(She also says Dee Dee’s love interest, played in The Act by Dean Norris, was not a real person.) On the other hand, the show appears to have paid attention to some finer points, such as Dee Dee suffering from diabetes toward the end of her life, a fact all but verified through some digging by local Springfield paper News Leader, whose coverage of the Blanchards dating back to 2015 is essential.Īs for her roll call of Gypsy’s supposed maladies, which were certainly myriad as The Act details: We could not confirm a sugar allergy - which the show built quite a bit of narrative tension around - as one of them. More broadly speaking, The Act’s presentation of the overarching circumstances of Dee Dee’s life dating back to the turn of the 1990s largely line up with available biographical information - though in a recent phone interview, Gypsy’s stepmom, Kristy, took issue with the notion that Gypsy was at any point a conscious co-conspirator in Dee Dee’s petty crimes, such as shoplifting. (Accents are a recurring theme in The Act’s portrayals.) The real Dee Dee certainly retained a noticeable Louisiana drawl even after moving Gypsy and herself from their home state to Springfield, Missouri, following Hurricane Katrina - you can judge for yourself if it approximates Arquette’s affectation. )Īrquette, fresh off her performance as another notorious middle-aged suburban mother in Escape at Dannemora, oozes out her lines in a heightened bayou patois. ( Note: In discussing real-life events, this piece necessarily includes spoilers for later episodes of The Act. And so we’ve wended our way through The Act via its depiction of the main players in this tangled family tragedy to see how closely it hews to the established trail of truth - and the moments when it may have strayed.

The Act acknowledges in every episode that some of its events have been “dramatized or fictionalized,” which can make it even more difficult than it already is to suss out the concrete facts, such as they are, at the heart of this story. And in March, Hulu premiered The Act, an eight-part dramatic series based on the events leading up to and including Dee Dee’s murder, sourced from BuzzFeed reporter Michelle Dean’s 2016 investigative feature.

It has since become the subject of an HBO documentary, Lifetime TV movie, and unending fascination and speculation. To be brief: In June 2015, Gypsy conspired with her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to murder her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, who it turned out had made Gypsy a lifelong victim of her Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

The Act’s trickiest act may just be fighting through the thicket of existing coverage clouding the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.

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