Vili Fualaau proves there are no easy answers to May December's questions

What ethical considerations do storytellers owe to their real-life muses? This is one of Hollywood’s most prevalent recurring questions, and this season’s award contenders have taken a variety of different approaches. Cillian Murphy was invested in researching J. Robert Oppenheimer (if not the actual science). Martin Scorsese built a partnership with the Osage Nation. Bradley Cooper became close with Leonard Bernstein’s children, and Priscilla Presley gave her stamp of approval to Sofia Coppola (though the late Lisa Marie did not). No one on the May December team reached out to Vili Fualaau, whose experience closely resembled that movie, and he thinks the film is worse for it.

Fualaau says he’s “offended” by May December and what he sees as a “lack of respect” for his “real story.” He tells The Hollywood Reporter, “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.”

Todd Haynes’ film is not a biopic about the infamous relationship between Fualaau and his teacher, Mary Kay Letourneau, though there are obvious similarities. The most glaring lift is dialogue between Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) which directly echoes an interview Fualaau and Letourneau gave in 2018. Though tabloid sensation around the couple is an undeniable influence on the film, the elements of their story are remixed, reimagined, and recontextualized to create May December.

Different actors make different choices when deciding how to play a real (or real-ish) person. Margot Robbie took a trip to meet Tonya Harding shortly before filming began for I, Tonya, but Amanda Seyfried never spoke with Elizabeth Holmes when portraying her in The Dropout. How such a relationship influences the craft of acting depends, apparently, from person to person. The moral significance of choosing to engage with their real-life muse is also relative to the particular project. Melton is not playing Vili Fualaau, but Fualaau is, undeniably, the movie’s muse.

Fualaau’s feelings about watching a simulacrum of his life onscreen, one in which he had no input, are obviously valid. The complicated truth is that May December is itself an echo of the very sensationalized coverage that made Fualaau infamous in the first place, coverage that occurred at a time when he was too young and too victimized to assert any agency over the situation. Though May December is a layered, nuanced tale, Fualaau believes his own story “is not nearly as simple as this movie [portrays].” He legally separated from Letourneau in 2017 after having been with her since middle school, but was by her side when she died in 2020. Haynes’ movie captures one brief chapter in the fictionalized couple’s relationship—and in another echo of Fualaau’s real-life situation, it’s not Joe who is telling his own story, but Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman).

May December is literally about an actor who spends time with Gracie and Joe, purportedly to better portray her in a film adaptation of their lives, adding another meta layer to the storytelling. Haynes explores how Elizabeth’s invasive behavior blurs ethical lines. She disrupts the family’s life, takes advantage of Joe, and causes a stir in their community, all in the pursuit of making a movie of questionable quality. We see the way this immersive research improves Elizabeth’s portrayal of Gracie, but it comes at a cost to the real-life people she’s portraying. Are her actions worth it? Is it okay because Gracie is a monster?

These are just a few of the questions May December, a sort of an Inception of tricky ethical dilemmas, asks. You might argue the fact that the film prompts such thoughtful but thorny contemplation makes it worthwhile. You might also argue that Fualaau’s total exclusion makes it morally bad. You might even say that great art is the kind that can’t be easily categorized in a single box. Fualaau says he admires movies “that capture the essence and complications of real-life events,” and that he’d like to work on such a project. Perhaps the best outcome would be for Fualaau to participate in that kind of project, one that could exist alongside May December.