Characters / You (2018) - Main Characters

The titular Yous of You (2018).

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Guinevere Beck

Guinevere "Beck" Beck

Played by: Elizabeth Lail

A broke NYU graduate student and an aspiring writer, who has the bad luck of crossing into Joe's orbit and becoming the center of his attention.

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• Acquired Situational Narcissism: In specific contrast with the narcissistic Peach, Beck isn't anywhere near as pathological as Peach or Joe, but she ignores Joe the minute Benji pays attention to her, she prefers being around Peach solely because Peach pays her a lot of attention, and it goes to her head quickly when she goes viral after Peach's death.
• Adaptational Dye-Job: Has dark hair in the book and blonde hair in the adaptation.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: So much, which makes the negative reaction some viewers have towards her even more noticeable. Book Beck is cruel about Joe to her friends, telling them he has nothing but her in his life. She's also a Gold Digger (according to Benji, but she also takes advantage of Peach), admits that she doesn't care about Peach, and intentionally seduces most of the men around her. Television Beck is much kinder to Joe, is never rude about him to her friends, genuinely tries to help Peach, babysits Paco, and most noticeably, while she does cheat on Joe with Nicky, she also permanently ends the relationship when she gets back together with Joe, and it's made clear Nicky was exploiting her fragile emotional state at the time.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: A more realistic example of the trope. She's very attracted to Benji who is a manipulative drug addict, and Joe, though she has no idea how bad he is.
• Always Someone Better: She hates her father's perfect family.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: She brings this up in her final story, noting that she always wanted a handsome stranger to make her feel loved and special in the way no one else ever had and Joe did exactly that. Her story even ends with "didn't you ask for this?" multiple times.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: The show doesn't try to present Beck as completely innocent, with her being portrayed as pretty irresponsible and deceptive. She cheated on her boyfriend on numerous occasions, lied to him, and seduced him after he started another relationship. Despite this, she is still a saint compared to Joe. She even points out herself how while she did cheat on him and lie to him, what she did is in no way comparable to him murdering the people in her life and obsessively stalking her, and that he's insane for thinking that they're equivalent.
• Broken Bird: Her history with her father has fucked her up as a child, and she has difficulty finding actual intimacy. She goes after broken men because she believes that she doesn't deserve better and constantly tells Joe that she's a mess.
• Bunker Woman: When Joe captures her near season one's finale. After an unsuccessful escape attempt, she's killed there.
• Consummate Liar: She's nowhere near as bad as her Ax-Crazy boyfriend, but Beck has a lot of issues with honesty. She carries on affairs and frequently misleads people in her life.
• Crying Wolf: This borders on her Fatal Flaw. Because Beck lies about so much — sleeping with Dr. Nicky, her father being dead — it's easy for Joe to not raise any suspicions when he kidnaps her, and then to frame Nicky for her murder.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Zig-zagged, as she's had some genuine struggles but she sometimes misrepresents her life experiences to seem more interesting/dramatic as an author. For one thing, although her father isn't actually dead, we do learn that her father did still overdose and she'd briefly thought he was dead, only for him to abandon her and her mother for his Holier Than Thou sober coach after he'd cleaned up his act. She also reveals how her uncle had groped her as a teenager and her father had "accusation" in his eyes when she told him, as well as how her combined issues led her to have a string of romances with men that were clearly bad for her, like Benji.
• Dead Artists Are Better: In universe. After her death, her book becomes wildly popular, due to the real life drama behind it.
• Dead Person Conversation:
  • She shows up a bunch of times in Season 2 as a guilt-induced hallucination Joe is having. Note that these hallucinations have her spelling it out clearly for Joe and the audience that she really is dead, in contrast to Candace, who really did miraculously survive. Joe sometimes has difficulty telling the difference.
  • She shows up again in a dream during Season 4, teaming up with Love to try to get Joe to kill himself.
• Disowned Parent: Beck has disowned her father following his drug addiction, and tells everybody in her life that he's dead. She only recently got back in contact with him due to needing his financial help with grad school.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: She feels uncomfortable when Peach offers to pay for things or help her out financially, even though Peach can certainly afford it. It may also be complicated by Beck's awareness that Peach is attracted to her, which she doesn't reciprocate.
• Doom Magnet: As Joe's Love Interest, bad things tend to befall everyone she is associated with.
• Dude Magnet: Deconstructed. She's a pretty woman who gets a lot of attention, but of all the men in season one whom she attracts, all but one want nothing more than to sleep with her, and all of them do it by exploiting her emotional vulnerabilities and insecurities. The only one who wanted her for more than her body is Jo, who's not exactly the best guy...
• Embarrassing First Name: Given that no one, not even her father, refers to it by it and she calls herself by her last name even in her own mind, it's all but stated that she sees "Guinevere" as one.
• Even the Girls Want Her: While Peach is most probably a lesbian anyway, she undoubtedly could get other girls... it's just that she's obsessed with Beck.
• Everyone Loves Blondes: Attracts Joe, Benji, as well as her friend Peach and therapist, Dr. Nicky.
• Fairytale Motifs: Of Literature/Cinderella. Beck is a shy, sweet-natured blonde girl from a modest background with missing parents and a step family which doesn't accept her, who has always dreamed of being swept off her feet by a dashing romantic hero and given the love she never got from anyone else. She even refers to Joe as her Prince Charming who really turned out to be Bluebeard.
• Freudian Excuse: Her father was a drug addict, although he didn't die, he abandoned her for a Wicked Stepmother. At the end of Season 1, she recalls being groped by her uncle and that her father shamed her for it. She was also an outcast at school and always felt deep resentment at being shut out by wealthy, popular girls. This led her to a series of unhealthy, destructive relationships and unintentional self-sabotage.
• "Friends" Rent Control: She has a pretty swank living situation, despite just being a student with a part time job. It turns out that her father gives her money to support her.
