Penn Badgley

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1:02You don't? Oh, I can't read any of them. That's what I was going to ask you. The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Yeah. Bruh!

1:11Well, Penn Badgley, welcome to One Night Stand. Thank you. Thank you for having me. No, we're so thrilled to have you here. You've chosen some great books, and we also have your brilliant book here as well to talk about. Yeah, let's put that one on top. Have you always been a big reader? Yeah, yeah. The first year I stopped formal schooling at least for a time, and it began this pattern of like never really returning to school fully, was my fourth grade year. Oh, wow. My parents had to move from one side of the country to another completely. It seemed and felt random and sudden, and we moved to the middle of nowhere, Like our driveway was two tire tracks up a mountain, really.

1:53And like our neighbors were about a mile away. We were in the sticks of Washington State. And it was beautiful, but I was completely alone, only child, didn't have an outlet. Summer. This is when I started acting. And because of the strange sort of non-schooling situation I would be kind of in and out of, reading music were some primary form of connection. To me, my approach as an actor, to be honest, is... I think it's almost like 95 % reading comprehension to me. If I'm at my worst, it means I'm being lazy, but if I'm at my best, it really is just take the words off the page and understand what you're saying.

2:31All the other stuff the wardrobe does for you, the editing does for you, really, if you were just present with the words, which is to say reading, you've memorized them, of course, at this point, but it's reading comprehension to me. What do you do when you come up against something that feels ambiguous or you're not sure? Do you trust your gut? Well, as a reader, I love to kind of pour over something. Yeah. For instance, this, The Hidden Words by Baha 'u'llah, that anything that feels of truly divine origin to me can never be fully understood. It has infinite meaning and depth. So therefore, you can pour over it over and over and over and over and over.

3:05And that's actually what I do with that book. As an actor, well, at some point you have to perform it. So at that point, you just let your misunderstanding just be honest with how you feel, actually. And it will seem like a good choice. Yeah. I feel like when I was at university as well, the professors really used to value people making an eccentric random choice sometimes as well. So I feel like you can't be wrong. Well, you can, but mostly... At university, I feel like you can be wrong. As an actor, if you believe what you're saying, you might not be able to be wrong. The best version of that is like if you're really honest about how you feel which might even be like I don't really love this line You know, but you're in the full thing you're in the scene you're present with your scene partner It actually might just seem like and be an interesting choice.

3:54Yeah I love that. We're gonna start the bottom of this gigantic pile here because we have a very big Item which is the complete Calvin and Hobbes Tell me about your love of this. Well, I was reminded of it. It's so deep and far back but very foundational that I had forgotten about it completely until a few nights ago. So you guys, you guys acted quick getting this, finding this. We move fast. So I've had this stack, like some earlier edition of it, but I've had this stack. I must, I've probably had it for 20 years, 25 years. I think, I think that my mom might've gotten it for me as like a birthday present when I was 16, 17, you know, something.

4:37But my five-year-old just happened to, he picked it up, and I read some of it to him. And I was just like awash with all of these sense memories. And I think in particular, Bill Watterson's art, his depiction of the natural world. So like Calvin and Hobbes are these very irreverent characters. They're deeply philosophical. One of them's not real. But they live in a world of their irreverent imagination. and philosophy and it's a very funny comic. It's tight. You know, you get maybe four frames or six frames and it's something is communicated and that's a real knack. That's a real special skill that I don't know where else it's ever exercised.

5:24Like that's a very, it's like a poem, a haiku. Yes. So there's Calvin and Hobbes and their whole thing. But then the way that Bill Watterson paints the natural world around them is stunning. It's like, it's really gorgeous. gorgeous so there's so even without the words and the themes you feel that interesting um the creative tension between their comic ness and the deep beauty of like the way he paints trees and mountains like what these vistas these like these like like you know these old american vistas and they just used to be like in the newspaper yeah like we can just like what a lovely really so did you read them as a kid then so when you say a sense memory so you would read them in the newspaper yeah like every week yeah I mean you know I can recall in Virginia when I was like five and six probably doing it and then I think by the time I was a bit older eight nine that's when you could like get some of the books yeah so not this fully but you know you'd have yeah and I definitely had a lot of the books and it was a great comfort you know Calvin is uh he's really he's brilliant calvin technically speaking he's brilliant and he's like cutely sweetly antagonistic with his parents and they're actually really tender with him yes they're very tender even though they're also like this fucking child like you know and that's actually now as a parent of a five-year-old um you know my stepson who is 16 i met him when he was five so not having gotten zero to five.

