Jameela Jamil canceled her ‘You’ season 4 audition

Jameela Jamil told Penn Badgley she canceled her You season 4 audition to avoid doing sex scenes “And then you f—ing came out and were like, ‘Yeah, I’m not doing sex scenes anymore,’” Jamil recalled on Badgley’s podcast.

Lester Fabian Brathwaite

YOU

Jameela Jamil chatted with You star and devoted podcaster Penn Badgley and discussed why she canceled an audition for his show’s fourth season.

On Badgley’s podcast with co-hosts Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari, Podcrushed, Jamil revealed she decided she wasn’t right for You because she didn’t want to be asked to do sex scenes.

Jameela Jamil attends NIRH Champions of Choice Awards Luncheon

Jameela Jamil

| Credit: Jared Siskin/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

“I don’t do sex scenes,” Jamil told Badgley. “In fact, I was supposed to audition for the most recent season of your show. My character was supposed to be quite sexy, and I pulled out of the audition, because I am so shy about anything sexy that I can’t.”

Jamil went on to explain that her decision is rooted in childhood sexual trauma and an unwillingness to objectify herself.

“So I think that was never in the cards for me,” she added. “You know, I still wear the little skirt or the busty top, but like, occasionally. But generally, I feel quite protective of myself in that way.”

On a bonus episode of Podcrushed from February, Badgley said he had asked You’s creator Sera Gamble if he could skip out on doing anymore “intimacy scenes” in season 4 in order to prioritize his wife and family.

“This is actually a decision I had made before I took the show,” he said at the time. “I don’t think I had ever mentioned it publicly, but one of the main things is like, do I want to put myself back in a career path where I’m just always a romantic lead?”

When Jamil heard that, she thought maybe she should’ve done the show after all.

“And then you f—ing came out and were like, ‘Yeah, I’m not doing sex scenes anymore.’ And I was like, ‘I didn’t even know that was a boundary that we could draw,'” she recalled. “But then I was like, I should have gone and done the f—ing show.”