Penn Badgley is dangerously charming in exclusive portraits from EW's YOU cover shoot

For EW's latest digital cover, we invited YOU's Penn Badgley to play off Joe Goldberg's dark side. Scroll through to see more photos from the bloody shoot.

As Badgley told EW, Joe is "unhinged" at the start of season 2, mostly thanks to the return of Candace (Ambyr Childers), his ex-girlfriend.

When Joe Goldberg lands in Los Angeles, he meets Love (Victoria Pedretti). "She sees somebody who has also been through a lot," Pedretti says. "She sees somebody who is lost and in pain, and so she feels a connection there."

"Everybody thinks it's going to be just another season where he has an obsession and then that person ends up in a glass box," executive producer Greg Berlanti says of season 2. "That's not what we're trying to put out into the universe."

"If I said to somebody who had binged season 1, 'Do you think Joe would love Los Angeles?' I'm pretty sure they’d know Joe's not a big fan of Hollywood," showrunner Sera Gamble says. "He's not really an afficionado of the green juice movement."

With the move, Joe is leaving what happened with Beck (Elizabeth Lail) behind. "He has a level of self-awareness," Gamble says. "Part of the job for us in season 2 was really about defining where is that line of self-awareness: What is he able to see and admit to himself about what happened with Beck?"

"Guys are like, 'You're creepy, bro,'" Badgley says of fan response. "And then women are like either, 'I love you' or 'I'm terrified of you' and often I think it's both."

"To me, it's actually all about the fan response," Badgley says of working on YOU. "It's all about what people think about it."