As a Black Woman, You's Tati Gabrielle Wanted Marienne To "Have a Level of Awareness" (2024)

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the third season of You.

If you've made it to the end of You season 3, then you're fully aware that a few more people have joined the exclusive "I Survived Joe Goldberg" club. There's Theo, who Love left to die in the bakery basem*nt before Joe took pity and saved him. We also have Sherry and Cary, who despite two bullet wounds and a few domestic disputes escaped the infamous plexiglass cage after discovering its hidden key.

But as the object of Joe's affections this season—his latest "You"—it was Marienne who earned the most enthusiastic sigh of relief from fans. Played by Tati Gabrielle, her character narrowly escaped death after Love decided to spare her life, succumbing to the young librarian's charms as she opened up about being an independent single mother. And after Love warned her that Joe was a cold blooded murderer who killed her ex, Marienne fled Madre Linda with her daughter—hopefully buying time until Joe inevitably finds her.

"It was beautiful, it was exciting," Gabrielle tells Oprah Daily about her character's survival. "Especially as a woman of color, it was like, 'Yeah, she freaking made it out alive!'"

The 25-year-old also explained that though Marienne eventually fell for Joe after rejecting him up until episode 6, it was important to her that she not give in to his seduction immediately—something she communicated with series showrunner and writer Sera Gamble.

"As a Black woman, you have a certain level of awareness. So I wanted to make sure that she wasn't so oblivious to certain things and that her falling for Joe could be more genuine. It wasn't that she was just being hypnotized by his tropes, but that she was being pulled by the realness of him as a person—what is left of him as a human being," Gabrielle says.

Gamble, who told Oprah Daily it was "important" Marienne survive the season said: "Every time we create a love interest, we have to make them different than anyone who came before. You have to understand why he's falling in love with them. He's not going to fall in love with somebody stupid. He's also not going to fall in love with somebody who's easily attainable."

Part of what drew Marienne to the serial killer was the fact that both characters share troubled pasts, and both are odd men out in a community dominated by privilege. The actress tells us that in order to fully understand her character—a bibliophile and recovering addict who's raising a child with her abusive ex-husband—she dove head first into research.

For her performance, Gabrielle channeled her own family's experiences with substance abuse and past toxic relationships. But she also read about the responsibilities of a librarian (including the Dewey Decimal system), and spoke to a mother who had her child taken away while living with addiction.

"I wanted to take each of those layers individually at first and look into them," she says. "I really wanted to make sure that I understood because I'm 25. I don't have kids and that's not a reality for me."

Going the extra mile behind the scenes helped Gabrielle understand the one thing we're all probably wondering: Aside from Penn Badgley being distractingly handsome, how could you get to a place where you fall for a serial killer?