The Truth About Nick Godejohn’s Unsettling Police Interview in ‘The Act’ for the Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard
[Warning: Spoilers for The Act episode 7, “Bonnie & Clyde,” ahead.]
In this week’s episode of The Act, everything finally catches up to Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her boyfriend, Nick Godejohn. Despite fleeing to his home in Big Bend, Wisconsin, a few serious screwups lead to the couple’s capture. Gypsy had the idea to mail the knife to themselves, but when it came to ditching the evidence somewhere it couldn’t be found, the two were unprepared. Oh, and that menacing Facebook post (that’s still live, btw)? Turns out Gypsy was desperate for someone to find her mother’s body instead of letting her waste away alone. But rookie move, she forgot to switch off Facebook’s location feature. That brings us to their arrest and drastically different police interviews.
Although together they agree to tell the truth, Gypsy (Joey King) denies any and all involvement in her mom’s murder (but the detective is unconvinced). Meanwhile, Nick (Calum Worthy) is spilling everything in the next room, without a hint of the emotional distress he was exuding throughout the episode.
“In the closet, they agree to just tell the truth because the truth will set them free and because they believe that they are in the right. So I tell the truth, they’ll be fine,” Calum explains to me over the phone when I ask what caused his character’s change in behavior. “So once he’s arrested and he’s in the interrogation room with the police officer, he feels very calm because he really believes that it’s going to be okay. He believes that by explaining what happened, they’ll all understand and everyone can go back home.” So Nick didn’t really understand the consequences, Calum insists. “In that moment, he really believes that he was going to be okay, because he was...he was the hero that saved her.”
Calum is what some might call a “method actor.” Even before his audition for The Act, he dedicating himself to studying the case and Nick’s mind-set. He subsisted on pizza and peanut butter alone because that was Nick’s basic, everyday diet. It wasn’t the violent killing or fascinating BDSM relationship he shared with Gypsy that drew Calum to Nick. “I thought it was interesting that in a lot of the coverage that I’d seen surrounding him, they would often talk about him as a murderer,” he says. “Yes, he’d murdered someone, but he had a lot of life that he lived before that event, he’s living with a lot of life after that, even if it is in prison. I was really interested in the parts of Nick that we didn’t know about yet.”
But how did he get into the mind-set of Victor, Nick’s alleged murderous alter ego? “I knew that Nick had a lot of dark and disturbing thoughts, so I watched very disturbing videos at night until I fell asleep,” he says. But it didn’t stop there. “Once Nick committed the crime, I knew that he kept thinking about the images of what...what he had seen. So I found pictures online of the crime scene itself and one from the documentary, and I would put them on my phone, I’d look at them before I fell asleep, so I’d kind of be haunted by those images at night.” *shivers at the thought*
In fact, Calum’s only escape from those dark thoughts, and from Nick, was Joey herself. “At the very end when we’d wrap, Joey would show me memes on Instagram and I would just laugh, and that would...that would bring me out of the character.” (Check their fave meme, here.)
So, how does Calum think Nick takes it once he finds out Gypsy lays the entire crime at his feet? “It’s going to crush him. Nick is destroyed, because he really believed he was doing the right thing and that he was...he was helping her and is confused as to why his sentence would be different than hers.” I can tell Calum truly feels for Nick-there’s an incredible amount of empathy in the way he talks about him. I ask him what he thinks of Nick’s sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He doesn’t know about a lighter sentence, but he does want something for Nick. “I do hope that he’s feeling at peace with himself, and I hope that he’s safe and okay.”
“I was fascinated with the idea that Nick and Gypsy did have a real love story,” Calum says. “For that brief period of time that they were actually together, that was real. And they were the heroes of their own story.”
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