You author Caroline Kepnes: ‘It’s very strange to realise you have written a serial killer’ Exclusive: Author and creator of Netflix’s sleeper hit talks feeling protective over Joe Goldberg and what he’ll face in season two

“It’s mind blowing. I can’t even picture 40 million people.” Caroline Kepnes is talking about the number of people who watched You on Netflix within the first month of its release. Based on her bestselling novel of the same name, the series was released on Boxing Day 2018 – a smart move by Netflix, says Kepnes, because then “it’s like a present” – and was gobbled up by millions of viewers worldwide. “There was a moment when I realised it had become A Thing. I was in a grocery store and heard three girls talking about the show – I dropped my pizza and ran out of there.”

Kepnes wrote You in 2013, and the novel has since been praised by the likes of her writing heroes Stephen King and Lena Dunham. It’s a delightfully fast paced story of frustration, male ego and the disastrous lengths people go to in order to shield it. The narrator of the book, Joe Goldberg, is a handsome New Yorker bookworm, who appears to be the perfect man on the surface (Kepnes says she was writing her fantasy boyfriend who was also “a bit of a nightmare”). When he meets an equally attractive young writer, Guinevere Beck, it also turns out he’s a stalker and a serial killer, though Kepnes is oddly reluctant to brand him that way.

“There’s a level of denial, you don’t really know what you’re writing,” she explains of her creation. “I remember when I wrote You and someone first referred to Joe as a serial killer I argued ‘he’s not a serial killer, he meets these terrible people and has these awful thoughts, but he’s very sensitive’. It’s very strange to realise you have written a serial killer.

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“When people talk about how awful he is, I feel more protective of him. It also makes me want to torture him a bit more.”

Penn Badgely, best known for playing Dan Humphrey in the teen drama Gossip Girl, played Joe, a casting choice that certainly helped make him into a controversial sex symbol. For Kepnes, it was an inevitability: “I completely understand people who romanticise the story and look the other way.

“It’s a blown-up metaphor for the way we are with the men in our lives. Part of the idea for You came from growing up and being naturally wary of upsetting a man and being aware that male emotion is a dangerous thing. If you say ‘no’ to someone. you’re supposed to tell them there’s a reason, like ‘I have a boyfriend’. There has to be an explanation so that they can still feel good. It doesn’t work that way for women.”

Social media plays a huge part in the first series of You: it’s Joe’s main gateway into the private life of his girlfriend and eventual victim, Beck. Kepnes describes herself as an “awkward addict” when it comes to her own social media use and finds its prominence in our lives increasingly strange.

“If I ran the world, every week there would be two days a week when it’s all turned off. It wouldn’t be deciding to take a break, it wouldn’t be there for anyone and we would just have to learn how to exist.”

It’s not the only time she sounds like the sociopathic main character of You (she openly admits her inner, intolerant Joe emerges when she spends too long in LA). Does she ever have to force herself to think in his abrasive tone? “I can tell when I’m too much like myself and need to Joe it up a bit. Then it’s a case of closing my eyes and thinking of everything he’s done. Because I haven’t committed those kinds of crimes, I like to remind myself what it would be like to walk around being surprised that you’re free.

“My favourite thing is when I’m outlining the plot and then it turns into writing. I’ll be writing ‘he does this and this’ and then all of a sudden it turns into first person ‘you’, and all his bitching starts. It’s a good feeling to copy and paste that into a draft.”

At the end of the series, having killed his girlfriend Beck, her best friend Peach, her ex-boyfriend Benji and various other people who got in his way, Joe ran into his ex, whom everyone (Joe included) had presumed dead. The perfect cliffhanger for a second season.

While the US channel Lifetime passed on a second season, Netflix picked up the worldwide rights to the show and, knowing they had a hit on their hands, greenlit the next chapter of Joe’s murderous tale. Thankfully, Kepnes had already written her sequel, Hidden Bodies, in 2016 and was more than willing to offer it up. “Before I was even finished with the first book I knew what my second one was going to be. I wanted to trap Joe somewhere.”

That somewhere is the stifling city of LA, where a range of new characters are introduced – fresh meat for a serial killer that readers and viewers somehow find themselves rooting for. As with the first season, the show will differ from the book, though Kepnes doesn’t want to give away any spoilers. Unlike the first series, the author wasn’t able to write her own episode. She had a good excuse: she was busy writing the third instalment.

“It was like my own Game Of Thrones situation, but on a very small scale,” she laughs. “I knew I had to get this third book done because, God willing, they’ll want a third season. It’s weird when the ‘what’s next?’ question you’ve been asking yourself becomes one everyone else cares about too.”

The third book, which remains as yet untitled, sees Joe move again, this time to a small island where he can start afresh. “It’s got a very low murder rate,” assures Kepnes with a smile her protagonist would analyse as teasing, “He moves there for love reasons, for the greater good. But then he discovers there are no murders because they’re all too co-dependent. It was an exciting challenge to figure out how to kill people in a place where there’s so much intimacy in the community.”

A third season of the series hasn’t been confirmed yet, and fans of the books and the show might be disappointed to hear Joe moves away from the potential to commit any more crimes. Don’t worry, assures Kepnes, “there’s definitely still going to be a body count.”