The actor, who we will see again soon in the fourth season of YOU, said he suffered from a rare health condition that required special interventions in his first year of life.
Today we know him as the Dan Humphrey of Gossip Girl and as the indomitable murderous stalker Joe Goldberg from YOU (which will return with the fourth season on Netflix on February 9), with an acting career now taking off. But Penn Badgley, in reality, it is a real miracle. It was the actor himself who told a very personal story: as a child, during his first year of life, he had to face the consequences of being born premature, two months in advance. Due to this condition, first the doctors and then his mother had to revive him over and over again. “Otherwise my heart and lungs would have stopped,” Badgley said, explaining that his experience as a very young child still heavily influenced his perspective on life and parenting.
Penn Badgley Could Have Died in His First Year: The Actor’s Story
Podcast host HypocondriActorPenn Badgley has revealed that he was born prematurely and needed to special care during the first year of life. Doctors, she said, in the first two weeks of life had to carry out continuous operations so that her heart and lungs would not stop. Once he returned home with his mother, it was the latter who had to learn life-saving maneuvers by reviving him on several occasions, even several times a day. “I was hooked up to a monitor that was beeping really loud,” the star recounted YOU to podcast hosts Sean Hayes and Priyanka Wali. “The doctors basically told my mom, like, ‘This is going to happen all the time so you’re going to have to revive him,’ and it happened up until about a year of age.”
Read also
YOU 4: Joe becomes Sherlock in the official Italian trailer of the new episodes
The effects of that childhood experience on adult life
The actor, despite having no memories of those frightening moments, has reported the stories of his family members who have literally brought him back to life when he faced certain crises. “Maybe I was in the backseat, sitting in the car seat and hooked up to the monitor. And if the monitor went off, whoever was there just had to touch me. A human touch woke me up“, he said. In the end, luckily, everything worked out. But Badgley is convinced that period of his life left a mark on him. “I’m extremely sensitive to touch. I’ve just noticed this in my life, and later realized that it’s probably because of it,” she reflected.
The experience, according to him, influenced his as well relationship with death and its way of being a parent, now that he is the father of a 2-year-old boy. “Death doesn’t scare me. It seems strange to say, but somehow I feel like those early experiences that I had… like, I can go into a very solitary and meditative mode,” he said. “Thinking about my baby now, I realize that it’s actually influenced me. It’s influenced the way I look at life. My baby is so joyful, and I think I might have been too,” she concluded.
