So deeply is Penn Badgley’s face imprinted upon the cultural psyche that even our breezy lunch in NoHo, partially ensconced within an outdoor dining shed, prompts enough double takes to land him on Deux Moi two days later—as just one of three Lonely Boy sightings reported that week. For even the most indifferent New Yorkers of a certain age, recognizing Badgley out and about in the city feels like accessing an inside joke, or claiming your spot in an ongoing Gossip Girl live-action role play of your preteen dreams. It’s not entirely a stretch to say, for millennials who grew up in Dan Humphrey’s heyday, that to see Penn Badgley is to be reminded of our youth.

For Badgley, this kind of cryogenic freeze of boyhood has loomed over the ensuing last decade of his post-G.G. career—how much harder can a guy pivot than going full bore on Joe Goldberg, international murderous creep at large, on You? So, this summer, the 35-year-old actor is reluctantly leaning into the nostalgia and trying something new (and perhaps fulfilling a true Brooklyniter’s arc): podcasting.

Launched on Stitcher last month, Podcrushed taps into Badgley’s could-lure-you-to-your-demise voice and Rolodex of celeb friends to pore over listener-submitted stories about the horrors of middle school. Where it gets interesting, though, is when the conversations springboard into pretty personal territory—there’s Leighton Meester reflecting on Hollywood’s warped concepts of age, Drew Barrymore squaring up her experiences with early fame with day-to-day challenges of parenting. Badgley, who cohosts the show with his friends Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari, provides a slight edge of darkness throughout the show with allusions to his own experiences as a child star. As Badgley makes apparent over the course of our interview, the topic of adolescence isn’t so much fun fertile memory lane material as it is an origin story to be examined in order to understand the rest of your life.

Below, Vanity Fair speaks with Badgley about his new medium, the misguided ways we fixate on adolescence, and what 12-year-old Penn was like.

Vanity Fair: So, Penn, have you always wanted to be a podcaster?

Penn Badgley: I had been interested in it for a while; I am very much a podcast listener. Radiolab—it’s not just my favorite podcast. It’s one of the most influential pieces of work in my life in the realm of literature and journalism. I mean, it’s a podcast, so it’s not literature, but it’s not not literature.

Wow, so you’re like a Radiolab superfan.

I regularly cry listening to it. It got me through some tough times over the last 10 years. The only two things I would even reference in the same breath as being that influential for me are D’Angelo and Radiolab. They’re the only two things that I have a singular love for. Everything else I'm like, moderate.

When do you usually listen to podcasts?

I actually don’t listen to it in the background. I sit down, and I listen. The one caveat is doing the dishes. In the pandemic, our dishwasher was broken for a long time, so I did a hell of a lot of dishes. That’s one memory of the pandemic for me, listening to podcasts and doing the dishes and getting back into Radiolab.

Do you think you’ve listened to every episode?

Oh, I know I have. I bet you I’ve listened to at least 40% of them twice, or more. I just relistened to one episode called “Debatable” two weeks ago, and again, I wept. They just tell—ah! They’re just so compassionate and empathetic and sensitive and courageous, this mix of sonic soundscaping and journalistic storytelling and scientific inquiry. It’s so meta in a lot of ways.

Podcasting makes a lot of sense based on your voice acting work too. Much has been made of all the narration you do in You. I also read that your first work as a child actor was doing voiceovers. When did you first realize your voice was special?

That’s funny you say that. If that’s true, I’m realizing it now in a different way. To take your words, I did not think my voice was special. But I always loved to sing. That was my first love. And I think the power of a sensitive narration is just—it’s a lovely thing, you know. I didn’t really think of myself as having a narrative ability until recently.

I’m curious about the way Podcrushed focuses on the middle school experience when so much of pop culture is mostly fixated on the high school, official teenage mode. What intrigued you about this specific part of adolescence?

If I think back to when I was 12, in a lot of ways, I almost feel the same now. Like, it still feels like it’s the same lifetime whereas childhood doesn’t. It’s the same mental space. Once you get into adolescence, there are parts of you that suddenly can just leap into consciousness that remain in a lot of ways the same.

It’s the point in life when you’re first fully booted up. What were you like as a preteen?

I was very quiet; I had a very rich interior life. But I was also very insecure. I think I was longing for a sense of community because I was an only child. With theater and in performing, I started to see the arts as a community. And I thought that was a dignified way to try and spend your life. But I always saw myself as becoming a musician, to be honest.

Were you a Walkman or CD player kid?

I don’t remember my Walkman, but I remember my first CD player and my first CD.

Was it D’Angelo?

No, it was the Fugees’ The Score. And I remember the first time I got a stereo system—the 12-year-old version of hi-fi. My parents got me a Sony stereo, which back then was pretty good. The first concert I ever went to was the Puff Daddy No Way Out tour with Usher and Busta Rhymes opening up. I was like 10 or 11, and I went with my parents because no one would go with me.

Aw. That’s kind of funny.

It is, definitely.

We were just talking about this sensation of feeling like you’re the same person you were at age 12, and now you’re cohosting a podcast about that life stage. Meanwhile, you’re also extremely famous for playing a high schooler in a show that aired a decade ago. Is there any part of all of this that makes you feel…trapped? Or in a stage of arrested development? I think a lot about how millennial nostalgia doesn’t let any of us really grow up.

