Odd tale takes stars into new place
Tragic mother-daughter relationship portrayed in new Hulu series
If you think your relationship with your mom is complicated, the new series The Act will offer a dose of perspective.
The first season of the Hulu anthology drama, now airing on Starz in Canada, stars Patricia Arquette and Joey King and follows the strange real-life case of Dee Dee Blanchard and her daughter, Gypsy Rose. For years, Dee Dee (Arquette), a single mom living in Missouri, convinced the public that her wheelchair-using daughter (King) was chronically ill — all while collecting donations from charity organizations.
That is, until Gypsy Rose, after figuring out the sham, plotted her mother’s murder. The pair gained national attention after a 2016 BuzzFeed article and an HBO documentary, Mommy Dead and Dear
est, chronicled their troubled and tragic mother-daughter relationship. (Gypsy is serving a10-year sentence after pleading guilty to her role in her mother’s death.)
Experts have said Gypsy likely was the victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disorder in which a caretaker induces or fabricates illness in another person to gain attention or sympathy. Pop culture most recently put that form of abuse into view in HBO’s Sharp Objects.
“There are two people whose main desire is to love and be loved; they just go about it in the most unhealthy way,” says King, seated alongside Arquette.
“Yes,” Arquette adds, “These were two people on a collision course. Nothing good was going to come of this. One of them was always going to end up dead.”
Hulu’s scripted dramatization, which premiered on Wednesday, is based on the BuzzFeed article by Michelle Dean, who is also a writer and executive producer on the series. (Dean served as coshow runner along with Chan
nel Zero’s Nick Antosca.) It follows Lifetime’s take on the events ( Love You to Death) earlier this year.
In an interview, Arquette and King talked about diving into the stranger-than-fiction story, portraying a troubled motherdaughter relationship, and being untethered to Hollywood’s standards of beauty. The interview has been edited for space and clarity.
With stories like these — that are just so bizarre and wild — it’s easy to lose sight that there are real people involved and to go for the sensational. Were you worried about that going into this project?
Arquette: I think there’s a lot of things that lend themselves in this story to turning it into some kitschy thing. They love Disney, and their house was pink, and their room was purple, and the way that Gypsy’s voice had this affectation, and all the layers of deception. But I think people can understand a maternal relationship, even their mom over-mothering them. (And) I think most people make humour out of something that they can’t really imagine. They’re in utter shock that someone’s mom would intentionally harm them in any kind of way or make sense of how they could harm their own child.
Then there’s this kind of overarching thing of what happens at the end. It’s like (Gypsy) claims back her power, and there is a serious price to pay.
What sort of research did you both do before digging in?
King: I watched the documentary countless times. I found any interviews, any home videos I could scramble on the internet. It was really helpful to have Michelle Dean on our show, because I would go to her a lot. I would call her up a lot just for stories and information. The craziest thing for me was watching interviews of Gypsy now versus seeing footage of her home when she was younger and how different she is.
Gypsy’s kind of become a master manipulator herself. So it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not.
Arquette: My daughter happened to be going away to school when we started this. There’s a natural instinct I, as a mom, have, to want to keep my daughter close, to want to keep her safe, to be worried about her in the world, to miss her so much, to wanna hug her so much, to miss her childhood, she’s growing up. I’m gonna take all those normal feelings but exploit them to perverse levels. I did kind of pull from my own normal feelings to a distorted feeling.
We haven’t really seen this kind of complex motherdaughter relationship on screen until recently.
Arquette: I don’t know that in the past there was a ton of value people found in a mother-daughter relationship — especially one like this that’s kind of sick. You might have a Gilmore Girls kind of thing. But to have a relationship like this — that’s deadly, that’s toxic — we haven’t really seen that.
You both really had to transform yourselves for these roles. What do you think about the discussions when actresses play characters that aren’t the prototypes of beauty? And to play them as sexual beings.
Arquette: Here’s the reality: There were times when I was at my peak weight as Tilly (Mitchell in Escape at Dannemora) — I haven’t lost all the weight — and I was in a high altitude and I did think I was going to have a heart attack. It did feel physically dangerous to me at a certain level. That wasn’t fun. Other than that, I mean, there’s a million 19-yearold porn stars with the perfect body, right? But guess what, a lot of people are watching porn of big beautiful women, all this other stuff, older women. I say screw the idea Hollywood’s been putting out that there’s only one idealized woman that’s allowed to be sexual. There’s a big, vast difference of sexuality.
King: People calling me brave (for shaving my head) — it’s so funny to me because I wouldn’t have done it any other way. Gypsy goes through this weird sexualization where she knows she’s different. She knows she looks different. She knows she sounds different. She has these teeth that are fake and silvercapped. She has this feeding tube. But she still has this primal urge to be sexual and to feel sexy and to make someone else feel sexy. And it’s uncomfortable for her, feeding tube and all, but she does it. And she does it with a lot of confidence. How do you think Dee Dee and Gypsy fit into the evolution of female characters we’re seeing onscreen?
Arquette: I’m really grateful for this part and also Dannemora because, at 50, I was sort of like, I don’t want to be likable anymore. I don’t care. My whole real life has been funneling me towards being a likable person,
King: Yeah, I agree with you. I’m so thankful that I got the opportunity to play this role because I, like you, was so excited and so ready to dive into something that it didn’t matter what I looked like.