7:00I didn't see that kind of... those early years are really significant in understanding a five-year-old. Now that I have seen that, I'm like, oh, this man, I don't know, he must have had children. There's something he really understands about both parenthood and childhood. Yeah, for sure. And I think the sort of facetiousness of... I like the one where Calvin's playing and they're like, oh, look, he's building things. Maybe he's going to be an architect. And then at the side, it's him like destroying worlds. Yeah, it's so good. It's so funny. Did you identify with Calvin as a kid, do you think?

7:38I must have. I don't remember. I think I really identified with both of them. Yeah. Definitely both of them. I loved Hobbes. I remember I had a stuffed animal of Hobbes. I mean, they never made a stuffed Hobbes, but I had a tiger that happened to look closely enough to Hobbes, and I really loved him. In your book Crushmore, you sort of write about how your education, your path to education, you sort of don't regret it. It's sort of like, you know, I think you have this lovely line where you talk about how you made you are sort of like making the best of the opportunities. And that when the alternative was staying where you were, it was best to move.

8:13Do you sort of with your own children? Do you have a sort of different perspective on education with them? Are you like pretty liberal about what are you more like? Well, great example. our 16 year old we tried to move out of the city for like a year and a half after the pandemic we really wanted our then 13 14 um to go to high school out of the out of new york city new york high schools are you know that's a thing yeah it's a thing we went to the the the little town where we had been living during the pandemic and that's the only house we own is there we we love that town we're going to go back there someday maybe when the oldest graduates yeah because raising kids in New York City is we've done it with the first one and you know he's a he's a he's a Brooklyn born and raised kid and he really wanted to come back so he's in a he's in a serious private school here like yeah and that really works for him it's the right kind of stimulation and I actually feel good about it I don't think it's for everybody it is intense but but I have to say again he's thriving yeah in that um he he needed that and kind of wanted that the little ones the five-year-old right now we have him in a kind of a hybrid homeschooling vibe he's not in kindergarten yet because it's like we don't need to be teaching these kids as much as we try to teach our reading and math comprehension is going down because we actually start too early and everybody's too like yeah you sometimes hear parents in like park slope brooklyn talk about their kids and like in the park and it's just like god bless them all seriously i know we're all trying our best but like the neuroses oh my god anxiety it's like can we let these children be children and the answer is actually no because we don't know how to play because there's something happening where like so I never lost my love for education because I wasn't a part of the educational system yeah it's not the teachers I mean maybe it is some of them if they're underpaid and overworked and exhausted and becoming miserable but like it's not it's the system yeah you know it's not the people so i'm i'm all for finding alternatives for the time but i am pro-education i'm not like you know like let them just no exactly go into the woods yeah it's also i think me and my i'm one of three girls i'm the middle and we all went to different secondary schools which is like 11 to 18 in the uk and i think that they sort of like suited each of us in different ways and i think you do have to like find the right fit for the child in question but i Do you think these American, so in the UK, you have exams when you're 16 and then again at 17 and 18.

10:43But this like always on testing in America that like every grade you get like contributes to your for like the four years you're at high school. It's serious pressure. It's brutal. It's serious pressure. You've got like no time to have like an off moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which what 14 to 18 year old doesn't have an off moment. Yeah, and actually, so the reason that our 16-year-old really wanted to get into that is because his middle school was the pandemic. So he didn't have, it was kind of like, now there's nothing. And so he lost this seriously formative, well, he didn't lose the formative time, but his formative time was spent.

