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The act on hulu11/7/2022 I think the justice system in this country, and specifically the United States’ system of punitive justice, is not great, and it is especially not great at apprehending a case like this where the circumstances of the murder were extremely complicated. Did you have a similar goal in mind when telling Gypsy’s story? Often true crime shows or documentaries are produced with the explicit goal of getting justice for the people whose stories they tell. Still, years later, people are putting the pieces together. One of the things I want to emphasize is that I didn’t know everything, and I’m not sure anybody knows everything here. It’s the kind of thing that even when you interview everyone, they’re still processing it, so you’re always kind of guessing. There’s a tendency to say, “This is such a crazy story can you believe these people?” And the truth was that after the process of reporting, I could believe these people, and I wanted whatever project we did to reflect that.Īnd I hope we got that emotional logic right. The goal was to make people understand at a base level that there was an emotional logic to what happened here, for the people who lived through it. What was your thought process going into production? These are edited excerpts from the conversation. In a phone conversation last week, Dean (who created the show with the writer Nick Antosca) discussed what it’s like to walk onto a TV set for the first time as a showrunner, the emotional experience of telling Gypsy’s story across different mediums and why it’s important to have women well-represented behind the camera as well as onscreen. The first two episodes are available to stream on Hulu, and the remaining six episodes will be posted weekly on the streaming service. The result is the mini-series “The Act,” starring Patricia Arquette and Joey King as Dee Dee and Gypsy. But Dean wanted the time and space to explore the emotion of the story, in addition to presenting the gory details of the crime, so she decided to go down the route of TV dramatization. The 8,000-word piece Dean wrote in 2016 for Buzzfeed about Gypsy’s life and Dee Dee’s death immediately went viral, and filmmakers began contacting her about turning the story into a feature film. Her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Gypsy is currently in prison serving a 10-year sentence for second-degree murder. It turned out Gypsy wasn’t really sick, didn’t need her wheelchair and that this disturbing murder involved a case of Munchausen by proxy syndrome, in which a caregiver fabricates illnesses to attract sympathy and financial support, or for other reasons. It took a year of reporting to piece together what happened, specifically why Dee Dee Blanchard’s sickly daughter, Gypsy Rose, whose medical care was Blanchard’s full-time job, would want her mother dead. Included were the mug shots of the woman’s daughter and her boyfriend, who had been arrested for the crime. Four years ago, the journalist Michelle Dean saw a news report about a woman who had been murdered in Missouri.
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