It’s not like Joe Goldberg’s (Penn Badgley) and Love Quinn’s (Victoria Pedretti) marriage wasn’t doomed from the start. However, the Season 3 finale of Netflix’s “You” — which was just renewed for Season 4 ahead of this season’s Friday premiere — proved that the union wasn’t meant to last, as a cat-and-mouse game between the two (literally) killer lovers ended with Joe murdering his wife with the same poison she had just used to paralyze him.

Her aim appeared to be to use aconite to immobilize her husband and then murder his new love, Marienne (Tati Gabrielle), in front of him. However, Joe was well-prepared. Love was killed by her own poison after he switched the script on her. He then hacked off his own toes and set fire to their house to make it look like they’d both perished.

With couples’ therapy and dead bodies, snobbish neighbors and a hidden glass prison, changing diapers and hiding evidence, the third season of Netflix’s You delivers an answer beyond our wildest dreams. It’s not going to be a happy ever after.

“It was pretty crazy to see the actual way that I was going to die,” Pedretti tells EW of seeing her character’s death. “It felt very unique and strange, and I didn’t really understand how to act it out. I don’t know anything about aconite and paralytics so there was a bit of a learning curve, but I was very excited to rise to the challenge.”

“This is the first season that Joe hasn’t been on his own in his murderous-kidnapping life, knowing now that Love has the same tendencies as him,” Pedretti said in an interview with TheWrap. “What was it like for you both to be playing these open versions of the characters you didn’t get to in Season 2 — and adding a baby into that?”

To which she answered, “I think it was really fun to be able to– as much as Joe, I guess, kind of hates it, like, these two people are really seeing each other fully in a way that nobody ever really has. And the baby being there, I feel like, represents just a further bond that they’ve created together, which is really daunting. And so there’s a lot of pressure in that. And it’s fun to play with and explore.”

Pedretti, who plays Love Quinn opposite Joe Goldberg played by Penn Badgley, is used to the unexpected at this stage. “I feel like I really don’t attach myself to thinking that I can predict what’s going to happen,” she tells ELLE.com, “And I kind of anticipate and expect to be surprised with the way in which things go down.”

Pedretti wasn’t the only one who had to improve his paralysis act. “For me there was a lot of scene work where I was laying there,” says Badgley. “The director would come up to me and she’d be like, ‘I know this is a lot to ask. Can you could just give a little more?’ I’d sort of shrug my shoulders and be like, ‘I mean, I’ll try. I’ll try to overcome the paralytic that’s supposed to have taken me to the point that all of this is happening.’ It was really strange. But I think it all plays.”

In the end, Badgley believes Love’s death “makes sense” for both characters. He says, “They’ve had their arc. We’ve gone to a lot of places, seen the highs and the lows, and it felt like, ‘Okay if this is going to happen, it’s time.'”

“I would say the same, in a way, for me playing Joe. As much as he is perpetually miserable, I’m not. And as an actor, like getting to put him in his perpetual misery in new situations where he’s challenged and discovers things about himself and the nature of relationships and can actually see another person, even if only for a fleeting moment, it’s just fun. It’s nice to sort of test the device of Joe against these other situations, and particularly having like a real equal partner. I mean, obviously, with Joe, that’s like a paradox or like a logical fallacy or something like that. But as an actor, like particularly those scenes in the second episode, where they’re going from therapy to flashbacks, that was like a play. I remember one scene we shot for just basically nine hours. It was lit all the same and it was just going in the basement with a dead body in the ground and a baby in the vestibule. To me, that was some of the best stuff in the series, I think, in a way.”

Pedretti adds, “It’s sad. I knew she was going to die, but the way in which it happened was still shocking.”

Fans of Pedretti’s Love, a California chef with a girl-next-door feel and a dark, violent past that rivals Joe’s, may be disappointed with the finale. Pedretti, too, was moved by the parting. “I did start crying as me [as a person], very sad for what the character had to go through,” she says.