Soon Gypsy finds out she’s not really a 14 year old little girl like her mother tells her, but in reality is a twenty year old woman kept prisoner by her mother’s false insistence she needs a feeding tube in her stomach, and is deathly allergic to sugar. The lies Dee Dee has constructed about Gypsy’s health is like a house of cards, and as it all begins to collapse, she fights like hell against Gypsy’s independent streak to wrestle control back. The realization she can walk perfectly fine and doesn’t need a wheelchair like she’s been told, leads Gypsy to wait until Dee Dee’s dependence on prescription pain and sleeping pills render her comatose each night, so she can lead a secret life online away from her mother’s influence.

The level of manipulation Dee Dee has exerted on her daughter has taught Gypsy to hide her own truth from her mother. Dee Dee has in effect brainwashed her daughter, but with each discovery Gypsy makes that’s contrary to what she’s been told, the anger and desire to escape her mother’s clutches in order to finally be free becomes stronger and stronger. The combination of yearning for friends after years of isolation, as well as the hormonal changes she experiences, lead Gypsy to question what she’s been told all of her life. The lies Dee Dee has told to the public, to her herself, and to her daughter begin to unravel little by little as Gypsy gets older.

The lengths she goes to convince the world, and her own daughter that Gypsy Rose is extremely sick is ghastly once the truth begins to come out. Arquette is at turns a doting mother who pours out all of herself for her daughter, but other times behind closed doors can be incredibly emotionally and physically manipulative, almost to the point of violence.

Patricia Arquette masterfully plays the clearly mentally ill mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, but covers it up by pretending to be an intensely attentive mother to her terminally ill daughter Gypsy Rose (Joey King, who’s wonderful). Beware, there’s a lot of spoilers below, so if you haven’t watched the series in full, don’t read any further. It was an extreme case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and though I didn’t pay the story too much attention at the time, the facts of the story make for one hell of a television show. It was one of those “you’re never going to believe this” type articles about a mother who systematically abused and brainwashed her own child into believing she was incredibly sick, even though there was nothing truly wrong with her. I remember hearing about this story when it happened. This true crime story is based on Dee Dee Blanchard and her abuse of her daughter Gypsy Rose. Hulu’s series THE ACT, shows just how hard it is to break free from the compromised nurture of a parent, even after the most intense act of defiance.

Hulu the act true story