• Good Bad Girl: Beck is a sweet and friendly person who is not shy about casual sex. Even her best friends jokingly describe her as "mildly slutty". It's played with in her cheating with Dr Nicky, where it causes serious problems in her relationship with Joe.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: She's blonde and while she has her flaws, she's a genuinely good person overall.
• Honey Trap: She pretends that she understands and still loves Joe so that he would let her out of the cage. She manages to stab him and trap him, but it doesn't do any good since he has a spare key inside.
• Horrible Judge of Character: While Joe masks his red flags behind layers of charm, making her trusting him a bit more understandable, she nonetheless fails to notice many red flags with the likes of Peach, who manipulates and guilts her on a regular basis. Nearly all the other guys she's dated are also implied to be jerks like Benji.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: Her final piece of writing reveals that she always dreamed of meeting Prince Charming, but due to a series of traumatic incidents and horrible relationships, came to the conclusion she didn't deserve him. Instead, she got Bluebeard.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Beck yearns to stand out from everyone as a writer and as a social influencer, envying the "princesses" like Peach and her rich friends. Early on she worries about whether or not she's "remarkable." Unfortunately, Joe thinks that she is very remarkable...
• Incompatible Orientation: With Peach, who's in love with her. Beck herself is straight.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The basic premise of Season 2 makes it pretty obvious that, unfortunately, she didn't survive Season 1.
• Last-Name Basis: No one calls her "Guinevere", even her father who shares her last name. She even calls herself back in her inner monologue.
• Liar Revealed: Essentially what Joe learns about her when he's stalking her.
• Mr. Vice Guy: She's nice, friendly, hardworking, and cares very much about her friends. She's also flighty, can be somewhat self-centered, sometimes resents her friends for their wealth and success, and has a dubious relationship with the truth. In other words, she's not a bad person, but she's still very realistically flawed. While most viewers (thankfully) probably don't know someone as twisted and psychopathic as Joe (or Peach, for that matter), it's very likely that they know somebody a lot like Beck or can identify themselves in her.
• Nice Girl: Beck is no saint, but her friendly nature makes her stand out from most other characters. She's shown in the first episode trying to give her friends gifts outside her price range, is basically polite and friendly to everyone, worries for Benji when he goes missing despite knowing what a jerk he is, and is a genuinely good friend to Peach to the point that even when she's had enough of Peach's toxic behavior, she runs right back to her after Peach makes a fake suicide attempt.
• Parental Abandonment: A variant in that, despite having stuck by him through the worst of his addictions, she feels her father is more focused on the new family he has gained since recovery and now treats her as an unwelcome reminder of his past. He still loves her and tries to make her part of his life and financially helps her out but Beck feels, not unjustifiably, that neither he nor his new family want much to do with her anymore and see her as intruding on their new happier lives.
• Parting-Words Regret: Implied to be a key factor in her depression after Peach died — besides, you know, the part about her best friend dying. The last conversation they had was a horrible fight, with Beck seeming determined to cut Peach out of her life for good. So when Peach "commits suicide" mere hours later...
• Practically Different Generations: Through her father's new family, she has half-siblings who are still kids while Beck is a young adult.
• Psychotic Love Triangle: Doesn't fully realize it, but is in one with Peach, as both are romantically obsessed with Beck.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Gives one to Peach when she learns the latter tried to sabotage her writing career, ending it by saying how exhausting it is to be friends with her and storming away.
  • Also delivers a very angry one to Joe after locking him in his own cage, expressing disbelief that he thought she actually loved him or meant any of the things she said when he was literally holding her captive. She theorizes that rather than doing terrible things for love, he gets off on his sense of control and just uses love as an excuse to do terrible things.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: She's insecure about how perfect Joe is to her and she's scared he'll leave her. So she cheats on him to ruin their relationship. According to Annika, this has happened before; any time anything good happens to Beck, she unconsciously sets off to sabotage it, because she believes it'll eventually be snatched away from her anyway.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: She loves Joe more than anyone else and believes he's the one. He's kind to her, polite, charming, intelligent, and he dotes on her and also unconditionally loves her. She's instantly turned off when she realizes he's a monster.
• Sliding Scale of Beauty: World Class, many people mention how attractive she is, to the point of attracting some admirers.
• Small Name, Big Ego: When her writing on Peach's death is published, it quickly goes to her head.
• So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Attracting Joe doesn't end well for Beck.
• So Okay, It's Average: Invoked. Beck struggles to write things that are inventive and profound, citing writer's block and a number of other challenges. This is subverted with her later works that become very popular, implying that her flaw as a writer was that the things she wrote about before were based on lies, whereas her last two most famous works were (for the most part) based on the truth.
• Stockholm Syndrome: She feigns this in the final episode of Season 1 to trick Joe into letting his guard down, claiming that she finally understands him and loves him despite what he did, since he did it for her, and that it's not all that bad in the cage either. She immediately drops the act once she gets the upper hand.
• Take a Moment to Catch Your Death: Beck and Joe get in a vicious fight as she tries to escape the cage. She gets the upper hand and manages to beat Joe... only to run upstairs and learn that the door is still locked, and Paco is outside. She begs Paco for his help but he ignores her, and Joe kills her.
• Weirdness Magnet: Despite being rather normal, if not somewhat flighty and irresponsible, she manages to attract the attention of two stalkers who are both willing to murder for her.
• Wicked Stepmother: Her father's new wife is a downplayed version in that while she is generally nice and doesn't seem to outright dislike Beck, Beck always feels unwelcome in her presence and like she has made Beck's father regard her in a similar manner, as an unwelcome part of his past and someone to be tolerated rather than made part of a family.