11:18Yeah. In fact, the very period of life we're really looking at, our first, it was in the pandemic. and that's, you know, I don't even think we have enough perspective on that. We don't. And it's the kind of thing they're going to talk to us about when they're older and be like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. What a time. Yes. I just moved to New York. I moved a month before the pandemic and was like, yeah, it was rough. Rough. I mean, everyone had a rough time, but that was really rough. No, but that's really intense. I was like living in this little one bedroom apartment on my own.

11:49So you didn't have any friends? I mean, but you wouldn't be able to see them anyway. No, but like I couldn't see any friends and I hadn't really made that many friends and no one was like taking on new people at that point. So, and I couldn't, because of my visa rules, if I left the country, I couldn't come back in. Good Lord. Don't recommend it. But you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Yeah. Well, on the theme of getting stronger, your second book, The Hidden Words, it's, I mean, tell me about your love for that book. Let me just crack it open real quick. Let's see what I open it to.

12:17This is my relationship to this book. So when I first got it, so to be clear, it's written by Baha 'u'llah, who's the founder of the Baha 'i faith. The Hidden Words is meant to be a distillation of the truth of all past religions. There's two books within it. One is in Persian and one is in Arabic. They have different characters. As I understand it, the Persian language has this sweetness to it. Arabic has this sort of deep comprehension to it. So I've always tended a bit more towards the Arabic personally. There's something about them that the mysticism is also like rigorously rational, whereas like the Persian might have this more bewildering mysticism to it.

13:05So, you know, there's, I think the bridge to this for me was Rumi. Yeah. The Barks, the Coleman-Barks translations of Rumi, but there's a lot to be said about the Coleman-Barks translations that is positive and then also could be maybe constructive criticism in that what Coleman-Barks has done and what most Western interpretations of Rumi have done is like removed his devout Muslim life.

13:32They've removed the Islamic devotion from Rumi's poetry because they don't understand it, and I think they largely misinterpret it. There's this idea of Sufism that it's like beyond the laws of the Quran. Some Sufis actually did believe that Rumi was not one of those. He was devout. Interesting. He was by the book and also deeply mystical. And so he was a great balance, I think, of a truly religious person. I loved Rumi's poetry a lot in my early and mid-20s. And it would get me to be able to really comprehend this. Because you could think, yeah, it sounds beautiful. I don't know what that means.

14:15Yeah. And you'd be right. Because you don't and you need to spend time with it. Yeah, exactly You know, you really need to spend time with it I mean the idea that the first call of the beloved capital B meaning we'll say in short God but that unknowable Source from which we come and which we return So if this is the first call Oh mystic nightingale, so that's a reference to then us So we are in some capacity. We are a mystic nightingale. This is the soul as I understand it abide not but in the rose garden of the spirit so then it's saying you know to me it's like remember that life is spiritual the rose garden abide not but in the rose garden of the spirit and what is a rose garden it's a number of things it's fragrant um it has to be cultivated gardens are gardens have to be meticulously kept in order to remain a garden you know what are the things that is required in a rose garden what are the complementary plants and conditions of the soils that a rose garden flourishes you know all that kind of stuff like really let's think about this and to live there it really would mean that you have to become a gardener you know and that you're you're cultivating this this and you would have to you could only do it out of love yeah and your relationship to the rose would become a deep one you'd have to understand it you'd have to understand it in a lot of ways you would have to become very knowledgeable.

15:41And that fragrance too, the fragrance of a rose is actually quite subtle. Yeah, totally. But it's a really, really, really sweet and subtle fragrance. So that's the way I spend time with this document. Yeah, when I was reading through, I found myself, it was like a comprehension test. I was like, okay. It just washes over you sometimes. Exactly. But I find it easier to read it rather than hear it with stuff like that. I agree. It's very hard. If you hear me saying it, it's like, no, no, no, you need to take your time. Yeah, and almost visually anchor the words a bit. In your book, Crushmore, your two co-hosts on your podcast, Sophie and Nava, they write a lot about growing up within the faith and how there were moments where they sometimes felt like, ooh, and then other moments where on the whole, they're obviously thrilled.

