's job easier and to make the set more respectful."

"Penn's been doing this job for a very long time, and I think that when intimacy coordinators became more ubiquitous, a lot of actors were just like, 'I'm so glad this is finally here,'" Sera added.

7. A meeting was held over what kind of Prince Albert piercing to give Malcolm.

Netflix

"The team that built our choppable Malcolm is this all-female special effects team in London, Red Girl," Sera explained. "My 9 a.m. was hopping on a call with all these brilliant women who make body parts and monsters for a living, and they put up this chart: 'There's more than one kind of a Prince Albert, so we just need to start by talking about the penis.' This is what producing television is like — whatever you put on the page, prepare to get the entire Wikipedia entry in your face."

8. Sera agreed with the fans who wanted to see Love return — but there were plenty of logistical challenges with the reunion scene of all the exes.

Netflix

When asked about getting that reunion scene together, Sera replied, "The challenges were logistic, just about getting them to the UK on the right dates. They're very busy and in demand, as they should be!" 

"We had this idea pretty early, that we'd like to see them again. We agreed with the fans who were like, 'Where's Love?' We wanted to see her, too! By that point in the season, we were in need of people to converse with Joe about how he was going to solve this problem, because his inner monologue had become unreliable to himself. Rhys was strongly advocating for his point of view, so we needed a way to have a conversation about him facing the possibility that like the solution lies with him stopping, versus looking out into the world and excusing his behavior again. Who better than a mere three of the many women he has killed?"

9. It was decided that Joe would end up back in New York before work began on Season 4.

Netflix

"When Greg and I were talking about the Europe season, the Agatha Christie season, all of these things, we've said to ourselves, 'What we should do is have him come home again at the end, reclaim his name and go back to New York — but so different than when we first met him.' So much of all of the things that he watched and judged from afar in Season 1 is now exactly who he is. So, we had this ending in mind with Kate from the beginning," Sera recalled.

10. But we shouldn't "assume that Kate leaves the season really knowing everything."

Netflix

When asked about the conclusion of Kate's character arc in Season 4, Sera replied, "We were figuring out who her father was, and where she really came from, and it seemed that she was as trained as anyone in patriarchy, broadly speaking. She's not a murderer, she doesn't have that much in common with Love — I guess they have similar taste in men, but that's kind of it. But I don't think it's an accident if you watch the show and you start to uncomfortably feel like certain people are complicit. I don't think we should assume that Kate leaves the season really knowing everything, just because he said he was gonna say everything. Her baseline standard of what she will accept in a relationship and in someone else's behavior might not be the same as yours or mine. In fact, she says it's not, because Tom Lockwood was her father, and that's what she was raised seeing."

11. Sera said that the show had "zero interest in letting Joe off the hook."

Courtesy of Netflix

"I feel like this is the season where the whole idea was to have Joe face himself — the 'you' of this season is Joe. He tried hard in certain ways to look at himself and to change. But I think, by the end of the season, it should be pretty clear that that this show has zero interest in letting Joe off the hook. The fact that he lives to be Joe another day means that we haven't redeemed him," she said.

12. And that the show has been influenced by the cultural conversation surrounding #MeToo around it.

Courtesy of Netflix

"It's not like that was our mission statement in the room, it just kept coming up. Because when you use the word 'redemption' for a guy like Joe, who has done what he has done, you start to have the conversation of what would that really look like? What would it mean? In what ways would he have to change? While we're in this part of the new cycle, where a version of this is happening in the news most of the time — there's someone who earlier faced consequences in the public square, and then now we start to talk about them 'redeeming themselves' or 'moving on,'" Sera explained.

"This show has quite neatly folded into the last five years of #MeToo. Caroline [Kepnes] wrote it in 2013, and we were in post for the first couple of episodes when the Harvey Weinstein thing broke. But we were making the show about that before that hashtag started trending. We've watched the whole wave, and frankly, at this point, there are things about it that are a little depressing. The honeymoon enthusiasm that people had for talking about this stuff, now we're more in the inevitable part of the conversation, I think, where people are trying to point at examples of why we should stop talking about it."

