Author: acsversace news

When He’s Not Playing Versace, Edgar Ramirez Is Really, Ridiculously Good Looking

Edgar Ramirez is one of the best-looking men working in Hollywood today. The Venezuelan actor is as ruggedly handsome as they come. It’s what’s made his transformation into Gianni Versace such a revelation. Here is an actor taking a page out of the deglam-yourself-to-prove-you-have-the-chops playbook that’s often the easiest way for gorgeous actresses to earn critical acclaim. It worked for Charlize Theron (Monster), Halle Berry (Monster’s Ball), Cameron Diaz (Being John Malkovich) and even actors like Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant) and Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler). They all successfully pulled attention away from their famous faces to earn praise for their talent. With that receding hairline and that slight paunch, Ramirez is truly doing some stellar work as the Italian designer.

Sadly, despite Ryan Murphy’s title, the FX show hasn’t spent that much time with Gianni, following instead the story of his killer, Andrew Cunanan played Darren Criss, going the opposite route, all but exploiting his perfectly chiseled face/abs to deliver a an instant-classic performance (he even gets his very own Gael-in-Bad Education pool scene). That’s the case in this sixth installment, which has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene between Cunanan and Versace in an episode that’s otherwise focused on the former’s birthday party celebration in San Diego months before the bloody events in Miami.

Some viewers may be getting their first glimpse of this talented actor underneath makeup that’s designed to age and deglam him. It’s why we thought this was as good a time to look back instead to the many (okay, 10!) roles Ramirez has played where he’s made full use of his fetching face and toned body, proving beauty and talent can work side by side.

View images

When He’s Not Playing Versace, Edgar Ramirez Is Really, Ridiculously Good Looking

TV review: The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story; Save Me

★★★★☆

Donatella Versace is said to have been “happy” that Penélope Cruz was chosen to play her in The Assassination of Gianni Versace. I bet she was. Not half. Who wouldn’t be? But Cruz, let’s face it, isn’t the most obvious lookalike for a woman who these days is cruelly likened to Janice the Muppet. So it is a testament to Cruz’s skill that she is compelling in the role, a woman grieving after her brother’s murder, but flint-like in her resolve to keep the company and his name alive. “I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice,” she said through her blond wig and plumped-up lips, which — was this just me? — gave her words something of a whistle.

This is the second offering from American Crime Story and, like The People v OJ Simpson, it brims with class. Édgar Ramírez looked eerily like the real Versace in his ridiculously opulent Miami villa, where it took six members of staff to give him one glass of orange juice. But it is Darren Criss as Andrew Cunanan, the fantasist serial killer who shot Versace in 1997, who is the show’s tour de force. Criss manages just the right blend of camp charisma and obsessive weirdo mendacity as the contrast is made between the fêted designer’s eye-bleeding wealth and the sociopath’s empty life and wardrobe.

The opening eight minutes were terrific, set to Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor and culminating in Versace’s death, his blood dripping down the steps. The chronology switched after that and the story was told in reverse, which was slightly discombobulating. But the stage is set to reflect a society that was still judgmental about gay lifestyles and to chart Cunanan’s descent into deranged violence. The Versace company has distanced itself from the drama, saying it is based on “gossip and speculation”, even though Donatella reportedly sent Cruz flowers. Call me cynical, but this stuff can only ramp up the ratings.

TV review: The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story; Save Me

Forget the Versace bling! It’s his sister who dazzles in this drama

★★★★★

Nothing says ‘tacky’ quite like the Versace logo. Other Continental fashion designers have elegantly intertwined initials for their brand, but Gianni Versace chose a doodle of Medusa, the goddess with snakes for hair.

It looks like the label on a £1.99 bottle of white wine at a rough Italian restaurant in Bedford.

Being that flaky takes talent, and money. His combination of wealth and sheer lack of taste was captured brilliantly in The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (BBC2), a dramatised retelling of the flamboyant couturier’s murder in 1997.

From the moment he slid from his silk sheets, to stand on the balcony of his Romanesque villa in Florida, Versace (Edgar Ramirez) looked like a Euro-lottery winner in desperate pursuit of class. Even his breakfast of melon slices, served by his butler on a silver platter, looked fake.

