in conversation

The Act’s Michelle Dean Doesn’t Think Gypsy Rose Blanchard Should Be in Jail

Some critics have slammed the press for allegedly downplaying Dean’s role in the production—but the journalist-turned-TV creator would much rather talk about her show’s majority-female creative team, and what Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s real-life ordeal tells us about the justice system.

By Laura Bradley

March 22, 2019

The Act is a story as repellant as it is enthralling—a tale of mother-daughter tension at its most gruesome extremes. The Hulu series, which debuted this week, is an adaptation of co-creator Michelle Dean’s instantly viral 2016 BuzzFeed story, “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter to Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered.”

Dee Dee Blanchard likely suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which sufferers feign or induce symptoms of physical or psychological illness in another person—in this case, her daughter, Gypsy Rose. (Dee Dee was dead by the time the story made national news, and thus could never be officially diagnosed.) Throughout Gypsy’s childhood, her mother drugged her with an unknown cocktail of medications, forced her to use an unnecessary wheelchair and feeding tube, and subjected her to multiple painful surgeries. All of this plays out on-screen in The Act, making the show at times sickening to watch—but due in large part to the performances of leads Patricia Arquette and Joey King, it’s also nearly impossible to look away from.

In an interview, Dean said that Hollywood expressed interest in her story within days of its publication—“and it sort of came as a surprise.” This signaled to Dean that someone would adapt her story regardless of whether she was part of the process herself. Obviously, certain elements of the tale would have to be dramatized—but as she said, “it was important to me that somebody who knew about the case be heavily involved.” In the end, Dean and co-creator Nick Antosca collaborated on a series that can be tough viewing—but only because its characters are so completely, undeniably human.

Vanity Fair: You’ve said you wanted this adaptation to be grounded in emotion, rather than taking a more lurid approach. What specific choices did you and Nick make to achieve that goal?

Michelle Dean: We both made the decision that certain things that came to light in the reporting weren’t integral to the story and didn’t need to be focused on. So there’s a certain amount of just picking and choosing the parts of the story that we thought were more emotionally resonant as opposed to just shocking.

And then, a really direct way that it happened, and this is credited to Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, who did Episodes 1, 2, and 6—as our pilot director, she got to set a lot of the tone of our show. She went into [the Blanchards’] house, which is very colorful, obviously, in real life, and she elevated the palette in a way that I really admire. She made it possible to an audience to see why they found the world that they lived in so beautiful, and I feel like that choice about the set design informed a lot of what we were thinking about: how do we dramatize this so that people can see the situation in the way that the people who lived it did, as closely as possible?

How did you decide which aspects of the Blanchards’ inner lives would be ethical to imagine, and which wouldn’t be?

It’s a really interesting question, and I think we did this as thoughtfully and consciously as we could under the circumstances. But I think part of that is just being thoughtful about it at all points, right? I don’t think that Gypsy, the real person, was far from the minds of anybody on the production throughout the time that we were working on it.

I think ethically, it’s less about drawing a line at a certain situation, or a certain fact or visual, and more about asking yourself, Are we doing this in a thoughtful way? if we are choosing to depart from fact—and where we have to depart from fact because of pacing, or tone, or lots of other demands that television makes on us. The question is, Are we aware of what we’re really doing?

How did the writers’ room discuss how to handle Dee Dee’s character? Obviously, she committed a lot of monstrous acts, but as you’ve noted, she was also likely suffering from Munchausen by proxy. How do you convey that without painting a possibly mentally ill person as evil with a capital “E”?

Yeah. Well, and also the things that she did are unquestionably evil, right? I mean, that’s one way to do it. So I had the writers’ room read Rachel Cusk, who had, it’s called A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, and Adrienne Rich [who wrote Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution]. And Vivian Gornick wrote a book about her mother called Fierce Attachments. I had them all read those books in part because I wanted to have a more wholesome discussion among us about the trope of the Good Mother, which was obviously like a fantasy that Dee Dee was trying to live out. She really strained to be the good mother who somehow ended up to be the exact opposite, and I think that that is an interesting duality.

We don’t know very much about Dee Dee because she’s gone, and she never really spoke to this experience. We had to guess pretty much everything. But a lot of that was informed by that intellectual work on mothers. It’s not to say that there are any mothers like Dee Dee in those books; it’s more about the cultural constructs of motherhood, and the way in which it can be really damaging to women to [seek] this kind of validation without mediation.

Michelle Dean.

By David Buchan/Variety/REX/Shutterstock.

What was it like to transition from telling this story as one person to collaborating with a writers’ room—especially one that included so many women?

It was great. The thing that I most enjoyed about this process—and Im so grateful to Nick for introducing me to it—is the collaborative nature of the writers’ room. I was initially a little bit like, it’s going to be weird—I’m not sure how this is going to work out. And Nick insisted that I was going to find it helpful. We had a blessed writers’ room that was able to move very nimbly and very quickly, but was also filled with deeply intelligent writers. We chose very carefully, and we ended up with writers who had worked on Mad Men and Better Call Saul and Westworld, and had really a good, strong backing in prestige television and prestige storytelling. Which, I kind of hate the word ‘prestige storytelling,’ but the truth is it meant that they were into a sort of complexity. And that we really needed here.

It was great to not feel alone, especially because it’s really dark subject matter and it can be a really intense subject to just sort of live in for a really long time.

There has been some discussion on Twitter about certain articles in which it seems your contributions to the show might have been downplayed. Did you initially feel like that was the case?

I think what I really want to focus on is just the fact that we were a show, and Nick was also the leader of the show, but it was produced by so many women. And that we had a majority-female writers’ room, we had majority-female directors—and we also had some great men working on the show, don’t get me wrong—but, you know, it’s still like a little bit rare to have that achievement. And it was really gratifying in terms of shaping the show that we have into something that gets into pretty dark and deep subject matter. A lot of that is tied to budding female sexuality. And it was just really gratifying to have all of these people participating in it. And I’d love to be talking about that more.

As somebody who has now seen so many sides of this story—you have a legal background, you’ve reported the story, you’ve adapted it—what do you take away from it all?

Well, because you alluded to the legal background: I don’t really think that the best place for Gypsy is prison. I think that what this case shows us is that the justice system isn’t prepared to apprehend cases at this level of complexity. She got a sentence of 10 years [because] at least she pled out to second-degree murder, but nonetheless, it’s still a long time in jail, or in prison, and it’s a long time without possibly appropriate treatment. And that seems to be how the justice system works. It’s a blunt, one-size-fits-all solution for people in very complicated cases.

And that goes for Nicholas Godejohn too, who just got sentenced to life without parole in this case. Again, it feels like the justice system had no way to apprehend his own challenges and talk about them, and so he wound up in a situation where he was convicted and that was it.

What are you hoping viewers will take away from the show once they get through all of the episodes?

I hope that they understand that these are people. It sounds so dumb and reductive in a way to say that these people are human beings, but I think that we all have a tendency when we hear a story like this to just sort of shut down. Which is how I interpret a lot of the “this is crazy, insane,” commentary that I hear all the time about this case. I think it’s easier for people just to shut down and have that reaction than it is to actually engage with what the real human experience of this must have been like—and the real human experience was wrenching, and really, really difficult. And that still deserves to be engaged with, even if we’re uncomfortable about it.