Victoria Pedretti Wants You To Believe In Love

Victoria Pedretti has never online dated, although she has a theory as to why we’re all on edge about it.


“It all goes back to fears about being vulnerable,” she says, in a matter-of-fact tone that would give my therapist a run for her cash. “You give your statistics to someone else, you pick to share something personalized about yourself … It’s scary what can be done with it. It takes a lot of vulnerability and trust to create a relationship with somebody.” Layer in the very legitimate fears of what people can do with your data on the vast and lawless internet, and, well, it’s no wonder several of us would prefer to spend a potential date night at residence in our sweatpants, binging TV shows that can’t hurt us the way a partner might.


You is one of these shows, yet it also doesn’t serve as complete escapism from the terrors of attempting to find your true love, given it explores and exaggerates the looming dangers of first yourself up to romantic experiences. Season 2 of the breakaway hit series released December 26 on Netflix introduces us to Love Quinn, a health supermarket heiress played by Pedretti. She’s the newest object of Joe Goldberg’s obsession — as Penn Badgley’s unnerving narration rapidly establishes, it takes almost no time immediately after meeting Love for him to determine he wants to spend the rest of his life with her, this time under the stolen name Will Bettelheim. Yet Love has a life of her own, with cooperative companions, a codependent twin brother, and parents who are very much in picture. Because the season unfolds, viewers rapidly learn there’s more to Love than even Joe’s thorough stalking can uncover: She is just as murderous and possessive as he is.


Pedretti first auditioned for Season 1 of You, reading for the role of Gueneviere Beck, Joe’s doomed love interest played by Elizabeth Lail. Whenever she didn’t land the part, she instantly associated with Love: “She’s a really self-possessed, confident woman who’s full of life and wants to embrace the possibility to be alive, not take life also seriously, and concentrate on the things that matter, like love joy and also a good fried chicken,” the 24-year-old, who studied at Carnegie Mellon University, says with a laugh. Whenever she had seen Season 1 before filming, she compartmentalized knowing there was a fandom and anticipation, focusing alternatively on the “good challenge” presented by Love, a character who is at once well-adjusted and wholly capable of murder.


The actor isn’t a fan of crime shows, and especially of true crime programming — though she makes the difference that You is “completely romanticized and Joe and Love aren’t real people. Although I find true crime shows are usually exaggerated and make people scared of going outdoor their home, and I can’t do that to myself. I am already flawlessly aware of how scared I should be in the world. I don’t need to stir more of that up.” She prefers shows like FX drama Atlanta, which describes as a brilliant example of how life “isn’t one note. It’s a symphony.”


It’s that complexity that informed her portrayal of Love, whose dangerous edge isn't dulled by sympathy, as with Joe, who is consumed with guilt for, and denial over, his misdeeds. She owns her past as much as she can — after all, being open about how her brother’s babysitter died would likely land her in jail — nevertheless doesn’t necessarily let it define her future, or her identity as good or evil.


“I think something we’re missing a lot culturally is this idea that people can do bad things, yet that doesn’t make them bad people,” Pedretti says, or that bad people can do good things, yet that doesn’t make them good. “The aesthetics in life, so often, is what is ambiguous and what is gray. Don’t judge a book by its cover, and try not to let yourself to think you know people before you let them to tell you who they are.”


That projection serves because the undoing for almost each person in the series, yet even for Joe, who is so busy judging the people he meets that he loses himself in his own conflicting inner monologue. “Our characters begin off with exceedingly different energy,” Pedretti says of how Love’s bright realism first clashes with Joe’s nihilism — she shows him how to reside in Los Angeles, although he has vowed to hate the city, and plunges headfirst into their relationship despite his awkward mind games. “For her, it was habitually about beginning him up.”


Even so, Love can only do so much to mold her boyfriend — the rest is up to him. Slowly nevertheless surely, the new age siren song of the Anavrin supermarket, and also Love’s own friend and relative, wins Joe over. He tries reiki. He goes for a hike (to stalk Love’s new boyfriend, however hey, you should to begin somewhere). He even endures a wellness weekend unfortunately dubbed a “wellkend” and hosted by Love’s parents, where cultural appropriation abounds in gauzy tents, crystals, as well as a live wolf that can ostensibly read people’s auras.


“Oh my god! It was sickening to be there,” Pedretti says of filming the episode. “I was like, ‘This can’t be real. You are exaggerating.’ However cultural appropriation is a large allocate, and folks are really doing this shit.”


That privilege also paves the way for the sinister depths Love will go to protect both the people she loves, and the cash her family member has amassed for themselves. “There’s a normalcy to extravagance and these huge trips, and thus anything that gets in the way of that is a threat. Any time once you have an ordinate quantity of cash you aspire to protect that, apparently.”


She points Love’s choice to hire a private investigator to tail people, and her family’s ability to pay the police off so they won’t investigate numerous homicides. Badgley has mentioned that the show is about how far people will go to forgive an evil white man, yet Love complicates that narrative; once again we are left discussing the ways in which society is rigged to excuse and absolve whiteness more broadly.


“I don’t think that folks are unaware of the fact that white people in this nation possess a lot of privilege, and our inability to let go of control and power and cash is deeply seeded in the way our society is structured,” Pedretti says. Joe and Love are that privilege personified — the internet’s enduring thirst for Joe, despite the fact that he's a killer, could serve as exhibit A in ways in which we selectively forgive people for their worst actions.


Whether Love and Joe will finally be served their just deserts remains to be seen; on Tuesday (January 14), Netflix announced the romantic horror will return for 1/3 season. Pedretti is now working on The Haunting of Bly Manor, a follow-up to The Haunting of Hill House, and You fans have much less of a roadmap or clues as to what will happen next season, given Caroline Kepnes has although to publish the third book in her series. We do know that Joe is already up to his old ways, and has officially transferred the doomed “you” to a new neighbor reading by the pool — this, despite how he and Love have moved in with each other, in a suburban residence with a white picket fence. Oh, and surprise! Love is pregnant.


“Joe got far more than he deserves,” Pedretti says. “He got a loving, astonishing partner who protects the shit out of him. And she may be crazy on her own, yet she’s no worse than he is. So they really could have been great.”


Alas, You was never made to be the story of a happy ending — the ways in which our dream people let's down is segment of its whole point. Even so, Pedretti was initially “disappointed” to learn that Love and Joe were pretty much doomed from the begin. “It could be a lot nicer on the soul if we might have a real love story,” she adds, wistfully. A beat, and then, pragmatically: “That’s not what the show is.”