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6 major times The Act strayed from the real story

By Jerald Raymond Pierce

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The Act — “Stay Inside” – Episode 104 — Gypsy’s getting older and Dee Dee is forced to new legal maneuvers to keep control of her “little girl.” But Dee Dee’s limited by her own health problems, and Gypsy goes to greater lengths than ever to connect with men and experience a sexual awakening. Dee Dee Blanchard (Patricia Arquette) and Gypsy Rose Blanchard (Joey King), shown. (Photo by: Brownie Harris/Hulu)

The Act has drawn a lot of attention for its depiction of a bazaar real story of a mother and her daughter. However, it’s possible that the Hulu series takes liberties which keep the story from being as dark as what happened in real life.

Movies and television shows based on real-life events (like Hulu’s The Act) are always bound to take liberties for the sake of storytelling. Sometimes it works out for the best, others it completely wrecks the source material they’re working from.

Michelle Dean wrote an in-depth article for BuzzFeed that brought a very bright spotlight to the dark story behind Gypsy Rose Blanchard and the death of her mother Dee Dee. That 2016 article led to Dean leading the charge on bringing Gypsy’s story to Hulu.

Prior to The Act hitting Hulu, there was the HBO special documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest (by documentarian Erin Lee Carr). And after The Act wraps up there’s set to be another retelling of Gypsy’s story By Proxy.

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The latter is being put together by Gypsy’s real step-mother (Kristy Blanchard) and family friend (and writer) Francesca “Fancy” Macelli. It’s worth noting that Marcelli is the only “official” owner of Gypsy’s life story (per In Touch Weekly).

Ok, all of that is to say, a lot of people have opinions about what went on between Gypsy and her mother and it will forever be impossible to know all of the details since Dee Dee cannot speak for her actions. But throughout The Act’s run on Hulu Macelli and others have been speaking up about some questionable changes The Act’s creative team have decided to make to an already complicated story.

Macelli does say she understands that people have to take liberties with real stories. But, she told In Touch, “It went beyond the fact of, ‘Okay, we’re taking some different liberties with it,’ to, ‘Alright, we’re just gonna totally stray from anything that actually happened, and we’re just gonna go ahead and create this strange narrative that we are going ahead and doing.’ … I kind of looked at it and said, ‘It’s not true crime, and it’s not drama.’ It’s sort of a weird horror that’s kind of bastardizing the story, truthfully.”

From what I’ve seen, here are six big changes The Act has made so far that will completely change how you see what really happened in Gypsy’s life.

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