YOU adds Haunting of Hill House's Victoria Pedretti as season 2 female lead

There’s a new woman in Joe Goldberg’s life … but it’s not quite what you think.

YOU has cast Victoria Pedretti as its female lead for its upcoming second season. Pedretti, fresh off her turn on Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, will play Love Quinn, an aspiring chef working as a produce manager in a high-end grocery store. Love is uninterested in the world of social media, branding and self-promotion, focused instead on leading an interesting life. She is also tending to a deep grief, and when she meets Joe Goldberg, she senses a shared knowledge of profound, life-changing loss.

“It is very f–king cool that Victoria is playing this role,” YOU showrunner Sera Gamble tells EW. “I binged Hill House, and she was incredible. And then a couple of days later, [executive producer] Greg [Berlanti] sent an email asking, ‘Have you seen Hill House? Have you seen Victoria Pedretti, wouldn’t she make a perfect Love?’ Leave it to Greg to put that together.”

As for what kind of person Love is, Gamble says: “Like her name, she’s very warm and there is a carefree aspect to her spirit that really comes from the fact that she has constructed a life for herself that’s about being in the moment and doing what she loves every day. In that way, she’s very very different than the woman that you got to know in season one, Beck, who was ambitious and driven as a writer and also as a young person in a social circle that had a certain kind of status. Beck had been quite aware of her social media presence, and Love is extremely disinterested in all of that.”

Love — a character readers of the second book in Caroline Kepnes’ YOU series, Hidden Bodies, know well — is also a big part of Joe’s cross-country move as season 2 finds him in Los Angeles (as opposed to New York). “To me, Love embodies the best of Los Angeles,” Gamble says. “Joe is not moving to LA because he f–king loves the West Coast. He’s a New Yorker and he has bought the party line on how terrible L.A. is and when he gets here, very little dissuades him from his initial opinion. But I personally have been in L.A. since I was a teenager and it’s this beautiful patchwork city that I truly adore. This show is an opportunity to illuminate an L.A. that maybe a lot of people haven’t seen that goes beyond the Hollywood sign and Love is part of that. She’s a Los Angeles native. She has really absorbed the best of the city and she’s really artistic with the way that she lives her life.”

One thing is certain: Love is no Beck. And Gamble has no interest in season 2 being a repeat of season 1. “Season 1 was a particular kind of story that we could tell about the relationship between Joe and Beck and the moment that we did what we did in the finale, that’s not repeatable,” Gamble says. “I will say that Love is a person he could only have met after what happened between him and Beck. And by the way, Joe is not out there looking for love. He’s truly heartbroken by what has happened, and so what Love offers is a different kind of friendship and a different kind of relationship.”

YOU, which moved from Lifetime to Netflix following season 1, is yet to set a premiere date for season 2.

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• YOU moving from Lifetime to Netflix for season 2
• Netflix puts YOU on track for over 40 million member views in first four weeks