The role of a lifetime! Joey King embraced portraying Gypsy Rose Blanchard in Hulu’s The Act, despite the many challenges that accompanied the dark role.
“It was a bizarrely enjoyable experience to able to completely strip away all vanity and become Gypsy, so f–k what other people say, I’m proud of myself,” the 19-year-old actress revealed in As If magazine’s latest issue of shaving her head to portray Gypsy, who is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for her involvement in her mother Dee Dee Blanchard’s murder. “People have been asking me if I am a method actor who stayed in character on and off set and the answer to that is no. I’m not the type of person that can do that mentally, it would take too much of a toll on me.”
Gypsy, 27, made headlines in 2016, one year after her mother’s death, after BuzzFeed reported that Dee Dee faked her daughter’s various diseases, which led Gypsy’s former boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to kill Dee Dee. Gypsy pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in July 2015, while Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison for a first-degree murder conviction.
“There were times when I took Gypsy home and it was really hard to shake her off,” the Kissing Booth actress admitted. “I had to decompress by watching cartoons. I started the process of becoming her by getting to know her through information available online, like news articles and videos.”
King added that she takes time on set “to get into a certain headspace” before the cameras start rolling. “It’s interesting because I’m playing a character I don’t have a lot in common with, so getting in that headspace takes more focus, because I’m trying to relate to something that I can’t possibly begin to imagine,” she noted. “Once I started getting into the headspace of the heavier scenes, the character that I came to know took over me. Once I started going to that place, my character knew what to do.”
Tatijana Shoan, photographer and editor in chief of As If, exclusively told Us Weekly why working with King was a “joyous” experience: “Her inner brightness and playfulness, combined with an indescribable depth, resulted in a portfolio of images as alluring as the subject herself.”
The Act is now streaming on Hulu.
