Penn Badgley’s wife, Domino Kirke, is clapping back at claims that she’s responsible for the actor cutting back on filming sex scenes.
In an Instagram video on Monday, September 28, Kirke, 42, said she continues “to get DMs about this thing that happened three years ago,” referring to an article about Badgley, 39, explaining his decision to abstain from intimate scenes.
Kirke noted that with “the characters that my husband has played over the years, people have come to expect that he will continue to play that guy,” acknowledging Badgley’s risqué scenes in You and Gossip Girl.
Kirke, a professional doula, said of Badgley’s decision to stop doing sex scenes: “I was super happy for him and very proud of him because I understood how major it was, and yeah, it’s just relational hygiene.”
However, that hasn’t stopped people from flooding Kirke’s DMs, prompting a more direct response.
“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.
Kirke captioned the post, “A few years ago, the internet decided I’d asked my husband to stop doing sex scenes. The truth is, my husband decided to do this for his own mental health reason. After working in the industry since he was just 12 years old, believe me, it was time.”
Kirke noted similarities between her work as a caregiver and her husband’s work as an entertainer.
“Caregivers are so ready to be invisible, collapse, disappear, or take direction no matter what. They’re constantly allowing folks to blaze past their boundaries, all in the spirit of being accommodating or, in my husband’s case, entertaining,” she wrote. “They’re OK with being forgettable. Sometimes I ask people what their doula’s name was, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t remember!’ So finally, after years of trying, Penn decided to take a stand and let the world see him. And guess what … he hasn’t lost fans and he’s still getting hired!”
Back in 2023, Badgley revealed that he requested fewer steamy scenes for his You character, Joe Goldberg, in the Netflix drama’s fourth season.
“I asked [the creator of the show] Sera Gamble, ‘Can I just do no more intimacy scenes?’” the actor said on an episode of his “Podcrushed” podcast. “Fidelity in every relationship, and especially my marriage, is really important to me.”
“I said to Sera, ‘My desire would be zero, to go from 100 to zero,’” he explained at the time. “But I signed this contract, I signed up for this show, I know what I did. You can’t take this aspect out of the DNA of the concept, so, ‘How much less can you make it?’ was my question for them.”
According to Badgley, Gamble “didn’t even bat an eye. She was really glad that I was that honest, and she had a really positive response. She appreciated my directness, and she appreciated that I was being reasonable and practical. And they came back with a phenomenal reduction.”
However, for the show’s fifth and final season, which aired in 2025, Badgley said he understood the need for more physically intimate scenes with his costars.
“I had to throw that out the window,” he told People in April 2025. “And as I always said, ‘My desire is that least as possible, but if it’s necessary, that’s the show we all signed up to make. So, let’s make sure it’s vital, let’s make sure it’s important, it’s deliberate.’ And we did.”
