You may remember that back in 2023, Penn Badgley made waves when he said on his Podcrushed podcast that he specifically requested to cut down the amount of intimate scenes he was shooting for his hit Netflix show, You.
"I don't think I have ever mentioned it publicly, but one of the main things was: Do I want to put myself back on a career path where I'm always the romantic lead?" he confessed at the time, going on to say that his marriage to Domino Kirke-Badgley played a role in his decision to ask for less onscreen intimacy.
"Fidelity in every relationship, including my marriage, is important to me. It's got to the point where I don't want to do that," he said, referring to the fact that Seasons 1–3 of You featured sex scenes between him and various other actors.
Season 4 of You, which came out in 2023, was noticeably less raunchy than previous seasons. And while Penn said that the show’s creator, Sera Gamble, "didn’t even bat an eye" at his request, his comments sparked significant criticism, prompting him to speak out again a few weeks later.
Telling GQ that his comments had been "blown out of proportion," Penn clarified: "It was sort of like the culture inherent to the production of all movies, but particularly those scenes. It’s like, look, we know that Hollywood has had a history of flagrant exploitation and abuse."
Well, that was more than three years ago, and now, Penn's wife, Domino, is clearing up misconceptions about the role she played in the whole thing. Speaking to the camera in a video posted to Instagram on Sept. 28, Domino, who is a professional birth doula, said that she still gets DMs about the sex scene headlines all these years later.
"My husband decided that he didn't want to do intimacy scenes anymore. Meaning, he didn’t want to have sex...he didn’t want to do any of that, which was really major in his industry because that’s the thing they like you to do the most," she said. "And the characters that my husband has played over the years, people have come to expect that he will continue to play that guy."
Domino said that she was "super happy" and "very proud" of him when he made the decision to request a limit on sex scenes, because she knows what a "major" move it was. "It's just relational hygiene," she said.
"So yeah, I want to say to those of you who still DM me about my husband deciding to do this for himself and his mental health, like, get over it," she said. In the caption, Domino also directly refuted that she "asked [her] husband to stop doing sex scenes."
"The truth is, my husband decided to do this for his own mental health reason," she wrote in the lengthy caption. "After working in the industry since he was just 12 years old, believe me, it was time. In the entertainment world, they call actors 'puppets' behind their backs, and it’s even more disturbing when they start out as child actors."
Praising Penn for advocating for himself, Domino went on to link this to her work as a doula, writing: "It’s wild how rarely we talk about relational hygiene and mental health for the people in the caregiving world AND the entertainment world. Entertainers, birth professionals, and caregivers bleed to create so much for others, and then they’re expected to go home and show up for their own lives and families as though nothing happened."
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