13. Due to all the twists and turns throughout the season, one writer had the "full-time job of tracking the secret appendix pages," because of how many versions of each scene had to be shot.

Courtesy of Netflix

"We combed through the whole first half of the season, so that it worked several different ways. I do think that it's a season that invites rewatching, so that you can see who was and wasn't talking to Rhys in the group scenes and you know what really happened when he was making his political speech. There's a lot of stuff like that, and there's also us very carefully tracking where Joe is when these things are happening. Is he getting sleepy? Has he gone home?" Sera recalled.

14. Penn Badgley directed Episode 9, aka the episode with "the longest stretch of no Joe."

Netflix

"When Penn asked to direct this episode, I said that I would support it, but I couldn't promise that we would clear that. We put the Marienne story there for a reason, though — it was the longest stretch of no Joe that we had. If you go back, you'll see that there's a scene or two where you hear him, but you don't actually see him because we just didn't want him to have to come to set that day."

Sera continued, "We were on a lot of Zooms and FaceTimes on the weekend, and he was basically at a cafe with his iced tea and all of his notes, asking questions and chasing his very young child around. I don't know how he did it and was also pleasant and delightful every day, but it's hard to describe how much he took on and how much he signed up to not sleep or rest for a solid month to be able to do Episode 9."

15. Season 4 is full of Easter eggs — including some shoutouts to Taylor Swift.

Netflix

"I would just urge people to go back to the beginning of Joe's dream in Episode 9, there's a little shoutout to Miss Swift there that the writers of the episode put in," she said [Author's note: It involves Taylor's birthday]. "I don't know if the camera ever gets tight enough on that bookshelf for you to see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for example. Stuff like that is all over all of the sets."

16. The character of Rhys is partially based on the idea that "we romanticize the political outsider as being more authentic" and acts as a "heroic version of Joe that he wants to see."

Courtesy of Netflix

When I asked Sera if Rhys was inspired by alt-right male influencers, she replied, "I would more say that it's when we're looking up to people who are in a much more positive and mainstream light in the media, people who write memoirs and make films about how they overcame the trauma of their childhood. I think this is the language we're all speaking now in this era, it's the language of like, what was your childhood trauma, and then what did you do with it? We weren't thinking about people you click on who have 400 views so far on YouTube, but they're about to go viral. We were much more thinking about like, who would run for office?"

"We were also talking about the idea that we romanticize the political outsider as being more authentic. That the authenticity that the real Rhys has is a huge attraction for Joe, that he's not trying to smooth the edges of his past. In fact, he's leading with how rocky all of that was and how hard he has to work to rise above it. That's the heroic version of Joe that he wants to see."

17. Netflix approached the creators to ask them if they'd be interested in splitting the season into two parts — which meant that Sera had to be "patient" for people to understand "why the first half is structured that way."

Courtesy of Netflix

"The goal of the season was never to shock you with how wildly clever the solution to the whodunit in Episode 5 was — it's a classic whodunit where we followed every single trope. We won't be surprised if plenty of people figure out it's Rhys before he steps out of the shadows. Part of being one of the writers is that I have to sit, be patient, and know that when people see the second half, they'll understand why the first half is structured that way," she said.

18. Season 5, should it go ahead, will be set in New York.

Netflix

Affirming her desire for another season, Sera explained, "The idea we have for Season 5 is that Joe goes home again, but now, he is resourced beyond his wildest imagination. What can Joe Goldberg accomplish if he has wealth, privilege, protection, more than ever before? Beforehand, 60-85% of his energy is spent lying to himself about the fact that he's going to a location to kill someone and then cleaning up the horrible mess that has happened because he hasn't planned it properly. If he instead is more honest with himself, and we're accepting that this is a tool in his toolbox, what does that turn him into? He will always want to be your perfect boyfriend. His belief in love, I don't think, will ever flag. If the Rhys aspect of him is fully integrated, if not, what's in there?"

Thanks for talking to us, Sera! You Season 4 is now available for streaming on Netflix.

Note: Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.