A new image from YOU season 3 gives a fresh look at Joe and Love’s new next-door neighbor, played by Scott Speedman. The psychological thriller YOU is based on a series of novels by Caroline Kepnes, and was developed for television by Greg Berlanti (Arrow, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) and Sera Gamble (The Magicians, Supernatural). YOU premiered on Lifetime in September 2018, but it wasn’t until the series made the move to Netflix in December 2018 that it exploded in popularity. Season 2 premiered on Netflix in December 2019, and the series was renewed for season 3 less than a month later.
YOU stars Gossip Girl alum Penn Badgley, who gives a creepily compelling performance as Joe Goldberg, a seemingly mild-mannered New York City bookstore manager who is actually an obsessive serial killer. In season 1, the unlucky object of his affection was Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). In season 2, after Joe moved to Los Angeles to start over, he focused his attention on Love Quinn (The Haunting of Bly Manor’s Victoria Pedretti), who surprised Joe - and the audience - by turning out to be just as dark and twisted a person as he was. Season 2 ended with Joe and Love expecting their first child together and moving to the California suburbs, in an attempt at a normal life. But as posters for YOU season 3 reveal, Joe and Love’s version of normal is still pretty depraved.
An image shared by EW in their Fall TV Preview gives YOU fans a chance to scrutinize one of season 3’s new characters, a mysterious CEO named Matthew Engler who happens to be Joe and Love's new next-door neighbor. Matthew is played by Scott Speedman, who is best known for his roles in television shows such as Animal Kingdom and Felicity, and films like 2003’s Underworld. The image shows Matthew sharing what appears to be a serious moment with Pedretti’s Love - they are making intense eye contact as she either puts on or takes off a neon yellow high-visibility vest while standing near a table in a wooded area. Check out the image below:
The YOU season 3 trailer shows a search party wearing high-visibility vests like Love’s combing the woods in the rain, which would indicate that in the image above, Love is preparing to help look for someone. (Of course, with Love’s history, she’s just as likely to be responsible for a person going missing as she is for helping to find them). Matthew also appears in the trailer, rain-drenched and somber in what looks like the same outfit he’s wearing here. The identity of the person they might be searching for remains to be seen, but based on Joe's obsession in the trailer with neighbor Natalie Engler (Michaela McManus) it’s a pretty good bet that Joe and Love are somehow involved, and that it’s not good news for Matthew.
If season 2 of YOU taught viewers anything, though, it's that no one on the show can be trusted, so Speedman's Matthew may very well have some unsettling secrets of his own. Gamble has already said YOU season 3 will be "bonkers" and although the first two seasons of YOU were closely based on Kepnes’s novels, the Netflix series has gone off-book for the third season. Fans will therefore have to wait until the series returns on October 15 to see how Speedman's Matthew ties into what’s certain to be a dark, disturbing, and highly entertaining storyline in YOU season 3.
Source: EW