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List of You characters

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ109974521 ↗
Source-derived summary

You is an American psychological thriller novel series, written by Caroline Kepnes, and television series, developed by Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble, following bookshop owner Joe Goldberg in a satire of romantic comedies, as he struggles to overcome his homicidal tendencies while searching for true love. For the latter's first season, it aired on Lifetime, moving to Netflix from its second season onward. The novel series consists of You (2013), Hidden Bodies (2016), You Love Me (2021), and For You and You Only (2023).

The following is a list of characters that have appeared in the novel and television series.

Overview

Key

Main cast (credited)

Recurring cast (3 or more episodes)

Guest cast (1–2 episodes)

Main cast

Recurring cast

Main characters

Joe Goldberg

Joseph Gabriel Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is a bookstore manager at Mooney's who stalks and dates Guinevere Beck in the first season. In the second season, he goes by the name Will Bettelheim and works as a bookstore clerk at Anavrin, and stalks and dates Love Quinn. Joe then marries Love, has a son named Henry and moves to the San Francisco suburbs. However, his obsessive behavior still finds a way back into their lives, ruining his marriage. At the end of season 3, Joe kills Love and moves to London, where he is given the cover identity of Jonathan Moore, a college English professor. While in London, Joe undergoes a psychotic break that causes his personality to dissociate, leading him to unconsciously commit a string of murders.

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Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2013, 2016, 2021, 2023—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with List, characters and Wikimedia providing the first useful test.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of You characters” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.