I had compassion for mom but don’t expect that or force it on the audience. I imagine people will come away with extreme sympathy for Gypsy, rightfully so. They might say, ‘Well, you are too much in our business.’ (Laughs) I’ll be like, ‘I don’t tape you to a chair!’
I believe my kids will watch this movie and be able to relate to certain things. That’s what our movie is about, the extreme sickness. When we subjugate ourselves to another person, which is what parenthood is, there is this weird moment of imbalance. Doesn’t every teenager say, ‘Let me be!’ and ‘Back off!’ at some point? The acts seem so monstrous to me - this behavior between the mother and the child, and yet when I think about it every teenager wants to murder their parents at some point. You can go back to Greek drama to Medea and find links of that heinous behavior of Medea killing her kids over jealously, and the Oedipal stories. Harden: Anytime I do something I hope people can see a reflection of a potential image of themselves in a mirror. What do you want people to walk away after seeing this movie? She was very culpable, but she was also really trapped. She had multiple online boyfriends, so she had that to prove she wasn’t a minor. that gave her real age that she could show and say she’s not this younger age. She’s definitely responsible for her actions. We’d shoot and I was sitting in a wheelchair all day, so it came pretty naturally to feel sick, ill, and trapped. What did you do physically to make yourself look ill? we had to tell the story that was on paper. Because our is an ‘inspired by’ it was very hard because we’d want to put every single thing in. Harden: Emily loves crime and she turned me on to all these fascinating podcasts where you can learn more about the true people. Skeggs: We watched a lot of interviews and the HBO documentary Mommie Dead and Dearest. What kind of research did you do for this?
Skeggs: It was really complicated and also easy to understand how a doctor would miss it or be unable to identify it or know how to treat it.
Her mother did feed her cancer meds and continued to give her medications that continued to make her sick. She fought, but she was culpable in a lot of ways. felt trapped, but she also made choices to stay and take that trip to Disneyland and to have that feeding tube because her mom wanted her to have it. Skeggs: Yeah, I hope people walk away with a deeper understanding of how complicated the situation is. Viewers might watch this and think, “If this were me, I’d try to get out of this situation somehow.” I’m terrified of it, but I read about it, watch it, and I listen to it. Harden: That’s right! You are a true-crime junkie! Also, I was attracted to this because I’m a true-crime junkie. Obviously, was the sicker one.Įmily Skeggs: She is sick because she needs her daughter’s illness to give her purpose or to give her something that she’s not finding in her own life without it. I felt there was a parallel desperation between the two characters. The more that I learned, the more I discovered it’s about abuser and victim and that symbiotic relationship. I was interested what the physical world of that character was and that transformation. How horrifying it is to have that authority and position in the world to be a mother and use that to the declination of another person. Marcia Gay Harden: I didn’t know about Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, but after I did it was like a train wreck. Read on as Harden and Skeggs talk about delving into this bizarre world and their future projects, including a possible return for Harden to Law & Order: SVU. Just as Dee Dee was killed by Gypsy and her boyfriend, Camile also meets her final fate at the hands of Esme and her beau. The real and reel life stories are parallel. Inspired by this real-life crime drama, Lifetime is airing Love You to Death, which tells the story of Camile Stoller (Marcia Gay Harden) and her daughter Esme (Emily Skeggs). In 2015, the investigation into the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard revealed that she had suffered from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a disorder where she forced her daughter Gypsy Rose to partake in a bizarre fraud that made people think that Gypsy was severely ill in order to gain sympathy.