Joey King Shaves Head for Hulu’s The Act Playing Gypsy Rose Blanchard

Joey King may be your new favorite rom-com star thanks to her role in Netflix’s smash hit film, The Kissing Booth, but the actress is returning back to her dramatic roots for her role in Hulu’s true crime anthology series, The Act — and she’s getting into character by shaving off all her hair.

“My name for the next 4 months, is Gypsy Rose Blanchard,” the 19-year-old star captioned a video of herself getting her head shaved on Instagram. “This story is very disturbing and I am honored to be able to portray it. What a wild ride this will be on “The Act” @hulu.”

Season one of The Act tells the real life story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the Missouri woman who murdered her abusive mother Dee Dee Blanchard after her mom manipulated her into portraying herself as terminally ill for almost her whole life.

Dee Dee, who will be played by Patricia Arquette, began to abuse Gypsy soon after she was born up until Dee Dee’s 2015 death. In an attempt to escape her mother’s harmful hold, Gypsy ultimately murdered her in 2015 at the age of 23 and is serving 10 years in prison for second degree murder.

Experts have said that Gypsy was the victim of Munchausen by proxy, a rare form of abuse in which a guardian — in this case Gypsy’s mother — exaggerates or induces illness in a child for attention and sympathy.

The new anthology series, The Act, is set to tell stranger-than-fiction true crime stories and it all kicks off with this harrowing mother-daughter story based on the 2016 Buzzfeed article, “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered.”

In an interview with Allure, King revealed that her major hair change didn’t phase her very much. “I’ve never really had an attachment to my hair. I couldn’t care less what happens to it,” she said. “No part of me was nervous or was second-guessing it. So many people would ask me, ‘Are you really scared?’ or ‘Are you nervous?’ or say, ‘You’re so brave.’ And I’d go, ‘I’m not brave, I’m just cutting my hair off.’”

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King has some practice with hair transformations for roles. In the 2014 film, Wish I Was Here, the then-14-year-old actually shaved her head herself on-screen and for the 2012 movie, The Dark Knight Rises, she also sported a buzz cut throughout the film.