Love Quinn

Love Quinn

Played by: Victoria Pedretti (Adult), Olivia Ragan (Teenager)

Joe's new Love Interest in Season 2. A chef and co-manager of an organic market with her twin brother Forty. In spite of wanting to try being single, Joe can't help but find himself drawn to her.

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• Adaptational Villainy: In the book, she finds out about Joe's crimes and willingly covers them up. However, in the series, she turns out to be a murderer and a major Yandere. She kills Delilah and Candace, two of the most sympathetic characters and past victims of Joe's. Although Forty's rapist was an Asshole Victim of the first order, she also had no problem making Forty believe he committed the crime.
• Affably Evil: She's an exceptionally and genuinely charming and good-natured person who cares deeply about those close to her. She's also a vicious killer.
• Age Lift: Book Love is in her mid-30s, while show-Love is presumably in her mid-20s. (Victoria Pedretti was 23-25 when she played Love.)
• Angsty Surviving Twin: She and Forty always have a clearly close relationship. She calls him her "codependent brother" and Joe calls her "helicopter sibling." But in season 2 it mostly seems like the neediness is one-way: Forty depends on her, and—while she would never dream of abandoning him—their dynamic is overall taxing on her. After Forty dies, we get a much better sense of how much Love needed him too.
• Animal Motifs: Wolves. She is intelligent, reasonable, dignified and brave but this is most notable when she chooses the wolf as her replacement verb for "love." It's much more appropriate when we learn her true nature. She's a predator that hides in sheep's clothing.
• At Least I Admit It: Despite being just as morally bankrupt as Joe, she seems to be more open about it, rather than trying to cover it up with hypocritical justifications like Joe does.
• Ax-Crazy: Literally in the case of Natalie, whom she kills with an axe; but murder is her go-to solution whenever anyone gets too close to Joe (or to exposing his own murders).
• Babies Make Everything Better: A fierce believer in this trope. She yearns to have children with her first husband, and she gets pregnant by Joe in an attempt to make it "better".
• The Baby Trap: She stops Joe from killing her or leaving her by revealing she's pregnant. It's unclear whether she planned this, though.
• Bait the Dog: Love is introduced as a nice and kind Manic Pixie Dream Girl, in the following episodes it is shown that she has to take care of his drug addict brother and is the victim of an abusive family, which makes her more likeable. At the end of the second season it is revealed that she is a psychopath who is as evil as Joe.
• Berserk Button:
  • Lying to her. She is upset whenever she catches Will in a lie and breaks up with him when she learns he'd been faking his identity.
  • Mistreating Forty. She breaks up with Milo after he punches Forty and murdered their au pair for molesting him.
  • Threatening her relationship with Joe. She kills Delilah and Candace so they wouldn't report him to the police, Natalie because Joe was getting obsessed with her (and she almost kills Marienne for the same reasons) and Joe when he demands a divorce.
• Big Sister Instinct: It's never made clear if she or Forty is older, but she is deeply devoted to him, even to the point of murder.
• Birds of a Feather: Why she still loves Joe, even after knowing he murdered so many people.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: She turns out to have a taste for stalking and murder that rivals Joe's.
• Blithe Spirit: Even when she shows herself not to be a total Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she is so constantly happy and supportive of Joe/Will that she is this.
• Bookends: Her relationship with Joe begins and ends with a roast chicken dinner.
• Bourgeois Bohemian: A liberal young woman from a rich Los Angeles family who volunteers at soup kitchens and stands up for oppressed minorities. Joe initially derides her friend group for being unaware of the privilege they have to be able to make sustainable choices.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: While having an internal monologue in "W.O.M.B.", she calls her mom "Dottie" and seethes about how much she hates her.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Unlike Joe, She is aware that she is not a good person and doesn't try to delude herself into thinking she is.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: The minute she meets Joe (Will), she wants to spend as much time with him as possible, doesn't take kindly to him cancelling on their dates, and wants him to meet her friends within days. And once they're together, she can see when Joe has eyes for another a woman a mile away.
  • She's also like this with her brother Forty, though it's far more obvious on his side than hers.
• Cloud Cuckoolanders Minder: To Forty. Essentially, any time Joe/Will suggests they do something together, she almost always follows it up with:
  Love: I have to take Forty.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Love is Joe's object of affection in season 2, and personality-wise, is a total contrast to Beck, his season 1 love interest. Beck was initially reticent about going out with Joe, Love proactively flirts with him; Beck was a financially struggling grad student, Love is the only daughter of rich parents; Beck had a very public life on social media, Love is private online; Beck ends up one of Joe's victims, Love is a killer like Joe.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Injected in the leg with aconite, spreading burning pain throughout her body.
• Didn't Think This Through: She murders Natalie in a fit of blind rage and then she and Joe then have to spend the rest of the season dealing with the fallout.
• Distaff Counterpart: It turns out she's Joe's mirror image. Both had troubled childhoods that culminated in them killing someone to protect a family member. Both are reeling from dead lovers, both lie, manipulate and kill out of some crazed sense of romance. The biggest similarity being when Love locks Joe in an enclosure identical to the one he kept Beck in.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Love dearly loves her brother and is devastated when he is killed. She also deeply loves her son Henry.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In the season 3 finale she was planning to murder Marienne, but changed her mind once she met her daughter, and decided to warn her that Joe might go after her.
