Director Tony Vainuku & Manti Te'o's 'Untold Story'
The internet has been buzzing over the last 24 hours after the 2nd Season of Netflix's UNTOLD series opened with the Manti Te'o story - 'Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist' co directed by Ryan Duffy and Tony Vainuku.
Key name right there - Tony Vainuku. Not just because Tony is one of the Directors, but because if it wasn't for him, Manti may not have been open to sharing his story.
The Samoan NFL players incredible story is told in the Netflix two part episode (screening now - peep the trailer above). It details the scandal around the Hawaiian born, former Notre Dame football standout who was infamously duped into believing his longtime girlfriend (who he never met in person) died just before his 2013 BCS National Championship game, before it was revealed that his dead girlfriend wasn't dead, his girlfriend or was even real.
In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune the Emmy award winning Tongan Director shared how 'Untold' producers Chapman and Maclain Way and co-director Ryan Duffy had secured the participation of Tuiasosopo (the catfisher who now identifies as a transgender woman and goes by both Ronaia and Naya) but they couldn't get to Te'o.
At this point they realised they needed Vainuku, as Te'o was familiar with Vainuku's Emmy-winning documentary 'In Football we Trust' (trailer below) about the strong ties between Polynesians and football.
“Manti just didn’t trust the media,” Vainuku said. “Didn’t trust any of it for good reason, right?”
“What was important for him was a film team and a director that weren’t going to exploit him and were going to allow him to tell his full truth,” Vainuku said. “Leave no stone unturned. Put it all out there. Leave it all out there once and for all. All the answers for his fans and have both sides of it.”
Vainuku also interviewed Tuiasosopo who provided her perspective as well.
Vainuku said it was important for Te'o that Naya was in it as well. He wasn't going to hide away from it.
“I went into the situation with no judgment on it and just being completely open to what she was ready to share,” Vainuku said. “I definitely don’t condone what Naya did, but this film definitely provides context and the complexity of the situation at the time.”
A lot of the coverage at the time the scandal was exposed treated it as a joke despite the damage it did to Te'o's life - it ruined the end of his college career and cost him millions of dollars when he fell from the 1st to the 2nd round of the NFL draft.
“It was important for us to really show what they did to him at the time,” Vainuku said.
Read the full interview with Tony and The Salt Lake Tribune here
In a recent interview with CBS Mornings Gayle King and her team (interview below), Te'o revealed another reason why he felt it was time to share his story. He said it was going back to 2017, when he went with some of his New Orleans Saints team mates to a Jay-Z concert and Jay started his show with 'You cannot heal, what you can't reveal' and it stuck with him. He said he decided that if he was asked again, he would be open to sharing his story because "In order for me to kind of heal from this, I needed to reveal it".
Fast forward a few years to Vainuku contacting him, three days later they were talking on Zoom and a couple of months after that he agreed to be interviewed on camera, sharing extensively on the subject he'd refused to discuss for nearly a decade.
Chrissy Teigen also served as an Executive Producer on the two part episode and recently shared the trailer on instagram saying "I've been obsessed with this story for years and I can't wait for you to check it out!!"
We spoke to a viewer this morning who said “As I was watching the series from the beginning I noticed how comfortable Manti’s parents were in the interview and something just felt different with the storytelling. So I went on IMDB to see who had put it together and thats when I found out they had a Polynesian director".
She continued to say "this is the importance of having islanders tell our own stories, because we can really feel the authenticity in the stories told right".
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Tony Vainuku recently signed with M88 and is directing the docuseries American Gladiators with Campfire Films and will helm and showrun a docuseries for Scott Budnick’s One Community.
He is also developing a narrative series based on the life of Junior Seau - the Samoan NFL star from Oceanside, California who tragically took his own life in 2012 after a long battle with the traumatic brain disease CTE, a major crisis sweeping the NFL.
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