Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman are conscious about the problems Vili Fualaau has had with how his non-public existence impressed their film Would possibly December.
Sooner than celebrating the movie’s good fortune on the Golden Globes on Sunday, January 7, Moore, 63, and Portman, 42, addressed Fualaau’s public complaint.
Moore mentioned she used to be “sorry” to listen to that Fualaau, 40, wasn’t overjoyed with the overall product.
“I mean, [director] Todd [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,” she famous to Leisure This night on Sunday. “So that’s how we looked at it, too. This was our document, we created these characters from the page and together.”
Portman additionally maintained that Would possibly December wasn’t only based totally on Fualaau’s arguable courting with the overdue Mary Kay Letourneau.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” she added whilst talking with ET. “It’s not based on them. 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, and yeah, it’s its own story. It’s not meant to be a biopic.”
Letourneau made headlines in 1996 for the statutory rape of Fualaau, who used to be her sixth-grade scholar on the time. She served 3 months in prison for 2 counts of prison second-degree rape and later gained a six-year jail sentence for making touch with Fualaau once more. The pair in the end welcomed two children and had been married for greater than a decade sooner than their 2019 separation.
In the meantime, Would possibly December stars Portman as an actress named Elizabeth who travels to fulfill and find out about the lifetime of Gracie (Moore), who she is about to play in a venture. Gracie’s infamous romance with Joe (Charles Melton), who's 23 years her junior, is the topic of the fictitious movie.
Faulaau, who has remained out of the highlight through the years, lately broke his silence on how his existence impressed the film.
“I’m still alive and well. 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,” he informed The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday, January 4. “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.”
He added: “I love movies — good movies. 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. Those kinds of writers and directors — someone who can do that — would be perfect to work with, because my story is not nearly as simple as this movie [portrays].”
Many main points of Gracie and Joe’s fictional romance seemed to carefully reflect Letourneau and Fualaau, together with an onscreen dialog about their age hole which resembled an interview Letourneau and Faulaau did after going public.
Two months sooner than Would possibly December began to movement on Netflix, Haynes broke down how Moore used Letourneau to form her persona.
“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 mentioned at a New York Movie Pageant screening in September 2023. “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 additionally identified that Moore based totally her talking voice on previous pictures of Letourneau, who died at age 58 in 2020 from most cancers.
“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 mentioned of Moore’s method. “[These creative decisions] helped us to sort of understand how this happened or the delusions that helped produce it.”