• Evil Counterpart: To Beck. She's the second object of Joe's attention and affection, the female lead, and the whole season revolves around him trying to win her. Like Beck, she too has a traumatic romantic past (although hers relates to the death of her husband, rather than dickish boyfriends like Benji), and she too has a clingy, slightly too romantically involved person close to her (while hers is her twin brother Forty, Beck's was Peach). However, Beck was nowhere near as bad as she appeared, while Love herself is a Serial Killer.
• Evil Is Petty: In the Season 3 finale, she was planning on killing Marianne in front of Joe merely to spite him, but changed her mind after seeing her daughter and asks her to leave instead.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: Has quite The Reveal as to her true self and intentions when we see her murder Candace in episode 9 — Joe is so taken aback by Love's Face–Heel Turn and his rosy, idyllic view of her being destroyed that he starts to think she's the crazy one — he's not exactly wrong either.
• Fag Hag: Her Best Friend is Camp Gay, and—unusually for this trope—the other two of her other closest friends are a lesbian couple. Sherry in the third season is bisexual, but Love doesn't find out until later and initially hates her.
• Family Theme Naming: Like her brother, she is named after a tennis term. In her care, "Love" refers to being scoreless, symbolizing her status as The Unfavorite on her family.
• Feminine Women Can Cook: In comparison to Beck, Joe's first Love Interest in the series, Love is very nurturing and she's a brilliant cook.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: The "responsible" to Forty's "foolish", she's required to do everything for him and refuses to leave him behind no matter what. She even took responsibility for Forty by killing his abuser.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: She tries to make her relationship with Joe develop as quickly as possible, for their second date she wants him to meet her friends, a few days later she wants him to meet her parents and in a few weeks she is ready to leave Los Angeles to start a new life with him.
• Freudian Excuse: She grew up with extremely abusive parents who showed her almost no affection and expected her to always look after her brother who they refused to help after he was sexually assaulted by their au pair who Love then killed in retaliation. As such, Love now clings desperately to anyone who shows her affection and believes anything is justified in protecting them or keeping them from leaving her.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: She (accidentally) killed her first husband James with wolfsbane and uses it to paralyze Joe. He ends up injecting a lethal dose into her.
• Hypocrite: She rails on Forty for being too involved in her love life, which he immediately calls her on, seeing as how she hired a PI to investigate his girlfriend. Love acknowledges this as fair.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Invoked by Joe in season 3, when, as part of his plan to fake his death and posthumously frame Love for it, he severs two of his toes and bakes them into a pie to make it appear as though she was a cannibalistic serial killer who murdered and ate him. In reality, while Love was both a serial killer and a chef, there was no overlap between her two passions.
• Incest Subtext: In Season 3, as an Angsty Surviving Twin, she imagines Forty in the bath with her while drunk. The imagined Forty tells her that he—not Joe—is her true soul mate, which indicates that she believes this on some level. They cradle each other naked in the bath while doing Headbutt of Love. When she later deletes his contact on her phone, she also thinks, "Goodbye, you," paralleling the way Joe refers to the objects of his romantic obsession in his Internal Monologue. She also becomes attracted to Theo who mirrors a lot of Forty’s qualities including being someone she can take care of.
  Forty: Oh, Lovey. You're not happy because Joe isn't your soulmate. I am. There is one person who understands what you have been through.
• Knight Templar Big Sister: It isn't clear if she is older or younger than Forty (they're twins), but she has every other trait. She's extremely protective of Forty, which borders on controlling, she has a desperate need to learn everything about the people in his life, and she killed his rapist.
  Love: I get that Forty is a lot. I know. And I know that I take care of him too much. But... you've met my parents now, so you know why. I'm stuck with him.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After murdering countless innocents for coming near Joe and framing other dead people for their murders, Love ends up getting a Karmic Death when Joe kills her with the same poison she used on him and not only exposes her as Natalie's killer, but also frames her for the deaths of Gil and Ryan.
• Living Emotional Crutch: For Forty, although the secret is she actually wants it that way.
• Mama Bear: She knocks out and cages Gil for causing her son to get the measles by not vaccinating his kids.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She's a much straighter version of this than Beck, being a chipper, attractive young woman who immediately latches onto Joe and takes him on adventures. But she's also a murderer. The show deconstructs the concept because Joe keeps attempting to invoke the trope. His ideal woman is somebody who is perfectly imperfect, whose flaws are obvious, but manageable and only serve to make them more lovable. The fact of the matter is that he glosses over her other flaws and balks when she's not as perfect as he once assumed.
• Mask of Sanity: The moment that she sees Joe in the storage locker, she flips and reveals herself to be insane all along. From then on, it's totally obvious to the viewer and Joe that she's insane, although she never showed any signs of it before.
• Meaningful Name: Serves as Joe's primary Love Interest for Season 2. In other words, Joe is literally "in love with Love". Some of Joe's narrations are noticeably vague whenever he's talking about either the woman or the concept.
• Monster Fangirl: Reveals herself to be an ultimate one once she learns the truth about Joe. She fully believes that Joe was justified in killing Beck because she "wasn't special."
• Mrs. Robinson: Love immediately notices that Theo's got the hots for her and savours the attention since Joe has long lost interest in her. Eventually Love has unprotected sex with Theo. Made more loaded by the backstory with Forty and their au pair. Then, she thought an older woman having sex with a younger boy was unforgivable, and now she's doing it herself, albeit with a much smaller age gap and technically legal age.
