CXone Studio REST Proxy returning null on JSON parse

The docs state: “The GetRESTProxy action returns the response body as a string.” I’m trying to parse a simple JSON payload from an internal endpoint, but the ASSIGN action keeps failing with a type mismatch. The endpoint returns valid JSON, checked in Postman. Here’s the snippet:

{
 "actions": [
 {
 "action": "GetRESTProxy",
 "parameters": {
 "url": "https://internal-api.example.com/data",
 "method": "GET",
 "contentType": "application/json"
 }
 },
 {
 "action": "ASSIGN",
 "parameters": {
 "variableName": "parsedData",
 "value": "{{$.response.body}}"
 }
 }
 ]
}

Then I try to access parsedData.field in a subsequent IF action. It doesn’t work. The variable parsedData seems to be a string, not an object. I tried wrapping it in JSON.parse() in the ASSIGN value field, but Studio complains about invalid syntax. The docs don’t mention a built-in JSON parser in Studio expressions. Is there a hidden function or am I missing a step? I’ve tried setting the acceptType to application/json in the GetRESTProxy parameters, but it still returns a string. The error log just says “Cannot read property ‘field’ of undefined.” What’s the correct way to convert the response body to an object in a Studio snippet?