16:36and you know how do you feel about it as a father are you do you sort of like give you are you giving your children the chance to like react to on their own terms or is that something you might read with your kid it's it's both of those things it's also other things it's you know having not grown up in anything close to a religious household and and the way i practice religion is not the baha 'i faith as an organized religion is that doesn't practice in the way that people commonly think of or understand religion. That's one of the great appeals of it. In some ways, it's very modern and futuristic.

17:09Some would say it feels, in other ways, conservative and archaic, and it's just, it's many things. The reason I adopted it, apart from, and always secondary to, that essential, like, falling in love with the words of Baha 'u'llah and then being like, well, this is a completely unparalleled elixir and medium and I love this and so there's a framework really for there's a the the Baha 'i faith has a has a modern framework for action which the individual can can connect their own spiritual transformation to the transformation of the community and the world around them I would have died for that kind of information and resource as a as a what we call junior youth middle schoolers like 11 to 15 as a high schooler as a child I would have oh my god that's what I was looking for I couldn't have articulated that of course but that's what I was looking for that level of identity at the level of the soul so being that I know that it's an incredibly valuable resource that nobody else is going to offer them out like explicitly so that's what I do I offer it to them learning how to do that in a really authentic way in a really selfless way which is a problem of religion's past.

18:28You know, proselytizing is prohibited in our faith. As is, you know, you have to, the first principle is independent investigation of truth and reality, and that you have to declare your faith as a Baha 'u'llah yourself. You can't technically grow up a Baha 'i. You're not a Baha 'i simply because you grew up in a Baha 'i household. You have to be 15 at least. You have to be of the age of spiritual maturity to declare your faith in Baha 'u'llah and mean it, and then you follow the laws. There's fasting, there's obligatory prayer every day. No drinking, you know? Oh really? So you've been sober since?

19:00Yeah, I've been sober for about 11 years. Lots of things like that. An interesting one is non-involvement in political affairs, but being deeply invested and engaged in the well-being, contributing to the well-being of the society you're a part of. So, you know, it's like we do vote, but it's interesting, our relationship to politics, you know, and especially in countries where the Baha 'i faith is like having, it's really contributing to the transformation of culture in like certain villages and localities around the world. That has, that non-involvement in politics has shown to be an extremely wise and valuable principle.

19:38Here, I think people are like, well, what do you mean everything is politics? How are you going to do anything meaningful? And I understand that. And so I'm learning about that and trying to understand how it manifests differently in a country like ours at a political time like ours. It's really, really interesting. So, you know, I'm trying to share this with my children only because it's like, look, this is the most valuable resource, infinitely more so than anything else I've encountered. So I'm going to share it with you. I pray with them. You know, my five-year-old asks me to say, he doesn't love to say prayers on his own, but he like will ask me to pray.

20:09And I sing my prayers a lot. So he'll, you know, in the morning wakes up at five o 'clock, I clockwork every day, you know, sometimes 455 often. 455 to 457 I find is really common I'm like wow every day every day with anything with a four on the front it's just not appropriate I'm like too early and he'll like want me to say the long obligatory prayer the long obligatory prayer takes about 11 minutes to say at a at a clip that's such a beautiful echo of I think Nava's essay in your collection where she talks about her memory of lying in bed with her mother when she was singing prayers that's right yeah it's lovely I was my parents met at church and we went to church a lot until I was about 10 but I remember when I was maybe six or seven saying like so you guys believe in God and my mom being like yeah my dad being like no he's like but I just he's like I think it brings out the good in people and I was like oh okay and so I never felt pressured to necessarily believe anything which I think is a nice like balance when you're a kid like yes so you pray every day and you would maybe are these prayers technically or they they're they're they're they're hidden words they're um they're hidden in plain sight they are they have the quality of prayers okay they definitely have the quality of prayers like i i will sit with one and like a prayer and uh yeah so they're so they're they're not not prayers they're almost like affirmations as well and in some degree of like being like i want to be this is how i want to move through the world yeah definitely um well your third book also has a lot about religion and I mean the fire next time by James Baldwin he really goes through a reckoning with his faith in this book but tell me about your love of this book so this one I really haven't read in a long time so it's like it's it's at this point it's become in memory possibly something that it is not if I was to read it again yeah so I want to be clear about that there are other works of James just James anything that he's said or or written and I'm just like, he was a genius.

