Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman are aware of the issues Vili Fualaau has had with how his personal life inspired their movie May December.
Before celebrating the film’s success at the Golden Globes on Sunday, January 7, Moore, 63, and Portman, 42, addressed Fualaau’s public criticism.
Moore said she was “sorry” to hear that Fualaau, 40, wasn’t thrilled with the final product.
“I mean, [director] Todd [Haynes] was always very clear when we were working on this movie that this was an original story, this was a story about these characters,” she noted to Entertainment Tonight on Sunday. “So that’s how we looked at it, too. This was our document, we created these characters from the page and together.”
Portman also maintained that May December wasn’t solely based on Fualaau’s controversial relationship with the late Mary Kay Letourneau.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” she added while speaking with ET. “It’s not based on them. 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, and yeah, it’s its own story. It’s not meant to be a biopic.”
Letourneau made headlines in 1996 for the statutory rape of Fualaau, who was her sixth-grade student at the time. She served three months in jail for two counts of felony second-degree rape and later received a six-year prison sentence for making contact with Fualaau again. The pair ultimately welcomed two kids and were married for more than a decade before their 2019 separation.
Meanwhile, May December stars Portman as an actress named Elizabeth who travels to meet and study the life of Gracie (Moore), who she is set to play in a project. Gracie’s notorious romance with Joe (Charles Melton), who is 23 years her junior, is the subject of the fictional film.
Faulaau, who has remained out of the spotlight over the years, recently broke his silence on how his life inspired the movie.
“I’m still alive and well. If they had reached out to me, we could have worked together on a masterpiece. Instead, they chose to do a ripoff of my original story,” he told The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday, January 4. “I’m offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given to me — who lived through a real story and is still living it.”
He added: “I love movies — good movies. And I admire ones that capture the essence and complications of real-life events. You know, movies that allow you to see or realize something new every time you watch them. Those kinds of writers and directors — someone who can do that — would be perfect to work with, because my story is not nearly as simple as this movie [portrays].”
Many details of Gracie and Joe’s fictional romance appeared to closely mirror Letourneau and Fualaau, including an onscreen conversation about their age gap which resembled an interview Letourneau and Faulaau did after going public.
Two months before May December started to stream on Netflix, Haynes broke down how Moore used Letourneau to shape her character.
“This idea of how does this kind of original relationship occur? What is the myth these two people tell each other about the roles they’re playing?” Haynes said at a New York Film Festival screening in September 2023. “She’s not a pedophile, this woman; she doesn’t have a history of going after every little teenage boy. There’s something very specific that happened to these two people.”
Haynes also pointed out that Moore based her speaking voice on past footage of Letourneau, who died at age 58 in 2020 from cancer.
“To be honest, there were things in kind of a loose upper palate that we did find interesting in Mary Kay Letourneau’s speech that was a kick-off for her. And she took it further,” Haynes said of Moore’s approach. “[These creative decisions] helped us to sort of understand how this happened or the delusions that helped produce it.”
