Penn Badgley is getting very candid about the intimate, awkward work that went into shooting a sex scene for the hit Netflix thriller You, recalling in vivid detail the “sheer absurdity” of it all.

In a new excerpt from Crushmore, his upcoming debut essay collection co-written with his Podcrushed cohosts Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari, the actor recalls filming a moment in season 3 that required a close-up of his face as it’s “deep in dissociative reverie mid-coitus” (via Vulture).

The scene involved his character Joe Goldberg, a serial stalker and murderer, doing the dirty with — or as Badgley puts it, “humpin’ on” — his wife, Love (played Victoria Pedretti), with whom he “has become not only bored but also contemptuous.” In the fantasy sequence, Joe imagines he’s having sex instead with Marienne (Tati Gabrielle), the librarian he’s been flirting with.

Penn Badgley and Victoria Pedretti on ‘You’.
Tyler Golden/Netflix

“What this means for me, practically speaking, is that the director wants a close-up of my face,” Badgley writes. Because the camera, a “very large apparatus” that weighed roughly 700 pounds, did not allow enough space to also include his scene partner, Pedretti, he had to simulate sex solo, “effectively humpin’ on the air, on a fake bed in a fake room, surrounded by a film crew,” he recounts.

Not only would Badgley — adorned in nothing but a nude thong — be “humping the air with the camera in my face,” he would also need to look “straight down the barrel of the lens, something I reflexively never do.”

“You never let a mean girl know you’re looking,” he writes. “Looking in camera ruins a take. Looking in camera is crossing a great metaphysical threshold because you’ve acknowledged the audience.”

When it came time to film, the actor writes, “I kneel onto the thin, false mattress where the camera rig — a large and unwieldy apparatus — hovers on a jib arm that extends from a Transformer-esque machine, one that is modified from the original Moviola Crab Dolly that used to load bombs into planes during World War II.”

On the bed, Badgley got onto all fours, he writes, “scooching myself closer so that the camera is beneath me and looking right up at me.” Though he had not turned his face to “peer into its eye,” he had the “strangest of butterflies flitting in my stomach.”

Penn Badgley on ‘You’.

Netflix

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“I realize as I try to look into the lens that, for a moment, I can’t. I simply cannot,” he recalls. “It’s too bald, too bold, too bawdy; and I feel naked because I am almost naked. I really can’t take this seriously. I start to giggle, and then I laugh, quaking on all fours. Every part of me that can jiggle is now jiggling.”

But things got better. “Our camera operator starts to laugh, and so does the sound guy holding a boom mic just above my head,” he continues. “We all laugh, and it’s a relaxing, unifying moment. But we must quiet, and eventually we do. I finally look into the lens.”

“The time has come for me to hump,” Badgley writes. “I’m not home, but I can imagine that I am. There is no one in front of me, but I can imagine someone is. A moment ago there was only resistance in my body to do what was needed, but upon the utterance of one word — ‘action’ — I am supremely present in the face of sheer absurdity.”

“I look in camera,” he concludes. “And I hump my ass off.”

The actor previously revealed that he requested “zero” intimacy scenes for Joe in season 4 of You. “It got to a point where [I thought], ‘I don’t want to do that,'” he said on an episode of Podcrushed.  “You can’t take this aspect out of the DNA of the concept, so ‘How much less can you make it?’ was my question to them.”

Crushmore — which features Badgley’s essays on love, loss, and coming-of-age — hits shelves Oct. 14.