May December is a fictional story that took heavy inspiration from Mary Kay Letourneau‘s infamous relationship with her student Vili Fualaau — which allowed Julianne Moore to base her role off the controversial scandal.
“I really wanted a fictional story that dealt with this tabloid culture of the ’90s that has kind of seemingly led into this true crime biopic world we’re in now, and kind of question that transition and why we want to keep recreating these stories,” screenwriter Samy Burch explained her vision during a screening at the New York Film Festival on Friday, September 29.
Burch added: “All of these stories like this that are in the ether are just completely embedded in everyone’s cultural history.”
Director Todd Haynes, meanwhile, discussed how Moore’s performance took inspiration from Letourneau. The former teacher made headlines in 1996 for the statutory rape of Faulauu, then her sixth-grade student. 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, now 40, again. The pair ultimately welcomed two kids and were married for more than a decade before their 2019 separation.
May December stars Natalie 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.
“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 during the event about Moore’s character. “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 noted that a large part of what keeps Gracie and Joe together is their reluctance to talk about the origins of their relationship.
“But it’s shrouded in a fantasy, which is that she is the princess that needs to be rescued from the domestic tower, and he’s the young, virile knight, almost like a Greco-Roman young knight, who’s gonna come in with all this sexual virility and power and beauty and save her,” he added. “And so she plays the little girl.”
According to Haynes, Moore, 62, 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.”
Moore, for her part, previously opened up about her interest in the role ahead of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike.
“For Gracie, there’s been a tremendous amount of judgment about her. She wants to say, ‘See me. Know who I am. Know why I’ve made these choices.’ She wants to be known,” the actress told Netflix’s Queue in September. “I think that there’s something really interesting about that, about letting somebody into your very, very private life to explore, to see who you are.”
Moore added: “But, of course, Gracie’s also presenting a version of herself that she wants to be known. I think Elizabeth becomes more dangerous as Gracie realizes that she can’t control her own narrative.”
