Is ‘May December’ Based on a True Story? Julianne Moore’s Movie Echoes a Disturbing Real-Life News Story

The latest from director Todd Haynes, May December, which began streaming on Netflix today, is a movie about a movie. Natalie Portman stars as TV-famous actress, Elizabeth, who goes to live with an older woman, Gracie (Julianne Moore), with a scandalous past. Why? Because she’s been cast to play Gracie in a harrowing “based on a true story” movie.

At the center of Gracie’s scandal is Joe Yoo (played by Charles Melton), who was just 13 years old when Gracie, at the age of 36, became pregnant with his child. Over 20 years later, Gracie and Joe are still together, raising their children. Joe is now 36 himself, and Gracie, in her late 50s, still believes she did nothing wrong. But when Elizabeth shows up and drags up the past, their relationship begins to unravel.

May December is meta in the sense that it’s a movie about making a movie that is based on a true story… but is May December itself based on a true story? Read on to find out.

Is May December based on a true story?

May December is not based on a true story. It is an original work of fiction—which means it’s totally made up—written by screenwriter Samy Burch. That said, it was likely inspired by a real-life news scandal.

In an interview for the May December press notes, Burch said she was inspired first by the idea of Joe as a character—though she did not say he was inspired by anyone she knew or heard about in real life.

“The seed of it for me was always the character of Joe, this idea of being a 36-year-old man who was about to be an empty-nester, who hadn’t processed what happened to him when he was young or the media blitz that followed,” Burch said. “That was the first thing that really excited me about it, and then also the chance to look more closely at 1990s tabloid culture and how it has pretty seamlessly transitioned into this true-crime frenzy that we’re living in.”

Burch added that her husband— Alex Mechanik, who has a “story by” credit on the film—was involved in fleshing out the tale, saying, “It started as an idea between me and my now-husband thinking of ways into this world, entry points—and it ended up being an actress doing research for a role, decades after the fact.”

Is May December based on Mary Kay Letourneau?

Several real news stories echo Joe’s story. A Variety review recently claimed May December was loosely inspired by Seattle woman Mary Kay Letourneau, a sex offender who pled guilty in 1997 to sexually abusing a 12-year-old child, Vili Fualaau, when she was 34. Vili Fualaau had been Letourneau’s student in the second grade. Letourneau gave birth to Fualaau’s baby in prison, after she was convicted of child rape. She then married the teenager after she was released from prison in 2005. They were the subject of tabloid fascination. The couple stayed together until their separation in 2019. Letourneau died of cancer in 2020, at the age of 58.

There was also a 2022 news story about a real-life 31-year-old Colorado woman, Andrea Neenet Serrano, who was arrested in July 2022. Her story bears a striking resemblance to May December: Serrano admitted to having sex with a 13-year-old after she became pregnant with his child. However, despite the coincidental overlap of this news story, Burch said she wrote the first draft of her screenplay in 2019. Portman and Moore were cast in 2021, and production for May December began in November 2022. So it seems unlikely that Burch’s script was inspired by Serrano.

Unfortunately, it’s not as uncommon a news story as one might hope. In 2017, a 24-year-old Texas teacher, Alexandria Vera, was arrested for having sex with a 13-year-old middle school student who impregnated her. Vera claimed at the time, as Moore character does in the film, that she and the victim “love each other” and that they had sex almost daily for nine months.

All this is to say, while May December is not based on a true story, and while none of the filmmakers have mentioned these real-life stories, it’s not a stretch to imagine that Burch may have been initially inspired by one of these horrible news stories and then created her own cast of characters from there.