Penelope Cruz talks making her TV debut as Donatella Versace

Today, platinum-haired powerhouse designer Donatella Versace is one of fashion’s most powerful women, but 20 years ago, she was a bereaved sister fighting for the future of her family’s Medusa-emblazoned megabrand. “Wow, Donatella!” is the first thing Penélope Cruz says to me when I mention her critically acclaimed role in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, and the exclamation could well serve as the show’s unofficial subtitle. “To keep the company going in the middle of that huge, deep pain she was feeling – that’s real strength,” reveres Cruz.

Proximity to her own siblings is just one of the reasons that 43-year-old Cruz – dressed down today in a gray cashmere hoodie and blue jeans – is happy to be back in her native Madrid. London, where she lived last winter during the filming of Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, reminded her that she is constitutionally unsuited to gray days and “a 4pm nighttime – it affects the brain,” she says in her accented purr. It was worth enduring a little seasonal affective disorder, though, for the bespoke performances she was able to coax from her co-star Josh Gad, aka the voice of Olaf the snowman in the Disney smash Frozen. Stored “like treasures” on her smartphone, she plays the audio clips to her kids when she’s in need of parental kudos. “I know Olaf, and that makes me the coolest mom in the world,” she beams.

For the rest of us, ‘Friend of Olaf’ doesn’t quite compare to Cruz’s other achievements, such as becoming the first Spanish woman to win an Academy Award, for her role in 2008’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. As she pointed out in her acceptance speech, this was the stuff of dreams for a girl from the working-class Madrid suburb of Alcobendas, who headed to New York at the age of 19 to study dance. The film also reacquainted the actress with fellow Spaniard and Oscar winner Javier Bardem, who had, once upon a time, played a bullfighter and part-time underwear model opposite Cruz’s feisty factory worker in her breakout film, Jamón, Jamón. The pair married in 2010. So now there are two Oscars to polish – and two children to consider.

Naturally, that phone call was to Actual Donatella. As a red-carpet regular, Cruz has been dressed by the house of Versace on multiple occasions. “I said to Donatella, ‘This is keeping me up at night because it’s such a big responsibility to play someone who’s not only alive, but someone I respect so much.’ And she told me, ‘If somebody’s going to do it, I’m happy that it’s you.’ Her words gave me the freedom to do this. I think she could hear in my voice that everything was going to be done from a place of respect.”

Mastering Donatella’s voice, of course, was a key part of characterization. This was Cruz’s second Italian job – she starred alongside Sophia Loren in the 2009 musical Nine – but the designer’s distinctive manner of speaking was a departure. “Her voice is much lower than mine, and I worked for months and months with the voice coach Tim Monich. I was not interested in doing a caricature, an imitation; I want you to feel her there. Everything about Donatella is rock and roll – even when she’s just sitting in a chair, she does it with an attitude.”

To keep the attitude alive in the breaks between their scenes together, she and Édgar Ramírez, who plays Gianni, turned to music: “We listened to a lot of Prince, and a lot of opera. We thought that both were very Versace.”

Whereas attitudes towards race churned at the core of The People v. O.J. Simpson, sex and sexuality pervade this sun-drenched second season of American Crime Story. Gianni Versace was killed outside his Miami mansion by Andrew Cunanan (played by Glee alumnus Darren Criss), a fantasist who preyed on gay men during a time of widespread homophobia, and whose fascination with celebrity culture morphed into a murderous obsession.

“We’re telling a story that makes you think a lot about the craziness that’s going on in the world today,” muses Cruz. “It makes you question the concept of fame, and how some teenagers and very young people grow up idealizing something that is poison.” She’s concerned that social media is exposing us to pressures that were previously the exclusive preserve of celebrities who are, she says, at least somewhat better prepared. “It doesn’t matter if you are exposed to 200 people or two million – if you’re not equipped to deal with the pressure of opinion, manipulation and bullying, it’s dangerous.”

It’s impossible to touch on the topic of fame’s dark side without alighting on Hollywood’s recent sexual harassment scandal. After all, Cruz won her Oscar for her performance in a film written and directed by Woody Allen and produced by Harvey Weinstein.