This nine-part, big budget docu-drama, scripted by London Spy’s Tom Rob Smith, revels in the plastic shallowness of Versace’s life. Everything was overdone, from the elaborate gates outside his palace where he was gunned down, to the head wound like a lotus blossom as he lay on the mortuary slab.

There’s no mystery about his killer. Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) was a psychopath, a serial killer and a fantasist, who spun implausible stories about his past to everyone he met. The character painted here is very like Patricia Highsmith’s charming con merchant and murderer, The Talented Mr Ripley.

We saw him ambush and kill Versace, before the story leapt back seven years to their first meeting at a club in California, and a date at the opera — meetings that the Versace family deny ever took place.

Smith was at pains to point out how far from mainstream America the overt gay lifestyle was, just 20 years ago. One of the FBI agents investigating the shooting couldn’t tell the difference between Versace and Liberace.

Another was so eager to hear salacious details from Gianni’s boyfriend Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) that the poor man had no chance to change out of his bloodstained robe. (That’s another factual dispute: the real Antonio says he never touched the body, and had no blood on him.)

The real protagonist of this piece is sister Donatella Versace, played by Penelope Cruz — a ruthless businesswoman, who seizes control of the company within hours of her brother’s murder. Psycho Cunanan is too contemptible and sick to hold our attention, but we won’t be able to take our eyes off the appalling Donatella.

Forget the Versace bling! It’s his sister who dazzles in this drama

A Little Less Spree Killing, A Little More Coffee and Contemplation

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on FX at 10:00pm ET. I thought this week was the last episode, but it’s the penultimate episode. I’ve really been missing Edgar Ramirez’s Versace the last few episodes, so I hope there’s more time with him in the last couple episodes. Darren Criss is doing an excellent job playing a spiraling narcissistic psychopath, but it’s also driving me straight up a wall watching him. Seeing Ramirez’s kind, calm, and focused Versace would be a nice change of pace.

A Little Less Spree Killing, A Little More Coffee and Contemplation

The Assassination of Gianni Versace … by a lying, destructive nobody

Sitting in the sanctum of her brother’s mansion in Miami, just hours after his murder on the steps, Donatella Versace turns her grief into defiance: “I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice.”

Lending her immense beauty to the role, but borrowing acid blonde hair and a tight black leather outfit for it, Penelope Cruz looks slightly less like a late 1990s fashionista than an avenging angel, and nobody should be happier with her casting than Donatella Versace.

But if the Versace family have publicly distanced themselves from American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace (BBC Two, Wednesday, 9pm), that scene seems to anticipate the reason. Why watch a loved one killed twice? Particularly when the show, however expertly made and gorgeous to look at, turns his murderer into a somebody?

Gianni Versace (a magnetic Édgar Ramirez) you already know – “It’s the jeans guy,” one crime scene cop helpfully explains – but if Andrew Cunanan(the implausibly handsome Darren Criss) is not a name that registers it’s because Versace’s killer really was a nobody: a prostitute, a chameleon and a fantasist, with nothing beneath it.

The first episode presents his slaughter like an operatic tragedy, as Gianni leaves the overdone Italianate opulence of his mansion for the trashy pastels of a sunny Miami morning, where his stalker awaits him in 1997.

Slain alongside a single white dove, Gianni’s death might be one worthy of an icon, or at least the launch of the new Spring collection, but writer Tom Rob Smith and director Ryan Murphy always bring something pointedly tacky into frame. A guy hawks a polaroid of the body. Tourists dip a magazine page in Versace’s spilled blood. An aspiring model struts for the TV news cameras. There’s no such thing as a designer death.

Instead, there’s a camp tension in everything. Cunanan had met Versace before, and their most significant conversation comes here on the set of an opera designed by Versace – luxurious and fake.

Versace, we understand, was a genius and a creator, but at the service of the wearer. Cunanan was a liar and a destroyer, ludicrously self-obsessed and burning with jealousy.

“I’m sure you’re going to be someone really special one day,” Versace tells him in that make-believe world of the opera set and brushes an eyelash from the young man’s face. Blowing it from the designer’s fingertip with the suddenness of a gun blast, we know what Cunanan wished for.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace … by a lying, destructive nobody