You’s Madeline Brewer Says Filming ‘Intense’ Standoff Between Joe and Brontë Was ‘Really Traumatizing in a Lot of Ways’ (Exclusive)

Warning: This post contains spoilers from the final season of You.

Madeline Brewer is opening up about her role as one of You‘s final girls.

At the launch celebration for the PEOPLE app, held at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City on Tuesday, April 29, Brewer, 33, broke down the show’s dramatic ending. The actress told PEOPLE exclusively, “It was a huge moment and it was really exciting to help land the plane of these five seasons of a show.”

She continued, “It was intense, but it was really choreographed. It was every moment, down to where little scrapes and things were on us were super choreographed. But really traumatizing in a lot of ways. I talked about this on Penn [Badgley]’s Podcrushed Podcast. Yeah, it was really intense. It was great though.”

Brewer stepped into the role of Louise Flannery in the hit Netflix show’s buzzy final season. Louise is an English student from Ohio who once worked with TA Guinivere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) at New York University. Beck was the central love interest in You season one, and among the show’s serial killer Joe Goldberg’s (Penn Badgley) first victims.

Upon discovering that Beck’s true killer may have gotten away with murder, she adopts the alter-ego of Brontë (named after the famous literary Brontë sisters of Gothic literature) to lure Joe Goldberg to justice after getting a job in his bookstore.

The show’s final showdown sees Brontë and Joe engaged in a grisly confrontation in the woods near the U.S.-Canadian border, where Brontë enticed him under the guise of fleeing the country together. Throughout the show’s five-season run, Joe’s character kills off several of his love interests, starting with Beck, and later his wife, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) along with a number of other characters in their orbit.

In the end, You’s serial killer is caught and brought to justice for his crimes after an international killing spree spanning several years.

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Badgley, 38, previously spoke with PEOPLE about saying goodbye to his controversial character. “He’s been a profound experience for me. He’s not a real person. So what have I been doing? I’ve been engaging in this … my entire 30s,” Badgley said.

“I became a father while I was on this show. I only got married just before I took the role. So I’ve grown a lot and I’ve grown with Joe in a strange way,” he added. “He’s taught me a lot about what it is to be a man by knowing what it is not. And I don’t mean the obvious things like, ‘Oh, don’t murder, that’s bad.’ That’s very clear.”

Season 5 of You is now streaming on Netflix.