Patricia Arquette to star in Hulu series based on murder case profiled in Mommy Dead And Dearest

Patricia Arquette won an Oscar for her portrayal of a mom who’s trying her best in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, and now she’s set to play a very different maternal figure for Hulu. As Deadline reports, Arquette has landed a starring role in season one of The Act, an upcoming anthology series that will dramatize a different, notorious case from the rubbernecking annals of true crime. The first season is based on the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard, a woman perceived by her friends and neighbors to be the doting mother of a severely disabled child. Her daughter Gypsy Rose, Dee Dee claimed, suffered from a staggering number of mental and physical ailments, from sleep apena to leukemia. The truth, as laid out in the HBO documentary Mommy Dead And Dearest, was much stranger—and more disturbing—than that.

We’ll say no more, but if you want to read the details of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose’s case, you can read the 2016 Buzzfeed article that season one of The Act is based on. The author of that article, Michelle Dean, is co-writing the season with Channel Zero creator Nick Antosca; Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, an actress and director of the upcoming Mustang, is set to direct. Arquette will star as Dee Dee Blanchard; casting for Gypsy Rose has yet to be announced.