• Nice Girl: Love seems to be an exceptionally kind and caring young woman for most of the season. The truth is very different.
• No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: In this case she does this to another villain, but in the Season 3 finale, she sets Joe up for a dinner in their house, as a way to paralyse him and then try to kill him.
• Operation: Jealousy: Attempted this with Milo, as later revealed in the season 2 finale.
• Politically Correct Villain: The second time Joe meets her, she's making a scene at the DMV in order to find an Arabic interpreter for a hijabi woman in line behind her who doesn't speak English. Her closest friends are a lesbian couple and she's attended LGBTQ rights rallies and pride parades. She's generally left-wing as one would expect from a young woman from Los Angeles.
• Psycho Supporter: Not of a cause, but of Joe. Being also love-crazed, she fully believes he was justified in killing Beck and just about everyone else.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: She's a Yandere with a very childish view of romance. It's apparent that she never quite matured from being an angsty teenage girl unable to deal with her overwhelming emotions. Her mother even calls her out on this in season 3.
• Replacement Goldfish: Forty implies Theo is this for him.
  Forty: I mean, I get it though. That kid is pretty cool. Kinda reminds me of me.
• Rewatch Bonus: Love figures out the perfect meal for Joe just by reading some very subtle hints to his personality. Her ability to read Joe is revealed to be a massive clue that she's just as analytical and possessive as he is.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: She's just more subtle about it than Forty.
  • The plot of Season 3 hinges on this no longer being an option for her after the divorce of her parents; thus, she can't just hire someone to clean up her spur-of-the-moment murders, attempted or otherwise, which inevitably draw attention and put her and Joe in jeopardy.
• Second Love: Technically third, but in the framework of the series' narrative she's Joe's second major Love Interest after Beck.
• Serial Killer: As it turns out, she murdered her first husband, kills Delilah and Candace in season 2, and in season 3, murders Natalie, which sets in motion the rest of the events of that season.
• Sex Goddess: She explicitly lists being great in bed as one of her qualities, which goes for her whole "lady in the streets and freak in the sheets" image.
  • In Season 3, Joe losing sexual interest in her because he is is already obsessing over other women, but mostly because he hypocritically despises her for being a murderer is a key factor in the slippage of her already barely there sanity.
• Spoiled Sweet: Played with. For most of the series, Love appears to be the archetype — she's extremely nice, especially Nice to the Waiter, she tries to refuse the strings attached to her parents' money, but she's also completely blind to the fact that Joe is a killer and that Joe actually despises Forty. While the twist doesn't reveal her to be a Spoiled Brat, she's a killer who is basically only happy as long as her Spoiled Sweet façade stays up.
• Start of Darkness: She murdered her babysitter when she found out she was sexually assaulting Forty.
• Stay in the Kitchen: Love longs to have kids, and she's a cook. Joe is disgusted that there is more to her than that. When he learns of her proactiveness, he immediately tries to terminate the relationship.
• Stepford Smiler: She's cheery and good-natured, but underneath she's still very sad about her husband passing away. And underneath that, she's totally nuts.
  Forty: You are just as broken as I am. You're just a much better liar.
• Supreme Chef: She's an awesome cook.
• Sweet Baker: Subverted. Love is a pretty and well-mannered woman who is a supreme baker. In season three, she is seen as a promising, young suburban wife who is opening up a neighborhood bakery. It's part of her Mask of Sanity — she's an impulsive and emotional murderer — but her baking skills are genuine.
• Talking to the Dead: Continues texting Forty after his death.
• Through His Stomach: Her preferred way of showing affection is to cook for people. Joe loves this about her.
• Unwanted Spouse: Joe wants rid of her almost immediately, which gets even worse after she kills Natalie and then expects him to cover it up.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: At the end of Season 2, she reveals she figured out Joe's dark side early on and sets up a decent plan to discredit investigations into them. Come Season 3, her planning skills take a dive, with her impulsively lashing out at Natalie and Gil and needing Joe to help clean up her messes. She also yells out that she killed Natalie in an argument with Joe when their neighbours are within earshot. She's not completely dumb, however, as she does have the sense to poison the knife handle to paralyse a paranoid Joe.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In Season 2, she is a sweet, slightly quirky Nice Girl and a loving girlfriend to Joe, and even when she's revealed to be a Serial Killer, she's still genuinely loving, loyal and affectionate towards Joe. In Season 3, she is a lot more snappy and distrusting towards Joe, becomes even more violent and impulsive towards others and attacks several of their neighbours.
• Tranquil Fury: She completely justifiably disowns her mother for taking Henry on a drunken joyride one night.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: She slashes Delilah's and Candace's throats to prevent them from exposing Joe for being a serial killer, and axes Natalie to death to prevent her from attracting Joe away from her.
• Villain Has a Point: While killing her was her Start of Darkness, she was absolutely correct that her and Forty's au pair was a rapist, and that their parents were wrong for allowing the "relationship" to continue.
• Walking Spoiler: Even these tropes indicate there's a lot more to her than meets the eye.
• Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: She killed Forty's abusive babysitter, Delilah, and Candace, all while appearing to be the perfect girl.
• Yandere: She's pretty possessive of Joe and Forty from the word go, but she becomes exceptionally so as she kills Candace and Delilah. She goes insane and Ax-Crazy when she realizes that Joe is about to cheat on her with Natalie, and nearly kills Marieanne too when she becomes Joe's new obsession.

