Age: 39
male
Penn Dayton Badgley (born November 1, 1986) is an American actor. He is primarily known for his roles as Dan Humphrey in The CW teen drama series Gossip Girl (2007–2012) and Joe Goldberg in the Netflix thriller series You (2018–2025). For Gossip Girl, he received six Teen Choice Award nominations, and for You, he earned MTV Movie & TV Award and Saturn Award nominations. Badgley first became known for portraying Phillip Chancellor IV on the soap opera The Young and the Restless (2000–2001), which earned him a Young Artist Award nomination, and he followed this with roles in the comedy films John Tucker Must Die (2006) and Drive-Thru (2007). Badgley went on to appear in a number of films, such as the thriller The Stepfather (2009), the teen comedy-drama Easy A (2010), the financial thriller Margin Call (2011), the biographical film Greetings from Tim Buckley (2012) and the independent drama The Paper Store (2016). For Margin Call, he won an Independent Spirit Award.
In Valley of the Dolls, Anne Welles arrives in postwar New York seeking independence and quickly becomes entangled in the intoxicating world of fame, ambition, and illusion. Working for powerful attorney Henry Bellamy, she befriends rising performer Neely O’Hara and the luminous but vulnerable Jennifer North, forming a trio bound by dreams of success. As Anne falls into a complicated romance with Lyon Burke, she also finds herself navigating the manipulations of industry titan Helen Lawson and the seductive pull of wealth and status. Neely’s meteoric rise to stardom and Jennifer’s troubled relationships mirror Anne’s own emotional entanglements, revealing the hidden costs of glamour as love, betrayal, and ambition collide. As the years pass, success gives way to dependency, heartbreak, and disillusionment. Neely’s career spirals under the weight of addiction and pressure, while Jennifer, searching desperately for love beyond her beauty, meets a tragic fate. Anne, now deeply embedded in the very world she once observed from the outside, struggles to reconcile her ideals with a life shaped by compromise, toxic relationships, and emotional endurance. Reunited with Lyon in a marriage shadowed by infidelity and power imbalance, Anne ultimately confronts the quiet devastation beneath her carefully constructed life. Surrounded by the echoes of lost innocence and broken dreams, she turns to the same “dolls” that claimed her friends, embracing a numbing acceptance of a world where success and suffering are inextricably linked.
