Penn Badgley Illustration by João Fazenda

“I drink some hot water, and then I get very low, like this,” the actor Penn Badgley said the other day, over breakfast downtown, dropping his voice to a homicidal basso. “The room is dark. I close my eyes. I raise my hands. It’s quite spiritual, actually.” He was describing the ritual he undergoes before recording the creepy voice-over monologues delivered by his character, a bookstore clerk named Joe, on the Netflix show “You.” The second season just dropped; in the first, Joe, a delusional “nice guy,” becomes the perfect ­boyfriend of an M.F.A. student—until he ­murders her. Joe’s monologues are addressed to “you,” the victim and the viewer, and they’re violently misogynistic. But because they are spoken by someone who looks and talks like Badgley, a dark-haired heartthrob famous for playing Dan Humphrey, the bookish outsider on “Gossip Girl,” Joe gets away with murder. Characters on the show find him adorable, and so, to Badgley’s dismay, do viewers. This prompted Badgley to tweet at fans who are infatuated with his character, “He is a murderer.”

“To me, Joe is privilege embodied,” Badgley, who is thirty-three, said. “He’s the blindness that privilege entails.” Badgley wore a black turtleneck, black pants, and beige Converse high-tops, and he spoke in Joe’s melodically persua­sive voice: “This is the whole ­strangeness of the show. In some ways, it’s this bizarre kind of fantastical, bingeable thing, like ‘Gossip Girl.’ At the same time it’s, like, Ugh! It’s horrifying!” Still, Joe isn’t a big departure from Dan Humphrey, he said. “It’s the same role. But now he has blood dripping down his face.”

In Season 2, Joe has unhappily relocated to Los Angeles. He’s hiding from a disgruntled ex-girlfriend (he tried to bury her alive), and he figures that, given his antipathy for gluten-free muffins and jogging, she’d never look for him there. (Badgley, who doesn’t smoke or drink, and prefers meditation to TV, likes L.A., although he lives in Williamsburg.) As Joe hides from sunshine and retribution, he pursues a new love interest. He deploys his usual methods, which range from Facebook stalking to trapping people in Plexiglas cages.

This season, however, Joe is trying to be better; he reflects on his misdeeds while reading “Crime and Punishment.” But, Badgley said, “there’s no way that I could understand what it would take for a person like Joe to be redeemed.” While shooting Season 2, Badgley found himself listening a lot to the rapper Saba. “He’s African-American, in Chicago, witnessing a lot of mental illness and death and murder in his life,” Badgley said. “I started to trace back the reality of white privilege. How many white men in the days of slavery were slaveowners? Or were adjacent to the murder and torture of people because of the color of their skin?” Saba’s music, he said, helped him understand “that the violence of Joe is not that far from the reality of not that long ago.” He went on, “It seems to me that Joe is an allegory for the history of our country, maybe.”

Badgley belongs to the Baha’i faith, which, he explained, teaches non-engagement in partisan politics, but encourages its members to be “engaged in thinking about and attempting to meet the needs of the age you live in.” On Twitter, he likes to alert fans to global injustice. “Right now, I’m considering how to post about my visit to a detention facility, in New Mexico,” he said. “ ‘Facility.’ It seems silly to call it that. It’s operated like a prison. And the people there are not criminals.”

After breakfast, he walked to McNally Jackson Books and browsed the shelves. On “You,” Joe scorns his customers for buying Dan Brown novels and chakra guides. Unlike Joe, Badgley hasn’t read Dostoyevsky. “The idea that philosophers in the past have actually figured anything out when we’ve ended up where we’ve ended up . . . ,” he said. “You’re kind of, like, ‘I dunno. I’m not sure, old white guy! I’m not sure I’m interested in what you have to say!’ ” ♦