Victoria Pedretti as Love Quinn in You Season 2.
This post contains spoilers for You season two.
What is it about Victoria Pedretti that makes casting directors choose her for dark roles? She got her big break last year in Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House— in which she delivered a wrenching performance as the family’s youngest, extremely haunted child, Nell. Earlier this year she also turned up in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in which she played former Manson family member Leslie Van Houten, aka “Lulu.”
In You season two, which debuted on Netflix December 26, she plays the cannily-named heiress Love Quinn, a widow with some dark secrets of her own. When asked about her increasingly twisted resume during a recent interview, Pedretti replied, “I’m curious, for sure, about that…but I really have been enjoying the work that I’ve had the opportunity to do, so I’m not fighting it.”
But there is something about Pedretti’s onscreen manner that lends itself to projects like these—horror shows, bloody Tarantino comedies, and bloodier psychological thrillers tinged with comedy. As anyone who watched The Haunting of Hill House knows, she can play a character with such fragility that you worry they’re bound to break any moment before your eyes. But as You proves, Pedretti can also play the opposite side of that coin when needed—cranking up the dial to 11 and going ham in a fashion as delightfully insane as it is terrifying. The result of those efforts, in this case, is her best performance yet.
Pedretti became a fan of You season one after watching it online when it was still a Lifetime series. (Netflix picked the show up after Lifetime gave it the ax.) And yes, she’s well aware that her You character, Love Quinn, has a lot in common with her Haunting of Hill House character, Nell. Both have fraternal twin brothers who struggle with substance use issues, both are widows, both come from widely known families. And yet, as Pedretti pointed out, “they couldn’t be any more different” in how they handle these circumstances. While everyone tends to fret over Nell, Love is a self-sufficient aspiring chef who works as a produce manager but also finds the time to work through stress by baking. (To be Love’s friend is to be a constant beneficiary of this habit.)
But there are also some, erm, bigger differences between the characters—and this is the point at which I should probably warn you one more time for safety: If you haven’t watched You season two all the way to the end, you should do that now. (But, you know, bookmark this so you can come back to it once you finish; we promise you’ll rip right through the season.)
Pedretti is part of You season two’s biggest twist by far, revealed in the season finale to have committed multiple murders. Penn Badgley’s Joe Goldberg spends an entire episode trying to figure out if he murdered a friend he’d been keeping prisoner—an act he knows would make him unworthy of Love. But just as he’s glumly accepted that he must’ve killed his prisoner, he finds out it was actually Love who killed her—and a few other people to boot.
Pedretti found out about the twist roughly halfway through the season—and when asked if it affected her performance, she offered a fascinating reason as to why it didn’t.
“I mean, that’s like saying that you’re not capable of murdering somebody,’ she said. “You and I are both perfectly capable, but you have the capacity, the strength, the tools, the intelligence to kill somebody, we just choose not to. You know what I mean? So it’s not like it takes a specific kind of person to kill somebody.”