UPDATE: This article was originally published on May 21, 2019.
After the highly anticipated trailer for Once Upon a Time In... Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino's dive into 1960s Hollywood, dropped, people were thrilled to see the star-studded cast. The sneak peek featured plenty of familiar faces including Leonardo DiCaprio as down-on-his-luck actor Rick Dalton, Brad Pitt as stuntman Cliff Booth, Al Pacino as Hollywood producer Marvin Schwarzs, Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, and Damon Herriman as Charles Manson.
But if you looked closely, you'll also saw a snippet of Lena Dunham's character Gypsy in Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood, who couldn't be more different from her Girls character, Hannah Horvath. For starters, it doesn't seem that Dunham's Once Upon a Time character gets any financial support from her parents, and she's definitely not living in a fancy NYC apartment.
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Instead, Dunham has unruly, frizzy hair and dons a loose frock. She seems to be a more maternal member of the film's version of the Manson family. Donning a loose-fitting smock and looking after her fellow Manson girls, Gypsy is one of the first people Pitt's Cliff Booth meets when he discovers the Manson family. Dunham's character, Catherine "Gypsy" Share, is fictionalized take on a real member of Charles Manson's notorious family cult.
But it's important to note that Share was not involved in any killings that the "family" was responsible for, including the murders of Sharon Tate and her houseguests, in the summer of 1969. In an interview with Australia's 60 Minutes, however, Share admitted that she understands why other Manson family members agreed to the murders.
"He just made you feel good about yourself," she said. "He gave women what they needed in a lot of different ways. So they wanted to be with him."
Share added that Manson's followers felt compelled to do anything for him because they were terrified of what they believed to be an imminent race war. They also viewed him as a Christ-like figure who could do no wrong.
Once Upon a Time In... Hollywood focuses a bit on the events leading up to the murders, including the time Manson's Family spent at Spahn Ranch, the 55-acre plot of land that sometimes served as a filming location for Westerns. In Tarantino's fictionalized version of events, Manson's girls meet Pitt's Cliff Booth, which is how the world of Hollywood is suddenly tied to one of the most notorious cult leaders in American history. Ultimately, though, the film is more about the changing tides in Hollywood at the time, and DiCaprio's Rick Dalton struggling to keep up, than it is about Manson (Daimon Herriman's scraggly visage of "Charlie" appears only briefly in a few scenes).
With so many actors — including Kurt Russell, Timothy Olyphant, Damian Lewis, Dakota Fanning, Emile Hirsch, and Margaret Qualley — and Tarantino's signature dark humor, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is bound to keep people talking long after its summer release.