May December stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore have weighed in on Vili Fualaau’s staunch criticism of their movie.
Fualaau, the ex-husband of convicted rapist May Kay Letourneau, told The Hollywood Reporter last week that he felt the film was a “ripoff of [his] original story” and that he was “offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given” to him.
May December, Portman told Entertainment Tonight, is “its own story—it’s not meant to be a biopic.” In the Todd Haynes film, Portman plays an actress assigned to portray Moore’s character, a woman who began a sexual relationship with, and later married, a seventh grader when she was in her thirties. The story resembles the controversy surrounding Fualaau’s marriage to Letourneau, his former sixth grade teacher; he was 12 when they struck up a sexual relationship. In 1997, Letourneau pleaded guilty to the second-degree child rape of Fualaau and served a seven-year stint in prison.
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“It’s not based on them,” Portman said of Letourneau and Fualaau. “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.”
Moore, Portman, and Melton—whose character, Joe, is loosely based on Fualaau—all received Golden Globe nominations for their performances in May December, which hit Netflix last month.
Moore, who also spoke with ET, echoed Portman’s comments. She said that 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. So that’s how we looked at it too. This was our document. We created these characters from the page.”
Last year, The Daily Beast asked Haynes how much he thought about the Letourneau story while making the film. The director replied, “I really started by pushing that to the side and just being like, OK, let’s bear down on the specific choices and the distinctions that Samy Burch’s script makes from the Mary Kay Letourneau story.
“But there was no way ultimately to not,” Haynes added.
