Real-Life Loves
Penn Badgley’s Dating History: Inside His Marriage & Past Relationships
Penn Badgley has romanced a number of women as Joe Goldberg on You, but in real life, he’s happily been in a relationship with his wife since 2014. However, the actor also dated two other recognizable women during his time in the public eye.
While Badgley likes to keep his personal life out of the spotlight as much as possible, he hasn’t fully been able to avoid his love life making headlines. Scroll down for everything to know about Badgley’s wife and see who else is part of his dating history.
Domino Kirke
Badgley’s wife is singer Domino Kirke. During a 2022 interview on her husband’s Podcrushed podcast, Kirke revealed that the two met “at a meatball shop” in 2014. “I had never seen Gossip Girl, so I had no context for Penn,” the doula shared.
She also shared that her now-husband was couch surfing at the time of the meeting, so she offered him the room she had for rent in her apartment. “I got his number because I was really interested in him living with me, and I thought he was cute,” she spilled. “And it would have been nice to have a little winter, you know, fling with my roommate.”
Kirke said she wasn’t ready to get serious with Badgley at first because she was “getting used to” being a single mom (she shares a son with ex Morgan O’Kane). “I didn’t think marriage was in the cards for us,” she admitted.
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Those feelings were short-lived, though. She and Badgley tied the knot in a courthouse ceremony in Brooklyn, New York, on February 27, 2017. Four months later, they invited more loved ones to a larger celebration in Upstate New York. Kirke’s younger sisters are Jemima and Lola Kirke.
“My first wedding was more of a civil ceremony with about 40 people that were able to join us in a pinch,” Kirke said in 2018. “The second one was more planned … 200 people came from all over the world. It just felt necessary to have both.”
Kirke announced that she was pregnant with her and Badgley’s first child in 2020. She revealed that she’d had two miscarriages before the pregnancy. Their son, James, was born in August 2020, and in February 2025, Kirke shared the news that she was pregnant with twins.
“Babies #3 and #4 coming this Summer!” she wrote on Instagram. “Talk about a PLOT TWIST! Spontaneous twins are beyond magical. Can’t think of anyone else I’d rather be on this ride with @pennbadgley.”
Blake Lively
Badgley’s Gossip Girl character, Dan Humphrey, dated Blake Lively‘s Serena van der Woodsen on the show, and the actors were also an item in real life. They dated during the beginning of the show’s run from 2007 to 2010 but continued working together until the series ended in 2012.
The show’s executive producer Joshua Safran hinted in 2017 that Badgley and Humphrey actually broke up quite some time before the news was made public in 2010. “I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale [in 2009] that Blake and Penn had broken up months before,” he told Vanity Fair. “They kept the breakup hidden from the crew, which you could never do now. I don’t even know how they did it. They kept it from everybody, which is a testament to how good they are as actors. Because they did not want their personal drama to relate to the show.”
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As Badgley told Elle in 2013, “We were very much caught up in the show, which itself was a six-year endurance test. Our relationship was a part of that and helped us through it. I mean, like anything valuable, it was good and it was bad, and it was a learning experience.”
While appearing on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen in 2015, Badgley said that he and Lively were “consummately professional” on set after their split. “I think we should both pat ourselves on the back for getting through it,” he admitted. He also joked that Lively was both his best and worst onscreen kiss. “I’d say best … I’ll say it was Blake, because we actually had a relationship at the time. [Worst is] maybe Blake after we broke up,” he joked.
Badgley opened up about “the struggle” of dating his costar during appearance on the April 23 edition of the Call Her Daddy podcast. Alex Cooper asked Badgley if he had trouble separating his job from his reality. “I mean, that’s a great question because it was the struggle,” the actor said. “When you do a television show, you’re doing it constantly.”
He added, “What starts to happen when you’re in this one role for a long time — the aspect of celebrity being a part of it, a huge part of it — there is not enough separation, I think, for anybody,” he noted. “You’re seen as this person, you’re called their name out on the street. You also constantly have to be that person at work.”
Zoë Kravitz
From 2011 to 2013, Badgley was in a relationship with Zoë Kravitz. He referred to their relationship as “real, true, earth-shattering love” in a 2013 interview with Movieline.
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While discussing filming the 2012 movie Greetings From Tim Buckley, Badgley recalled, “At that time, I was falling madly in love in a way that was changing me and opening me up. I was kind of going through what Jeff [Buckley] was going through emotionally in the movie in the sense that the worlds of music and love and women and art were opening up to me. Honestly, I needed it. It was like this cosmic intervention where, if you’re going to play somebody like Jeff, you’ve got to at least be in love, you know?”
You, Season 5, Thursday, April 24, Netflix
