Since her release from prison, Gypsy Rose Blanchard has watched one episode of The Act — but she isn’t sure how she feels about it.
“I think Joey King did an amazing job playing me,” Blanchard, 32, exclusively told Us Weekly while promoting her new Lifetime series, Gypsy Rose Life After Lock Up, which premieres on Monday, June 3. “I was a little bit harder on Patricia Arquette playing my mom just because it’s my life. I am very hypercritical of it.”
While 2019’s The Act attempted to depict Blanchard’s life growing up, she shared that her new show, Gypsy Rose Life After Lock Up, will depict “who [she is] today.”
“I kind of feel like with The Prison Confessions, I’ve already cleared up so much of misinformation as to my past, and so this is very future-based,” she explained.
Gypsy, who was released from prison in December 2023 after serving seven years for her mother Dee Dee Blanchard’s murder, wanted to create Gypsy Rose Life After Lock Up to show people the real her.
“From the moment that I was released until [the] present, this has been something that I have wanted viewers to be along this journey with me because it has been so many ups and downs,” she told Us. “When I was about to get released, I was sitting in my prison cell and I was thinking about all this and I’m like, ‘I’m so tired of this prison version of myself that I think people know me by.’ … I want to break that mold and show people who I am as an individual.”
Since being released from prison, Gypsy has struggled adjusting back into everyday life — especially with her life being in the public eye.
“Everything around me is different. Even the language that people are using … they’re using new slang than they used to,” she explained, adding that she didn’t realize all the social media “hype” surrounding her release. “I felt like I was the last to know that I was the sort of [this] pseudocelebrity, but I don’t like being labeled a celebrity. That’s just another title put on me by society, and I am just Gypsy.”
While Gypsy noted that it is hard to “blend in with the crowd” because of her public life, she has gotten to share some good moments since venturing out into the world again.
“It’s the simple things,” she gushed. “I had Taco Bell. [My boyfriend] Ken [Urker] had taken me to Taco Bell for the first time and bought everything on the menu, and so that was enjoyable. I went to the beach for the first time because I’ve been to a lake in the past, but I had not been to the ocean where I can walk on the sand and know what that feels like. So that was a wonderful first.”
Gypsy Rose Life After Lock Up premieres on Lifetime Monday, June 3, at 9 p.m. ET.
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
