It doesn't matter who you are as an actor; that's really always in the script. It wouldn't make sense a lot of times to drastically change things. It… - Penn Badgley

Honestly, for me, acting is just a very spiritual thing where I’m just present with the words I read on the screen, and when it’s awful and it kind of makes your skin crawl, then that’s what comes up and that’s what I do.

To me, Joe is this work in progress in dismantling and dissecting the myriad privileges that a young, attractive, white man carries with him. I’m not suggesting that the rest of the world shouldn’t have these so-called privileges. But I think when only one group has them, it’s actually a horrific blindness when it comes to being in touch with humanity. I think it’s material privilege but it’s not emotional or psychological or spiritual privilege, and it seems that that can be a great bondage.

It's not entirely fair to put that on the viewer because we're purposefully creating a device that is meant to be provocative—and hopefully thought-provoking—but not just titillating.