I feel her hand tap my kneecap. “I know that you are going in that direction,” she says, before adding that she had no inkling of the scale of Hollywood’s problems prior to the revelations in the New York Times. She was aware, she clarifies, that certain high-profile men were “difficult to deal with on a professional level; that they were tricky, or did some bullying – that much was clear. But these other things that have come to light…” Her eyes widen.

She knows, of course, that Hollywood has very different attitudes towards men and women. “Since the age of 25, [journalists] have been asking me if I’m afraid of aging. It’s a crazy thing to ask, and I’ve always refused to answer. They would never ask a man such a question.

“Obviously that kind of thing is on a different scale to what we were just talking about, but everything builds up, and I consider it to be part of an overall suppression of women,” says an impassioned Cruz.

She’s emphatic that the recent disclosure of widespread abuse via the #MeToo movement must result in actions as well as words. “It has to change the rules of our industry and all the other industries in which women are being repressed in so many different ways. It cannot just be something that’s there to fill the news for a few months before we move on to something else.”

With her own daughter and son, Cruz says she’s found a novel way of shifting the gender narrative, quite literally. “Fairy tales matter so much because these are the first stories that you hear from the mouths of your parents,” she says. “So, when I read fairy tales to my kids at night, I’m always changing the endings – always, always, always, always. F*****g Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and all of this – there’s a lot of machismo in those stories. That can have an effect on the way that kids see the world. If you’re not careful, they start thinking: ‘Oh, so the men get to decide everything.’”

Cruz’s subversive fairy-tale heroines, she says, are prone to declining proposals of marriage, or making the proposals themselves. An example? “In my version of Cinderella, when the prince says, ‘Do you wanna marry?’ she says, ‘No, thanks, ’cos I don’t want to be a princess. I want to be an astronaut, or a chef.’” Cruz laughs wickedly and closes an imaginary book.

No doubt, Donatella would approve.

Penelope Cruz talks making her TV debut as Donatella Versace

Big Dreams Are Deadly in American Crime Story Season 2

Andrew Cunanan, who shot and killed Gianni Versace on the front steps of the designer’s palatial estate on the morning of July 15, 1997, was good at bragging. In the second episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, a new FX miniseries about the crime and the years that led up to it, Cunanan (Darren Criss) lands in Miami’s South Beach. It is the last stop on a three-month killing spree, in which he has already murdered four men in three different states. Boasting energetically to a new friend, he claims he was once engaged to Versace (he wasn’t), who took him to dinner at the fabled San Francisco restaurant Stars (he didn’t). He launches into a reverie on Versace’s gift for design, and when his friend replies with, “Sounds real nice,” Cunanan is not pleased. “I don’t see something nice. I see the man behind it. A great creator. The man I could have been.”

Cunanan’s curdled sense of self-importance runs through the next seven episodes of the series, which travel backward from Cunanan’s crime spree to his troubled childhood. His parents, a depressive Italian-American mother and a Filipino immigrant father, poured all their hopes into young Andrew. He slept in the cavernous master bedroom by himself and attended a swanky private school in La Jolla, California, even though his parents could barely afford the tuition. He wore a red leather jumpsuit to school on occasion and was voted “Most Likely to Be Remembered” in his senior yearbook, but his own page gave almost no information about him. Instead, he inserted just one quote, attributed to the French King Louis XV: “Après moi, le déluge.” After me, the flood.

Cunanan’s first victims were Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock) and David Madson (Cody Fern), two young gay men he met through the San Diego and San Francisco nightlife scenes when he was in his twenties. Trail, a former naval officer, befriended him when his ship was docked in the San Diego harbor. Madson, a promising young architect from Minnesota, and Cunanan had met in San Francisco in 1995, when Cunanan spotted him at a restaurant bar and sent a cocktail over. That night, according to writer Maureen Orth’s account (the FX show is partially based on Vulgar Favors, her 1999 best-seller about Cunanan’s crimes), the pair had a “nonsexual sleepover” inside the Mandarin Oriental hotel, where Andrew was staying thanks to an allowance he collected from a wealthy, older La Jolla businessman named Norman Blachford.

