Mary Kay Letourneau's ex Vili Fualaau says he's 'offended' by “May December”
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"They chose to do a ripoff of my original story," Mary Kay Letourneau's ex-husband says in a new interview about the Todd Haynes film.
May December may be fiction, but it's too close to comfort for Villi Fualaau, who expressed his frustration with the film in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
When Fualaau was 12 years old, he entered a sexual relationship with his 34-year-old sixth-grade teacher, Mary Kay Letourneau. Their relationship (which was a tabloid scandal in 1996, and remains infamous to this day) is the inspiration for the age-gap marriage between Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) and Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) in May December.
“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," Fualaau said, adding, “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."
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There are important differences between May December and Fualaau's life. For one thing, much of the Todd Haynes-directed film revolves around a totally invented character, the actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), and her interactions with Gracie and Joe while she works on a movie about their life.
May December also strongly empathizes with Joe's emotions, as Elizabeth's questions inspire him to start thinking critically about his life. That gives Melton a lot to play, and his performance is earning enough buzz that he seems likely to earn an Oscar nomination.
"What's more salient to me is to think about what happens to Joe," Portman told EW last year. "That's really the heart of it. These two callous, manipulative women try to convince him of their version of the truth — because whatever he subscribes to will be the one that is true. He has to decide what to do with his life after these two women stand off."
The makers of May December have previously acknowledged that, while they were inspired by the saga of Letourneau (who died of cancer in 2020 after separating from Fualaau in 2019), they didn't want to mimic the real story beat-for-beat.
“Certainly that’s the seed of it, the big picture thing, but it was important to me that this wasn’t the Mary Kay Letourneau story,” screenwriter Samy Burch previously told THR. "It wasn’t the same details — I certainly don’t want anyone to assume that we’re trying to say all these conversations happened behind closed doors, it’s not. This was just a jumping off point and a way that something like this made sense to me emotionally.”
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