‘The Act’ Creator Michelle Dean Shares Her Take on Murderer Gypsy Rose Blanchard

Hulu’s shocking new crime thriller, The Act, probably never would have existed without the work of journalist Michelle Dean. The writer and producer spent months tirelessly chasing down the story of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a mother/daughter duo tangled up in a true crime story that makes HBO’s Sharp Objects look tame. In August 2016, Dean published an in-depth look at the case on Buzzfeed titled, “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter to be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered.” It’s been read over five million times and serves as the basis of The Act’s first season.

Dean helped the story reach national exposure, inspiring first an HBO documentary film, Mommy Dead and Dearest, and now Hulu’s The Act. The series dramatizes Dee Dee and Gypsy’s tragic tale in such a way that the horror of both women’s acts of betrayal hits like a crashing blow. Oscar winner Patricia Arquette plays Dee Dee Blanchard, a woman suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy who cons doctors and communities, all while torturing her own daughter, Gypsy. The Kissing Booth‘s Joey King plays Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the girl who planned her mother’s murder with a secret boyfriend (and who may be something of a master manipulator in her own right).

Decider sat down with Michelle Dean during Winter TCA and she explained how she turned a hit story into a unsettling TV show and whether or not the real Gypsy knows her life is about to become a Hulu series.

DECIDER: You started off with the article and you appeared in that documentary. What made it feel like a natural fit for a scripted mini-series and how were the majority involved in the writing and producing?

MICHELLE DEAN: When I published the article, I wasn’t really sure what people would make of this story. I mean I’d been obsessed with it for almost a year, and I had worked with the documentarians and discussed, “What are people gonna think of this?” But I didn’t expect it to go as viral as it did. So then like five million people read it and then I started to get inquiries about the rights, and I’d never had anything like that happen before. I was just sort of overwhelmed. And I ended up listening to a bunch of proposals from a bunch of different producers. I ended up picking this producer Britton Rizzio, who is one of our APs, and feeling like she was the right person to work with it. And then she introduced me to Nick Antosca, who’s her client.

In terms of the writing and producing, I helped run the [writers’] room, I co-wrote the show. I thought it was important that this is an “inspired by” story because there was a coorelate out there in the real world — like a real person out there in the world — that it’s important to have people who knew those people involved. So I helped out in the writers room and was involved in production and I’m still involved now.

I know there were details that you used from the story in the actual show. What did you have to invent? What was the balance? On that point, the pizza scene; Did that really happen or is that something you invented to give a detail into what that sort of a life might look like?

You mean blending the pizza? Definitely there are people who eat blended foods. And in the real story it’s true that one of the stories that was told was that she couldn’t eat by herself. And so that’s real. As to the invention, whenever you tell a true story you’re going to end up inventing lots of stuff. The circumstances, the time of day, everything. So it’s not a factual retelling. So it’s hard to answer your question, do you see what I mean? Because there’s both so much and also so much that has a correlate to a fact that isn’t exactly the same. We were trying to go for the spirit of the human story here, behind the tabloid extremes of it, and stay true to that.

Having watched the documentary, Mommy Dead and Dearest, I find Gypsy to be really interesting because on the one hand, what happened to her is so horrifying and traumatic and you wanna see her as the victim, but through the documentary, you become more and more creeped out. She really had a mean streak and she was manipulating people. How do you find that balance with the character on screen? And then, what’s your take on Gypsy as protagonist, or victim, or villain?

Well, I’ll answer the second question first which is that I don’t really see the world that way. In part because of reporting. And people who are traumatized, there’s often that thing going. They’re victim, but they’ve also learned how to use that victimhood to elicit sympathy in other people. It’s mostly survival mechanism; it’s not meant maliciously. Actually even in this case I suspect that was probably true of Dee Dee as well. Which seems crazy to say this mother may not have meant this maliciously, and yet, I have the feeling it was very conflicted for her. So I don’t really have a one or the other take.

My feeling is that Gypsy was shaped to who she was by what she went through. In terms of character, I think for us, the interesting thing was to trace over the course of the series how she became that. Because the feeling that you’re talking about, I’ve heard people tell me for three years they’ve had that experience. My own was a little bit different but they definitely…she’s giving you that impression for a reason. And our show’s about those reasons.

Does Gypsy know about the series and has she seen any of it?

I’m not in touch with her. She’s not involved. So I guess we’ll find out. So we don’t know.

What would you hope that she thought about the series?

I’d hope she thought it was fair to the story.

Joey mentioned on the stage that she worked closely with you to be Gypsy. What kind of questions did she come to you with? Did anything take you by surprise?

I’m not sure I remember specific questions. Those dinners would just be ongoing conversations about the case, and also ways in which we were departing from it, and what we were trying to say about the series. For Joey a lot of it was trying to access — cause it’s so difficult to understand the psychological. On some level there is just this question: why doesn’t she get up out of the chair? If she did that just once in front of other people everything would change. A lot of the trick of trying to figure out this entire situation was figuring out why she doesn’t get up out of the chair.

I have a single mom, and that’s a very tight relationship, and The Act felt like the perversion of that. How important was it to show the emotional connection that Gypsy and Dee Dee had? 

That’s something we talked about a lot in the writers room. This is really literary, but I had them read Rachel Cusk and Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born to bring a lot of ideas of mothering and different kinds of mothers into the show. In part because I thought it was so crucial to illustrating what went on. It is a close bond, right. And it eventually goes sour, in a way that I think most do.

One of the things that most surprised me about this case is how close some of the dynamics that Gypsy would describe between her and her mother, how close they would be to a universal experience. A universal experience of frustration with your mother, feeling your mother’s gonna try to control you, of growing up and realizing that your mother isn’t right about everything. All of those are experiences that we have. And Gypsy obviously had a very extreme version of this.

I know The Act is going to be an anthology series. Are you going to be involved in a second season?

That’s the plan. I had a sort of passion for the premise of this idea that there are people behind the act. That they do in the law — and I used to be a lawyer — there’s two portions to the act. One is the act, but the other is the reason. I really wanted to get at those reasons.

Reporting is a profound experience for me, in part because I realized I learned so much about how other people are and aren’t. In a way I want this show to be an expression of that. I’m trying to teach people that they might think they know everything because they saw a documentary or read an article, but there’s so much more going on here. It’s worth thinking about.

The first two episodes of The Act premiere on Hulu on Wednesday, March 20. New episodes debut on Wednesdays after that. 

This article has been edited and condensed for clarity.