‘May December’ Team Weighs in on Film’s Real-Life Comparisons: “This Is Not the Story of Mary Kay Letourneau”
As May December has made the rounds at this year’s film festivals and begun its awards season run, many comparisons have been made between the Netflix movie and the real-life story of Mary Kay Letourneau — a teacher who began a sexual relationship with 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau, going to jail in 1997 before the two were eventually married for 14 years and had several children.
Similarly, May December stars Julianne Moore as Gracie, a 30-something woman who begins a relationship with Joe (played by Charles Melton) when he is in seventh grade; 20 years later, the two are married and have three kids headed to college when actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) shows up at their home for a research visit to prepare to play Gracie in a movie.
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“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,” writer Samy Burch told The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s Los Angeles premiere on Thursday. “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.”
Director Todd Haynes added that at the beginning he kept away from the real story, “but then there were times when it became very, very helpful to get very specific about the research and we learned things from that relationship, even in the ways that it differed from the relationship between Gracie and Joe in our film.”
Moore, who echoed that “this is not the story of Mary Kay Letourneau,” said that in playing the role she was drawn to “Gracie’s hyper-femininity, the fact that she was so interested in gender and the way that she felt she was almost a child; that she was the one that hadn’t been in charge of the start of this relationship and it stands in direct contrast with the transgression that happened 20 years earlier.” Portman noted that she was won over by the script, in how the “characters were just so wild and strong and complicated.”
Despite sharing the screen with two Oscar winners, Melton is receiving particular acclaim for his performance, as Portman’s character’s arrival shakes up Joe’s marriage and forces him to look back at how it began. He gained 40 pounds for the role by “eating a lot of hamburgers and pizza” to represent what the character was going through.
“He’s this suburban father with three kids, a provider, a great loving husband, and at such a young age the immense responsibility of having kids, what would that feel like and where would he find his comfort amidst all of that?” Melton explained of his transformation. “That just really helped inform the physicality of what we created with Joe.”
Haynes also said that since the real story happened 20 years before the film is set, a big focus of the film is the tabloid culture coverage of the couple’s marriage: “It’s about the way that we look at ourselves as stories are told and we navigate and question our expectations and moral positions that we bring to the stories we watch.” Will Ferrell, a producer on the film alongside partner Jessica Elbaum, added, “There’s been so much time and distance from when [the real story] actually happened that it really ends up being a story about desperate, unhappy people and how one decision of narcissism affects so many other people and changes their lives forever.”
May December is currently in select theaters and starts streaming on Netflix Dec. 1.
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