Julianne Moore and Charles Melton appear in a scene from "May December." (Courtesy of Netflix)
“May December,” the darkly comic drama loosely inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, has been racking up acclaim, awards and nominations, especially for its break-out star, Charles Melton, who plays a 36-year-old man married to the older woman who seduced him as a 13-year-old boy.
Melton’s role has been described as the “heart” of Todd Haynes’ movie, but Letourneau’s former husband, Vili Fualaau, who serves as the model for Melton’s Joe Yoo, is not happy about “May December’s” depiction of “my original story,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. In particular, Fualaau is not happy that the director, screenwriter and actors failed to consult him before making the movie.
“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,” Fualaau told THR.
Fualaau could also be concerned that the film has prompted renewed interest in his scandalous relationship with Letourneau. A disturbing 2018 interview that he and Letourneau gave to Australian TV has gone viral.
In the interview, Letourneau defends their relationship, which became sexual in 1996 when she was his 34-year-old 6th-grade teacher and Fualaau was her 12-year-old student. Letourneau and Fualaau later had two children together, one while she was in prison, and they married after she finished her seven-year prison term for child rape.
In the interview, Letourneau insists that Fualaau pursued her, which meant he was “mature” enough to give consent to have sex with her. When the interviewer pushes back and says that she was the adult and he was a child, Letourneau turns to Fualaau and repeatedly demands, “Who was the boss? Who was the boss?”
Fualaau appears to grow uncomfortable, especially over her insistence that she was in no way culpable for acting inappropriately or for taking advantage of the situation. “This is ridiculous,” he says, recoiling. “This is getting weird,” he also says. But Letourneau continues to bark at him, “Who was the boss? Who was the boss?”
Letourneau appears determined to prove a point that is lost on everyone else. But a year later, she and Fualaau separated, and she died in July 2020 of cancer — with Fualaau by her side. Still, several months before Letourneau’s death, People reported that Fualaau had a changed of heart about their relationship. For a long time, he didn’t see himself as a victim and was unashamed of their relationship. But by May 2020, an unnamed source “close to Fualaau” told People that “he sees things clearly now, and he realizes that this wasn’t a healthy relationship, from the start.”
Letourneau’s disturbing line, “Who was the boss?” also made it into a key scene near the end of “May December.” In that scene, Melton’s Joe confronts his wife, Gracie, played by Julianne Moore. He wants to talk honestly about the criminal origins of their relationship, which produced three children when he was still a young teenager.
“What if I wasn’t ready to be making those kinds of decisions?” he asks. “What if I was too young?
“Well, you seduced me,” Moore’s Gracie replies. When Joe says he was only 13, Gracie replies, “I don’t care how old you were. Who was in charge? Who was the boss?” Gracie’s response forces Joe to see that she has never taken responsibility for her actions, which caused enormous harm to him and their children.
Earlier in the film, Joe has begun to question his relationship with Gracie after the couple are visited by Elizabeth Barry, an actress played by Natalie Portman, who is set to play Gracie in a movie about their scandal.
As THR reported, the similarities between the fictional Joe and Gracie and Fualaau’s relationship with Letourneau are “striking.” Besides the “Who was the boss” line, other similarities include: Both Joe and Fualaau are Asian/Pacific Islander — Joe is half-Korean and Fualaau is Samoan, THR said. Both also father children born in prison, and both marry their female abusers after the women have served time for their crimes.
THR said it is not uncommon for Hollywood productions to distance themselves from real-life people or events on which the project is based, often to avoid entanglement or allow greater creative freedom.
That’s a situation that Fualaau objects to, at least in his case.
“I’m still alive and well,” Fualaau told THR. He is now 40 and still lives in the Seattle area, where the scandal unfolded. “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.”
“I love movies — good movies,” Fualaau also said. “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.”
While Fualaau accused “May December” of over-simplifying his story, critics and fans of the movie disagree, with many saying that it provides a layered portrait of a highly complicated situation — one that allows new details and dimensions to reveal themselves upon repeat viewing. As played by Melton, the Fualaau character also is presented as a loving and caring husband and father.
However, the real Fualaau may not appreciate that Joe also comes across as developmentally arrested in some ways, because he missed out on a typical adolescence, and his life was overshadowed by his role in a national tabloid scandal. Joe also finds himself being emotionally manipulated by two women, Moore’s purposely “naive” Gracie and Portman’s ambitious actress.
At “May December’s” premiere in November, the screenwriter Samy Burch stressed that the Letourneau case was only a “jumping-off point” for the film, while Moore said, “this is not the story of Mary Kay Letourneau,” THR also reported.
Melton said he mostly focused on portraying “a suburban father with three kids, a provider, a great loving husband” who had immense responsibility at a young age. Director Haynes acknowledged that the Letourneau case informed the film, but said he tried to keep away from the real story as much as possible. He also said the real story happened 20 years before the film is set, and 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,” he said.
Actor Will Ferrell, a producer on the film, 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.”
Originally published at Martha Ross