Joey King’s Gypsy Rose Blanchard Meets Her (Literal) Partner in Crime in New The Act Trailer
Last month, Nicholas Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard. In an instance of eerily perfect timing, in just over a week the upcoming Hulu series The Act will give a closer look at how Godejohn (played by Calum Worthy) conspired with Gypsy Rose Blanchard (Joey King, nearly unrecognizable) to kill her mother, played by Patricia Arquette.
A new trailer for the first season of the anthology series was released on Monday. In contrast to the previous teaser, this full-length video not only dives deeper into the pattern of psychological and physical abuse Dee Dee allegedly inflicted on Gypsy Rose, it also broadens the Blanchards’ world, introducing Worthy as Godejohn and Chloë Sevigny and AnnaSophia Robb as a mother and daughter who live near and befriend the Blanchards.
In the two-minute clip, Arquette as Dee Dee, who is widely believed to have had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, claims that her daughter has paraplegia, a heart murmur, epilepsy, “the mind of a 7-year-old,” and a sugar allergy so serious that she sprints across a birthday party to knock an uneaten cupcake out of Gypsy Rose’s hand and stab her leg with an Epipen. She’s shown treating these ailments by concocting medicines of her own, forcing pills down her daughter’s throat, and tying up Gypsy Rose when she resists. As Dee Dee builds a friendship with Sevigny’s character, Mel, Gypsy Rose’s social circle expands too. She befriends Mel’s daughter, Lacey, and also strikes up an illicit online relationship with Godejohn, sneaking out of her room to chat with him late at night.
Of course, the trailer also hints at the not-so-happy ending for Gypsy Rose and her “Prince Charming”: They eventually began spending those late-night chat sessions plotting to kill her controlling, abusive mother. Godejohn carried out their plan in June 2015, resulting in his recent life sentence, while Gypsy Rose was sentenced to 10 years in prison for second-degree murder; her trial will also be depicted in the series, and the trailer gave glimpses of a scared-looking King sitting in a courtroom wearing a bright orange jumpsuit.
The Act debuts on March 15; subsequent seasons of the anthology series will each revolve around a different “startling, stranger-than-fiction” true-crime case, per Hulu.
