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May December stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore have responded to Vili Fualaau's critique of their movie, May December, Entertainment Tonight exclusively reported.
The actresses said that the film wasn't meant to tell Vualaau's same exact story with his ex Mary Kay Letourneau.
Portman said, “It's not based on them,” at the 2024 Golden Globes red carpet.
May December: not a biopic
“Obviously their story influenced the culture that we all grew up in and influenced the idea. But it's fictional characters that are really brought to life by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton so beautifully,” she added.
May December follows the story of fictional actress Elizabeth Berry (Portman) who goes to visit Gracie (Moore) and Joe (Melton), the married couple on whom her current film is based. Gracie, who was 36, met and had a dubious relationship with then-13-year-old Joe. She did prison time for child rape. After she was released, she and Joe got married. Years later, the couple have three children, one of whom Gracie gave birth to while incarcerated.
Samy Burch, who wrote the screenplay, stated that Letourneau and Fualaau's relationship inspired her to write the film. Letourneau was 34 and Fualaau was 12 when they met and had a an inappropriate relationship in 1996.
Portman continued to say that the film is “its own story — it's not meant to be a biopic.”
Moore concurred and stated that Todd Haynes, the director, “was always very clear when we were working on this movie that this was an original story. This was a story about these characters.”
“So that's how we looked at it too. This was our document. We created these characters from the page,” she continued.
Vili Fualaau offended by depiction
However, Fualauu, who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter and said that he was “offended by the entire project and lack of respect given to me — who lived through a real story and is still living it.”
“I'm still alive and well. If they had reached out to me, we could have worked together on a masterpiece,” the 40-year-old Fualaau said of May December.
“Instead, they chose to do a ripoff of my original story,” he added.
Both actresses said that they were sorry he felt that way, but insisted that it the film wasn't meant to be the Mary Kay-and-Vili story, but was the movie's own.
For Moore it was a challenging and complex role, one that earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture.
She told ET, “It was a very challenging part.”
“She's somebody who has transgressed in a major way and I think in order to justify what she's done, she sort of tells a story about her life. There's a lot of — I don't know, it's interesting. You know Natalie's character comes in and these two women are in a struggle for narrative dominance. Who gets to tell this story, who's right, who's wrong.”
May December was also nominated for three other awards: Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy for Portman, Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture for Melton and Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy for the movie.
