Michael director Antoine Fuqua explained why the new Michael Jackson biopic doesn’t address longstanding child sexual abuse allegations against the star.
In an interview with Deadline published on Sunday, April 26, Fuqua was asked whether the omission of accusations against Jackson “weigh[ed] heavy on your mind and the studio’s?”
“It definitely did for a while, because we had to rethink everything. That was a tough period. [Producer] Graham [King], [screenwriter] John Logan and I banged our heads around,” the director responded. “We had a lot of meetings. But we clicked into it at the same time: The movie is called Michael so you have to focus on Michael. Unless you can truly take your time, let’s go back to the beginning and really show people who he was on the stage. He’s a superhero on the stage.”
“Just like a human being, movies have the power of empathy to just say this is a human being. No one is perfect,” Fuqua added, explaining that the various accusations against Jackson may be addressed in a potential sequel.
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Michael — starring the “Thriller” singer’s nephew Jaafar Jackson — charts Michael’s rise to stardom as a member of the Jackson 5 before finding solo success and becoming the King of Pop. However, the biopic concludes in 1988, five years before he was first investigated by Los Angeles police amid allegations of abuse against a then-13-year-old Jordan Chandler. No charges were filed against Michael, who denied the allegations; he reached an out-of-court settlement with Chandler and the boy’s parents after they filed a lawsuit.
An earlier version of Michael intended to cover the 1993 scandal, but the third act of the film was changed after producers discovered that a clause in the settlement with the Chandlers barred any dramatization of the family.
“It was important to take the audience through a process of how do you get to wherever it’s going to go in a second movie … for people to get a bigger idea of his personality and what shaped him,” Fuqua told Deadline.
“What we realized, if you start there [with the accusations], some people who don’t know Michael, it’s out of context,” he continued. “His arc was so extreme. It was important for us to go back and give them a journey to go on with Michael. There was also a certain amount of abuse he was always dealing with emotionally and physically in that household with his father. If you don’t do that, you won’t understand him and where the story goes.”
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Fuqua said that there was plenty of material filmed that didn’t make the final cut of Michael.
“We went pretty far. We went through the Jordan allegations we couldn’t use. We went farther than that,” he said. “Maybe a year or two after that when things turned against Michael.”
Michael was acquitted of child molestation charges during a 2005 trial. Since his death in 2009, further allegations have been made against the singer, including in the 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, which detailed claims made by Wade Robson and James Safechuck. (Jackson’s estate deemed the doc a “tabloid character assassination” at the time.)
If you or someone you know is experiencing child abuse, call or text Child Help Hotline at 1-800-422-4453.
