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Penn Badgley underwent a full-body transformation ahead of his upcoming romantic comedy, You Deserve Each Other.
“It happened very fast, like, I signed on right before we had to go [shoot the movie],” Badgley, 39, said on the Thursday, January 29, episode of his “Podcrushed” podcast. “I was actually mostly consumed with losing enough weight, so it just made sense how maniacal this guy was supposed to be about his body.”
Badgley is set to star as Dr. Nicholas Rose in the forthcoming adaptation of Sarah Hogle’s You Deserve Each Other opposite Meghann Fahy as his love interest, Naomi Westfield.
“The way he is written on the page is truly, like, I should have had a shredded eight-pack,” Badgley said. “I should have had a Marvel body, and I had, like, a real-life good body, you know what I’m saying? There’s a difference.”
He continued, “I never had to lose weight and get kind of ripped for a role, so I was just like, ‘Of all things [it is for] a f***ing comedy, of course.’ I was just focused on that, and … I was thinking a lot about the premise.”
According to Badgley, the You Deserve Each Other concept was “a tough one to make work” onscreen. (The film, like the bestselling novel, is about an engaged couple on the precipice of a breakup.)
“It was important to me, like, ‘How are we going to make the first 15 pages work so that the rest of it is smooth sailing?’” he said. “It’s like, ‘Why do these two people get together? Why are they so insanely crazy competitive and won’t give up this insane game, which is the engine of the whole comedic device [and] the whole story?’”
Badgley believed if the story didn’t “make enough emotional sense” from the start, then none of the viewers would “want to watch past that.”
“The first step was knowing you and your work. I didn’t know you and your work,” Badgley told Fahy, 35, noting he watched a few moments of her Netflix show Sirens. “I was, like, ‘Oh, she’s really funny.’ I don’t even remember what you were having to do there.”
Penn Badgley and Meghann Fahy’s recent online back-and-forth is raising eyebrows. Badgley kicked off the chatter on Monday, June 30, by praising Fahy’s performance in her Netflix series, Sirens. “So I don’t usually do this, but my wife [Domino Kirke] and I just finished Sirens. OK Sirens, want to give her her flowers,” he said […]
From seeing just a few scenes, Badgley could instantly recognize Fahy’s sense of humor and was eager to work with her on You Deserve Each Other.
“I did a fair amount of comedy on The Bold Type, but I really wanted to do a rom-com, and you really didn’t,” Fahy chimed in of signing onto the film. “I love that is where we both were coming from. We would be on set, and he’d be, like, ‘I don’t know about this,’ and I’d be, like, ‘Yeah [it does].’”
You Deserve Each Other was codirected by Marc Silverstein and Abby Kohn.
“[Marc and Abby] were actually so supportive that I sometimes was like, ‘Well, surely some of this isn’t working, right? Give me something to hang onto [and tell me] don’t do that part,’” Badgley said. “It was so positive [and] I actually was trusting it. It was a relief to not do something that was at all heavy. It was so much fun the entire time.”
You Deserve Each Other does not yet have a premiere date.