Candace Stone

Candace Stone

Played by: Ambyr Childers

Joe's ex-girlfriend. After cheating on Joe, she disappears and is believed to have been killed by him. In spite of this, Candace manages to haunt Joe while he stalks other women.

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• Anti-Hero: She's a liar and a manipulator, but it's all to keep Joe from hurting any more people.
• Ascended Extra: She's presumed dead in Season 1, but is eventually revealed to be alive and well. She then becomes a major character in Season 2.
• Broken Bird: From being buried alive by Joe in the backstory, and not believed by the police. When she reappears, she's understandably bitter and extremely cynical.
• Buried Alive: What Joe did to her, although she survived.
• The Cassandra: She plays a more meta version of this throughout Season 1, as characters keep warning Beck that something bad happened between Joe and Candace, but in Season 2, she is revealed to be an even more extreme version. It all started when Joe buried her alive and the police didn't believe her, but Love also refuses to believe Candace's story of what happened between her and Joe.
• Casting Couch: Slept with a record executive to help her band. Zig-zagged in she that she also did it because she was sick of Joe.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: She was drowned in the opening pages of the first novel. In the adaptation, she survives being buried alive only to be killed by Love at the end of Season 2.
• Evil Redhead: Not of her own volition really, because she plays an antagonistic role to Joe, especially in Season 2. Although she still appears manipulative in the flashbacks, Unreliable Narrator is in full swing here. And even if we take her appearence there at face value, she's still miles better than Joe.
• Faking the Dead: She took the police's advice to pretend Joe had killed her.
• Fatal Flaw: Her vindictiveness and desire to see Joe suffer. After what he did to her, it's certainly understandable, but if she'd called the cops the instant she had Joe locked in the cage, he would've gone to jail — willingly, at that. But instead she calls Love to throw salt on the wound, and Love kills her.
• Fiery Redhead: A gorgeous, red-haired front-woman of a band.
• The First Cut Is the Deepest: Beck speculates that Joe is not over Candace, and Karen drives the point home when calling out Beck later on in the season. Even Love can see it.
• Hero Antagonist: In Season 2, she is Joe's arch-enemy, but her goal is totally heroic: to protect the Quinns, people she doesn't know, from him.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: For all her efforts to expose Joe, she always gets dismissed as "the crazy ex".
• Honey Trap: She pulls this on Forty to get close to Joe again.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Even if she a bit cold and manipulative, she is a well-intentioned and a legitimately decent woman who genuinely wants to protect other people from becoming Joe's next victim. She’s a bad girlfriend, but a good person.
• If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...: Candace threatens Joe that he will not getting away with hurting Love or Forty, but especially Love. Unfortunately, it isn't Joe she should've been worried about this time.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Candace selflessly decides to risk her life to save the Quinns from getting murdered by Joe. Love repays her bravery by slashing her throat open.
• Not Quite Dead: Joe buried her alive, but she managed to free herself and escape. It sticks the second time, though.
• Not Helping Your Case: She tries to convince Love Quinn that Joe is a murderer, but she does not seem credible, since she also lied with her name and profession, entered the house of "Will" as if she were a thief and seduced Love's brother to manipulate him.
• Not Quite Saved Enough: She unexpectedly survived being buried alive by Joe, as revealed in flashbacks during Season 2. But Love kills her once she captures and threatens Joe.