22:10Truly. I've always valued the artistic and cultural contributions of black Americans, African Americans, and I want to be clear, not in a way, I think white American culture, and actually British American culture, has of course a tendency to fetishize black art in a way where it's like, you know, the way that a lot of white musicians love gospel music for the chord progressions and the harmonies, but they're like, yeah, but that God stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, bro, where do you think it came from? We're all human. We're all truly equal and the same at some deep, deep, deep level. What you have in the case of our community in America, there is a group of people who have been subjected to the harshest reality of our social system.

23:03And so therefore, constant and involuntary confrontation with and experience of that on a moment-to-moment daily basis would naturally engender any group of people with insights into the way the social system works. To me, it's very simple. It's very straightforward in that sense. It's like, let's not fetishize or venerate or degrade. We're all human beings. We all have the, I think, equal capacity for perception depending on our experience. This man, a queer black man, has then therefore had an experience, which is, you know, so he has his genius and his insights and his unique qualities. And then he also has been given this involuntary aspect of his experience, which then also gives him insights.

23:54So he just has that really special mix of things. And I've always, whether it's black music or black thought, those have always been the artists. When I first was becoming Baha 'i, I thought of Baha 'u'llah as a black or brown revolutionary. I started to think of all the prophets of God that way. These are the people who somehow speak... I would love to say, there's a white artist who really touched me. I don't I happen to not have that I happen to just not have it and I'm like please do it please come move me the same way but there's an interesting limitation that's the strange the strangeness of whiteness I can't remember the particulars about the book which really excited me because I read it so long ago but that's the market left and then more recently what I've read of his is like his interviews.

24:52I have this book of his called The Last Interview, which I might have been my other offering here. You know, that one I'm more familiar with. But he's just, you know, he just, he was the first thinker who introduced the idea to me, this idea, people who believe they are white. He's the first person who introduced the notion that race is truly not a real thing. It's a social construct. We, of course, treat it like it's in our DNA. We treat it as though it's like it's immutable. It's like, yeah, but it's a completely social experience, which then, of course, makes it real. but um the idea that race is a social construct was not something that people said back then yeah it's not something that even when i read it people said but it but he introduced the concept in a way if you say race is a social construct it's like okay yeah what does that mean yeah he said it in a way where it's like from the heart oh totally and everything is crisp it's so like take a complex idea and he's able to just like distill it into one sentence yes and that's genius I don't remember who said it Many people have said it Genius is to take something complex and render it simple And he does that He does that over and over and over again It's like every line It's like my god It's like a punch to the gut every time It's just so assured Without being in any way Pushy It's crazy It really is If I could move through the world thinking about things like that i'd be like it's so yeah it's it's incredible he said something that um if he didn't say it with his cadence you could almost it could almost be used in a really like superficial way but he said you know love has never really been a popular movement yeah like true ooh, love has never been popular or easy.

26:47And that's kind of the essence of all of this. You know, it's like that's all the things we're looking at as the human race right now in confronting its greatest inadequacies and misunderstandings and miscommunications and difficulties. Like, we have not actually tried love. You know, everybody wants to act like, oh, we've tried the patience and the love. It's like, since when? No, exactly. We've been warring for a long time. We've given war a shot. Truly. Why don't we try, you know? And of course, there's reasons. It's very hard. And parenting, I think you learn. I think what I've learned as a parent, having with my stepson not gone through zero to five and now going through zero to five, I'm like, oh, we just behave at a cultural and social level like toddlers.

27:33Yeah. Interesting. And it's okay in a toddler. Yeah. and I understand that maybe culturally we're at that level of development so I can't get mad at us the same way you can't get mad at a toddler for being a toddler no you know but like our our world leaders behave like at best toddlers yeah I also I also wrote down this line people are not terribly anxious to be equal but they like love the idea of being superior and I was like that is extremely true because we like like you say we like to think we're committed to certain values and it's like well but you always want a house bigger than that part you know I mean it's sort of yeah whatever reflection of discourse that like being online is like if it's the comments or if it's people talk about twitter anymore x or whatever i don't go on there but it whatever that is even though it's not really real it's something yeah and it is a discourse of some kind and all that is is people just being like no actually you're wrong about that no actually there's something you haven't perceived in that actually no actually you're wrong about that no you're actually stupid it's like my god guys it's a youtube short of a of a man doing a backflip oh and now we're talking about politics yeah what the fuck is wrong with you people are insane like on social it's terrifying and it's i mean i i know obviously in your industry there's a pressure to like on talent to have followings and audiences and it's the same in our business as well and it's I find it revolting.

