Hulu’s The Act Is Horrifying, Human, and Hard to Stop Watching

Hulu's new true-crime series The Act, now streaming, delivers its first big shock in episode two, when all of Gypsy Rose Blanchard (Joey King)'s teeth are pulled out at the request of her own mother. Dee Dee (Patricia Arquette) puts her daughter through such a heinous procedure to help her, presumably, but the entire thing feels sinister. Does Gypsy really need this done? The fact you have to ask is disturbing in itself.

The aftermath is just as hard to watch. Gypsy's miserable. She cries in the bathtub while her mother assures her that her fake veneers are on the way. One day, two days, three days go by—but still Gypsy has no teeth. She's so upset about it that she tells Dee Dee she no longer wants to attend an upcoming charity event where she's supposed to collect a monstrous check.

It's only in the midnight hour, right as Gypsy's about to go onstage, that Dee Dee gives her the veneers. "Thank you, Mommy, but why didn't you give these to me before?" Gypsy asks. To which Dee Dee says, "They just came this morning, fresh from the dentist. It's like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight. Does the glass slipper fit?"

The timing is strange, to say the least. At best, it's a coincidence. At worst, Dee Dee purposefully kept the veneers from Gypsy and sprang them on her to look like a hero. This type of psychological manipulation is rampant in The Act, which is based on the Munchausen by proxy horror story that shocked many in 2016. You may remember it: Dee Dee Blanchard intentionally made her teenage daughter, Gypsy, sick for most of her life. In June 2015, Gypsy retaliated by conspiring with her online boyfriend, Nick Godejohn, to murder her mother. HBO highlighted the case in the documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest. It's a grisly, unfathomable story. And now the brains behind The Act want to humanize it.

"Over the years people have asked me, 'Is this or that person in the story a psychopath?' or, 'What's wrong with these people?' Ultimately, I don't think there's anything wrong with them," Michelle Dean, who wrote the BuzzFeed article that inspired The Act, tells Glamour. (She's also credited as a co-showrunner and screenwriter on the series.) "I think we all have our pathologies. Dee Dee's was deeper than most, and Gypsy's was deeper than most because of what her mother did to her. It was a lot more human than the crazy tabloid profile of the story."

Human isn't the first word I'd use to describe Dee Dee, but that's what Patricia Arquette leans into to play her in The Act. It's no easy feat, given what Dee Dee did to her child. Arquette has a different take on it, though: She found her way into Dee Dee by viewing her as a mother who loved too much.

"Sometimes I think I overmother my kids," Arquette says. "My daughter just went away to school, and my longing for her and missing her made me decide, 'I'm going to expand that by a thousand.' I used my fear of her leaving, my fear of anything happening to her outside of my reach, or outside of my vision."

Joey King had a similar approach to playing Gypsy, by finding the logic in her character's decision to murder her own mother. "Some people think Gypsy deserves no prison time, and some people think she deserves all the prison time in the world," King, who shaved her head for the role, tells Glamour. "Yes, she did conspire to commit murder, and that is a crime. But in the documentary, Dee Dee had paperwork in order to basically say Gypsy was incapacitated mentally and couldn't think for herself. Gypsy was so fearful that if she went to the police, no one would believe her. She didn't see a way out."

These layers make it very hard to hate Dee Dee or Gypsy outright as you watch The Act—and that's what makes it so fascinating. As you watch the eight episodes, you'll find it becomes less about their crimes and more about a very strained relationship between a daughter who wants to break free and the mother who won't let her.

Their dynamic is amplified by Chloë Sevigny's and AnnaSophia Robb's characters, Mel and Lacey, another mother-daughter pair who live across the street from Dee Dee and Gypsy. They serve as their foils; Lacey is a "cool" teenager who has a boyfriend, smokes weed, and fights with her mother. Watching her relationship with Mel shines an even brighter light on Gypsy and Dee Dee's peculiar situation.

"The Act is about how complicated mother-daughter relationships are," Robb says. "Mel and Lacy's relationship is definitely fraught, but strangely, they become closer because of this tragedy that's happened next door. Tragedy can either pull you apart or put you back together."

Adds co-showrunner Nick Antosca, "It's a female story, and I think it's a story that looks into the darkness and the humanity that can happen in female relationships and mother-daughter relationships."

A female story is best told by female creatives, which is why the writers room was made up primarily of women. Five out of the eight episodes had female directors. "Our first day on set, [the director] had a dress on and looked so chic but was directing like nobody's business," Robb recalls. "I thought, This the first time I've seen somebody direct in a dress. I've been doing this for 16 years."

Dean says it was important to have so many female voices on set. "At no point along the way has anybody said all the things I used to hear when I was an entertainment journalist, like, 'They get upset that there's so many women in the show.' We had none of that. Everybody was thrilled to have something that was so female-centric."

Still, at the center of this story is a perplexing murder. The true-crime element is why many people will tune in—and why they'll keep watching. True crime is now one of the most popular genres in entertainment thanks to podcasts like My Favorite Murder and Serial, not to mention Netflix's Making a Murderer and Ryan Murphy's American Crime Story. The Act's leads have some theories on the surge in interest in the genre.

"I think there's something in the psyche of all human beings that we know our species is capable of that," Arquette says. "I don't know if we're trying to protect ourselves by learning all the telltale signs. Or in the back of our minds, do we think a lot of us would be capable given the right or wrong circumstances?"

King thinks it's more about our fascination with the abnormal. "The people we meet in everyday life usually have some facade of normalcy," she says. "The fact that situations as ludicrous and as absolutely mind-blowing as this can happen—I think it just really rattles people. It makes people want to get inside the brain of someone like Dee Dee, who could do something like this, and get inside the brain of someone like Gypsy, who had to live through it."

The Act offers insight into the psyches of both Gypsy and Dee Dee. It's a narrative show, so the depictions aren't 100 percent accurate, but they'll nonetheless help viewers wrap their head around what happened. After fans watch, Sevigny hopes they'll "be able to recognize when somebody needs help more in their daily lives." "How does this happen to a person like Gypsy?" she says. "How does society let this happen to her?"

"This is an anti-fairy-tale," King adds. "I hope people feel like they learned something by watching it. And I hope it rattles them."

Arquette, meanwhile, doesn't know how she wants audiences to absorb The Act just yet. But she is certain of one thing when it comes to Gypsy and Dee Dee: "There's a lot of love in that really fucked-up relationship," she says. "That's what I'm taking away from it."

Christopher Rosa is the entertainment staff writer at Glamour. Follow him on Twitter at @chrisrosa92.