• Revenge Before Reason: Rather than reporting him to the police (which she believes won't work) or trying to kill him, Candace makes it clear she wants Joe to suffer for what she did to her and Beck. When she finally traps Joe in his glass cage with the body of someone he almost definitely murdered, she chooses to call Love instead of the police, just to break their hearts.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Joe kills her in the book, which is implied to have been her fate after too many references to her being in Italy. She returns from Italy — though it's very ambiguous whether she was ever there, given that Joe thought she was dead — in the final scene of Season One. But she doesn't live past Season 2.
• You Have to Believe Me!: Most of her interactions resemble this, with the police, Forty, and Love.
• Walking Spoiler: Even the fact that she's listed as a "main character" spoils that she's not dead, which is constantly implied throughout Season 1.

Marienne Bellamy

Marienne Bellamy

Played by: Tati Gabrielle

A librarian that Joe meets in suburbia.

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• Batman Gambit: After she's held hostage by Joe in season 4, she is found by Nadia and they team up to make sure she gets free and able to see her daughter Juliette again. Nadia takes her friend Beatrice's contact, pretending to be her, when Joe (as Marienne) texts her, with Nadia (as Beatrice) criticizing Marienne for her supposed relapse and threatening to give Juliette's custody to her grandmother. Marienne then fakes her own death to fool Joe, who leaves her on a bench at night, allowing Nadia to wake her up with an injection. Still, they end up losing when Kate, through her influences, gets Joe exonerated for all his crimes and he frames poor Nadia for his murders on Rhys and Edward, her college classmate and boyfriend.
• Everything Sounds Sexier in French: She was born in Paris and moved to the US as a young girl. French is her first language and she still speaks it fluently. Joe is impressed and aroused when she first does it around him.
• Expy: She and her daughter Juliette are very loosely based on Mary-Kay and Nomi from You Love Me.
• Foster Kid: Like Joe, she was a former foster kid. It's a (relatively, for Joe) genuine point of connection between them, since they both want the best for their respective children and don't want them to wind up in the system.
• Gut Feeling:
  Marienne: If there is ever, even for a fleeting moment, a tiny voice in your head, and that tiny voice is telling you, “I deserve better”, listen to her. That’s your partner. That’s your real, true love. And if you betray her long enough, you will lose her.
• Hot Librarian: A beautiful librarian whom Joe freely fantasizes over.
• Nice Girl: She has feelings for Joe but refuses to be a homewrecker. She also seems more grounded than his previous "You's".
• Recovered Addict: Played for Drama. She has beaten her drug addiction, but her well-off, white ex-husband keeps painting her as a crackhead in their custody battle, which stresses her out to no end.
• Shout-Out: Her name (and its pronunciation) calls to mind another famous librarian.
• Sole Survivor: She is only woman who Joe was obsessed with to survive the events so far.
• Struggling Single Mother: She has an ex, Ryan, but she does what she can to parent Juliette alone and is in a lot of financial and emotional turbulence.
• Ungrateful Bitch: When Joe catches her and Ryan in a loud and soon to be violent argument and asks Ryan to leave, she instead yells at him for being a white knight. Justified due to this possibly angering Ryan into harassing her further.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Marienne orders Nadia not to call the police to free her out of fear that Joe will escape and has her participate in a complicated plan to free her. It succeeds, but Joe catches onto Nadia, ends up murdering her boyfriend Edward and framing her for it. If Nadia called the cops, Marienne would have been freed and Joe would have been arrested at best or forced to flee at worst.