29:02I think it's encouraging that you rarely have these kind of interactions when you're in real life. Yeah. Rarely. And then what's interesting too is that I think what's developing in like sort of protest and activist, that subset of culture, which, you know, nobody is constantly at a protest. But I think what we see in protests, unfortunately, is like the equally rare manifestation of that kind of behavior. It's like somebody going to a protest is geared up to be in a political mindset. Yeah. So, and they're saying something that then any interaction they're going to have there is a response to that thought.

29:50And I'm actually not judging it. I'm just saying that's what it is. is like, so then what you have in protests, which is then filmed and then captured, and then it's like, it's a little bit evidence of like, see, the way we behave online is the way we behave in real life. And it's like, actually, that's the way people behave at protests. Yes, yeah. And so it's the way we behave in the comments section, and that's the way we behave at protests. That's such a small portion of life. It's part of life, I'm not going to deny it, and it's part of human behavior, but it's not the way we actually behave when we're like in line with each other at the grocery store driving.

30:25Interestingly, there's a lot of like healthy social, I don't know, obedience or like just collaboration that we have that we completely overlook, completely overlook. And we just keep finding all the ways that we're dividing. And it's like, we are, and it's, it's, it's insidious, and it's needs to be addressed. And it's not like both sides are equally wrong or right. It's like, there's a, there's a whole thing there. And there's like real injustices that need to be addressed and they're egregious and let's do that and at the same time there's this this thing of love you know it's like impatience and um people actually have it more than they give themselves and others credit for because otherwise we otherwise we would have been such social unrest like you couldn't have you seen bow is afraid no it's an ari aster film so it's um a treacherous mental experience, but it's starring Joaquin Phoenix, and from what I understand, Ari Aster has just taken that and made it real.

31:23It's like this man lives in a world that is just falling apart in every conceivable way. Like the social contract is just... I mean, it's crazy. It's actually literally almost, it's incoherent. Wow. It's incoherent, and that's what I think people... People talk about the world like it's that. Yes. The world has not become that. We're sort of judging the state of our civilization based on our absolute worst. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like headlines and comments. It's like, okay, yes, that is part of it. And there's some atrocious stuff happening. And there's also collaboration and integration happening.

31:58And I think it's actually our duty to recognize that and be like, all right, so what is working so we can do more of that? Yeah, it's hard to. I know. James Bolden wrote that people who cannot suffer can never grow up. They can never discover who they are. And I thought that was a really interesting idea in the context of your essay collection because I do feel like so many of your essays are about the different challenges that you and your co-hosts went through and how, you know, suffering is a conduit to, like, better self-awareness. Do you agree with that kind of principle? Yeah, I think it's tricky.

32:30The only way to accept that suffering has a purpose has to be in a spiritual context. I don't know how someone would tolerate it otherwise. Suffering is one of the things that unites us. It's not the only thing, but it is one of the things. Everybody's suffering. Right. And some recognition of that can be really poignant. Yeah, I agree. And I think that the sort of, I read it as a kind of like, we all have hardships. And obviously some people's hardships are much worse than others and that you can sort of grow and learn from them. Does your spirituality change the way you think about mental health?

33:04That's an interesting question. Mental health and mental illness are terms that the more I encounter them, that I don't think help communicate the truth of what's happening. Like a while back, the terms like white privilege, toxic masculinity, accountability, these are helpful when they first come into the cultural lexicon to help us name something that we weren't naming before. Mental health and mental illness does that too, but then I think the terms become limiting once you've sort of understood enough of that and you need to understand more. When we say mental health, I mean, it's an honest question.