Patricia Arquette was busy un-transforming. She was returning to her old self, after being Tilly in “Escape to Dannemora.”
Then she found Dee Dee and “The Act.”
“I started losing weight after ‘Dannemora,’“ Arquette sid. “Then I stopped for this.”
It’s another true story, another troubled soul, another transformation — this time holding back a tad.
For “Dannemora,” Arquette put on weight, changed her voice, became a replica of the woman who aided a prison break. She won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award, with more to come.
Then, just as she was trimming down, came this role. “This real lady was like a hundred pounds more and I thought, ‘I will die, … so I’ll just stop here.’”
Still, it’s another drastic change in voice and mood. Arquette becomes Dee Dee, hovering over her seemingly disabled teen-ager, Gypsy
That also meant a transformation for Joey King, 19. “Along with shaving my head, …. I wear several stages of fake teeth,” King said. Then there was “being in the wheelchair, being in Gypsy’s clothing.”
Dee Dee clung to an earlier image of Gypsy. She was, Arquette said, “keeping her young (with) the color palette … of their pink house, their purple walls, their dolls and their stuffed animals.”
Many parents may cling to younger images of their kids, but Dee Dee went further. It became a murder story “about love that is so extreme it becomes toxic,” said screenwriter Nick Ancosta.
He created “The Act” with Michelle Wolf, a lawyer-turned-journalist who had written about this in Buzzfeed. Dee Dee fooled everyone, Wolf said, including herself. “To be a successful fraudster, you usually have to believe the fraud.”
It is, Arquette said, “a distorted love affair. I am a little exhausted of playing crazy women.”
— “The Act,” eight-week mini-series; available starting Wednesday, March 20, on Hulu.