Penn Badgley Shares the Unexpected Way He Bonded With His Stepson, 15, After Struggling to Do So

Penn Badgley shared a rare look into the dynamic of his personal life.

Appearing on The New York Times' "Modern Love" podcast, the actor admitted it took him a while to figure out how to bond with wife Domino Kirke's now 15-year-old son, Cassius, after the pair married in 2017.

"I have an interesting situation where I have a biological son and a stepson. And my stepson is — his father is very much in his life, so his father is his father, and I’m something else," the Gossip Girl alum, 37, explained.

Badgely said his two "parental roles" are very "different" since his "biological son is only 3 and a half."

The You lead confessed that initially, he struggled to bond with Cassius, especially since as a high school student, "he doesn’t want to spend that much time with us anyway."

Eventually, Badgley found the perfect solution and asked the teen to join him in watching Tom Cruise's action sci-fi flick The Edge of Tomorrow.

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"I just knew it was important. It was like the stars had aligned so that my wife and my youngest son were asleep, and I was just like, ‘This is a good time to do this! You’re not going to play video games now. We’re going to do this!’" he recalled, adding that Cassius "loved it."

The TV star's wife, 40, had two miscarriages before they welcomed their bundle of joy in 2020 amid the COVID-19 surge.

"Well, you know he's a pandemic kid. So that is, anybody who has kids [knows], it's a joy, it's an immense — I mean, it's wild," he quipped when asked about raising the tot last year. "It's lovely. It's great. It's a challenge. Shout-out to all the parents. Keep going! Keeping going, it gets better."

Though his son is still too young to understand fame, he recounted one of the first times the toddler saw him acting.

"There was recently a day where I was doing something really sweet with him you know like in my lap. And then I sat on the remote and…it just went right to Netflix on the TV. And my face was right on the TV. And he was like, ‘Daddy!' I started to race around because the next thing he was going to see was something really crazy," he said, likely referring to a scene from his hit Netflix series You, in which he plays a serial killer.

Thankfully, he shut the TV off in time.