Kate Galvin

Katherine Galvin (née Lockwood)

Played by: Charlotte Ritchie

An art gallerist who lives with her boyfriend, Malcolm, in the flat directly opposite Joe.

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• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: She’s a lithe, raven-haired, porcelain-pale beauty, with a penchant for very heavy eyeshadow that enhances her large blue eyes, and typically speaks in a weary, deadpan tone.
• Ambiguously Evil: At the end of the season, she cleans up Joe's reputation even after learning his true identity of Joe Goldberg. However, whether Joe told her about his murders of her friends and Beck or just admitted to killing Love is unknown.
• Contrasting Replacement Character: Compared to Beck, Love, Marienne, and to a lesser extent, Natalie, who are all Nice Girls who have a near instant chemistry with Joe and are quickly charmed into a relationship by him, Kate hates Joe at first and treats him with thinly veiled and outright unveiled contempt. Joe's relationship with her is also different; while he spends most of his narration fawning over Beck and Love, he sees his protecting of Kate as a chore and is annoyed that she still treats him rudely. She becomes much nicer to him after they officially start dating, but still has a witty and cheeky edge.
• Cultural Posturing: It’s likely due to the increasing Belligerent Sexual Tension between them, but she often disparages Joe’s American background with withering condescension.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Kate is initially cold and even outright rude to Joe. She later warms up to him after they hook up.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • While Kate herself is (initially) a huge bitch to everyone and Joe, she is still disgusted by Gemma's unfair treatment and bullying of others who did not deserve it. At Phoebe's manor, Kate storms out after witnessing Gemma cruelly humiliating the help during a pall-mall game.
  • She is horrified when her father has Adam killed, no matter how much she loathed Adam.
• Freudian Excuse: Her father is a Corrupt Corporate Executive and she has been spending her whole adult life trying to get out from under his money and influence.
• Horrible Judge of Character: She continues to believe that Joe is a good person, even when he confesses to being a murderer.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Although she is unnecessarily rude and snobbish to Joe, she has repeatedly caught him peeking at her through the window, following her and proclaiming that he needs to protect her, so there is reason for her to be annoyed at him.
  • Possibly the worst thing she does to Joe is reveal that he was the last to see Malcolm and send them over to his apartment, risking him being arrested. However, she says that she just told the whole truth and if he truly was innocent, all the detectives did was clear his name. Not to mention, Joe is the killer, he just didn't remember it.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: While she is somewhat of a jerk to Joe at first, she is a loving friend to Phoebe, mourns Malcolm and Gemma despite their flaws, disapproves of her friends' snobbishness and is disgusted when her father has Adam tortured to death.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: She and Joe have sex in a 'secret hiding place' (a private gated park) that she and Malcolm used to frequent a lot, and are seen by Vic, who is suspicious of Joe's motives.
• Massive Numbered Siblings: She is just one of Tom Lockwood's seven children, even if she is his favorite.
• Mistaken for Murderer: Joe catches her kneeling over Gemma's corpse holding a bloody knife. She didn't kill her. He did.
• Nom de Mom: She goes by her mother's name of Galvin, rather than her father's name of Lockwood, because she wants to disassociate from him.
• Not So Stoic:
  • After spending most of the season behaving icy and cooly, Kate finally breaks into tears and sobs in Joe's arms after learning that her father was behind every success in her career and that she accomplished nothing without his influence.
  • Before that, she is clearly heartbroken when Tom reveals to her that he has been behind every successful job she was ever involved in.
• Pet the Dog: When Phoebe is moved to tears by Joe apparently saying something very profound to her, Kate can be seen hugging and consoling her.
• Self-Made Man: She prides herself on carving a path away from her father and succeeding on her own. Ends up subverted when her dad reveals he has ensured every opportunity, from her job offers to publicity to squashing lawsuits she didn't even know about to even how she landed her apartment, happened. Kate is horrified to realize she hasn't achieved anything on her own without her father making sure of it.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: She eventually falls into this dynamic with Joe, continuing to disparage him while having occasional trysts with him.
• Sliding Scale of Beauty: Common Beauty, Unlike other love interests who are often described as world-class beauty, Kate's beauty doesn't usually attract much attention, beyond a few flattering comments.
• Ungrateful Bitch: She reacts very indifferently towards Joe after he saves her from some muggers.

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