I feel you with that. You know what’s funny? I’m not a nostalgic person. Like middle school as nostalgia does not interest me. With the podcast, I’m far more interested in like, what are the unhelpful limitations placed in our sense of self-identity that have roots in this time? To me, it’s far more about the developmental stuff. The nostalgia thing makes sense to bring people in; it’s helpful to have that balance.

I don’t think it’s me or any one individual so much that has arrested development and nostalgia. Culturally, we’re obsessed with stories of teenagers. Which I think is absurd! I’ve never been interested in those kinds of shows. Never. Not once in my life. I think what’s interesting is that we can’t get over adolescence. It’s evident in our media. Can we stop telling stories about teenagers fucking each other, please?

I take it you’re not a Euphoria fan.

No, I’ve never seen it. I’m not even remotely interested. It’s no shade. Even though I have my own kind of pains of growing up in Hollywood, I also got to skip the pain of high school.

Before we met, I had a note to ask the requisite question about the new Gossip Girl, and whether you’d ever consider doing a cameo. But I think I have an idea of what you’d say.

What do you think my answer would be?

Like, “No, that’s done.”

Yeah. I think it’s finished for me.

Beyond a universal obsession with youth, the high school thing is fascinating, right? Because for most people, it’s not a great time. I don’t know if we’re trying to have a revisionist view of it, as a culture.

I’ve been working in television since I was 12 years old. I have been reading television scripts since I was 15. I have been asking myself for over 20 years: Why are adults so obsessed with the lives of teenagers? Get over it!

But rather than asking the question with resentment or contempt or disdain, let me measure it. Let’s ask the question from the perspective of a psychologist or a scientist. It’s not a rhetorical question. There’s an answer.

Any working theories?

I probably do, but I think the best thing you can do with a theory before you present it to the world is to test it. Maybe I’m testing it with this podcast.

Who do you think of as the audience for Podcrushed? I’m curious how I’d feel about listening to it as a tween.

We wondered the same thing.

So it could go either way?

We certainly aren’t making it for 13-year-olds but we’re not not making it for them. ’Cause the spirit of the show is all of us thinking about any 13-year-olds in our lives, and how to be a better person for them. Part of how I met Nava and Sophie was through the Baha’i faith, where this central activity that people all over the world associated with Baha’i teachings engage in what we call the Junior Youth Spiritual Empowerment Program. The three of us were all in some way engaged with that program in different neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

Please excuse my ignorance, but is it like a Girl Scouts/Boy Scouts kind of program?

I’d say it’s more about community building. It’s hard to sum up without going into this whole other part. Basically, playing a vital role in the empowerment of youth is important to all of us. To be honest, I think this is the first age group where you can truly empower people to become protagonists.

Again, I don’t get all gooey when I think about middle school. I don’t even initially find a lot of these stories told in the podcast to be funny.

Has working on Podcrushed changed the way you think of how you grew up?

To be fair, I have thought about a lot of this before, so I don’t know if it’s changed it. It’s made it so, well, I’m sharing some of it.

And it must all be very top of mind since you have a 13-year-old stepson now.

Yeah, and a two-year-old who’s going to be 13, eventually.

I kind of love this alternate universe where maybe Penn Badgley is a child psychologist.

Before I started You, I was trying to understand what it was that I could do if I wasn’t going to act. I just didn’t know if it was fulfilling enough alone.

Nobody is who you think they are, especially if they’re famous. I’m really interested in what makes each person feel the safest and the soundest and the most whole and the most themself. There is another world where I would have loved to go to school and have a PhD and actually bring to the topic decades of experience and study. At the moment, I don’t have that, but I do have my cohosts, and we have our guests, and so we’re just kind of thinking about it, unprofessionally.

In terms of the guest interviews on Podcrushed, I was struck by how rare it is to hear celebrities talk about lifelong insecurities and this kind of unfettered reflection in a relatively long format.

It’s funny that we often use the word “insecurity,” but we don’t use the word “security.”

Right. We don’t know what security really is, I guess?

But we can tell when it’s lacking. Which means we know we deserve security. We know that it’s somehow kind of an inborn right for all people.

That’s a really lovely way of putting it.

Again, back when I was 12, I was looking out on the world and being like, why don’t I feel secure? And even then I think I was like, there must be a reason. At first, for the next 15 years, I would be convinced it was me. And then finally in my late 20s, I was like, it’s not just me! It’s all this! You know?

And so many people go their whole lives without realizing that.

Yeah! Think about how many people end up living a life where they just keep perpetuating the stereotype they inherited at that age, which initially made them uncomfortable. But then they found that they were able to keep it up enough. And they were like, well shit, I guess I’m going to keep doing this because of the pain that comes when I try to do anything else.

For my last question, I’d love to turn the question that you ask at the end of each episode onto you. If you could talk to 12- or 13-year-old Penn, what would you say?

One of the pains of this time is that people can tell you things, but that doesn’t mean that you will hear them or understand them. Or that you’ll believe them. So I think I’d have to preface whatever I said with a true friendship. And then I would say a million things, and I wouldn’t necessarily try to say anything. I would just try to be a true friend. What you need is somebody who’s been through it. I wouldn’t say anything as much as I would just love him unconditionally.