Blachford, whose partner of 26 years had just died when he met Cunanan, allowed him to move in to his mansion and decorate it, giving him credit cards, a $33,000 Infiniti, and a $2,500 living allowance. Cunanan was apparently ashamed of being a “kept” man but also flaunted his nouveau riches, spending lavishly on friends and acquaintances. When he met Madson, Cunanan felt a genuine emotional connection and obsessed over the architect romantically for the next two years. By the time Trail took a blue-collar job in Minneapolis, where Madson also lived, Blachford had dropped Cunanan, who was now alone. Cunanan flew to Minnesota, killed Trail with a claw hammer inside Madson’s airy loft, and then shot and killed Madson four days later on the banks of East Rush Lake, an hour outside town—perhaps out of jealousy or despair.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace sticks with Cunanan throughout his spree. Versace (Edgar Ramírez) and his longtime partner, Antonio (Ricky Martin), only appear intermittently, like pops from a flashbulb rather than fully developed characters. This feels purposeful: Cunanan was preoccupied with fame, perhaps to the point of psychopathy, and he put celebrity on a pedestal. He saw himself as destined for greatness, and it is this tragic misconception of himself that makes his story so very American. Versace was an openly gay immigrant, succeeding at the highest levels of American business. This must have enraged Cunanan, the openly gay son of an immigrant, who saw in Versace the anointed prince that he longed to be.

Shortly before the first episode aired, members of the Versace family distanced themselves from the new show, which they thought “should only be considered as a work of fiction.” In Vulgar Favors, Orth asserts that Cunanan had met Versace in San Francisco around 1990, when the designer created the costumes for a San Francisco Opera production of Capriccio. Although it’s not clear whether the two met only in passing or were much better acquainted, we see this encounter in a scene in The Assassination of Gianni Versace. If they had dated, as Cunanan often boasted to friends, Cunanan’s violent act may have been personal: Some reporters at the time speculated—with a homophobic slant—that Cunanan may have been an “HIV killer,” out to get revenge on former boyfriends. (A medical examiner later testified that he was not in fact HIV positive.) Versace’s family holds that he never met Cunanan, that the designer was a victim of his own fame and of one man’s twisted rampage against a sparkling culture that rejected him.

The second installment in Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology series, the show doesn’t aim to establish which version is true so much as to expose the rot at the center of American culture—horrors that could only happen here. (Last season followed the trial of O.J. Simpson, dissecting the racial and gendered complexities of the case.) What we do know, from Orth’s book and from several other reports following the murders, was that Cunanan’s life was one of deception and delusion, of falsehoods and fibs and chicanery. He wanted to travel in the highest echelons of society, clinking glasses with socialites and captains of industry and cavorting on yachts. He didn’t like to work but loved to party, a less talented Mr. Ripley.

Cunanan wanted to travel in the highest echelons of society, clinking glasses with socialites and cavorting on yachts.

Throughout, Cunanan has to confront the mismatch between his aspirations and reality. From an early age, he bluffs about his background, telling classmates he is the son of wealthy aesthetes, that his father, Modesto (Jon Jon Briones), once served as Imelda Marcos’s personal pilot and that his mother has filled his lunch box with lobster tails. In the penultimate episode, we learn that Modesto has had to flee the country after embezzling fortunes from his clients. When Cunanan, now in his teens, goes to Manila to find him, Modesto is living in squalid conditions. Criss and Briones stare at each other for long minutes in this scene, filmed inside a tiny tropical shack. Cunanan realizes his father’s success was a lie, and that all of the confidence and self-regard he has absorbed from his bellowing belief must also be fraudulent.

Many people would experience this sort of trauma—the explosion of the family unit, the disgrace of a parent—and cave inward. Cunanan does the opposite. When he returns from Manila, his lies only get bigger. He claims that his father owns a pineapple plantation, that as son and heir, he is set to inherit millions. He tells friends that he has family in New York, Paris, and Rome, and that Signore Versace has asked him to travel around the world with him designing costumes. Even before the period when a quick Google search could swiftly puncture outrageous claims, all this bragging raises suspicion. In a conversation Madson imagines shortly before he is killed, he asks Cunanan to tell him one true thing about his life. It doesn’t happen. Cunanan was like a Gatsby so enchanted with the green light that he would kill for it, a man so bedeviled by the American dream that he became a walking nightmare.

Because the show tells Cunanan’s story backward, we often see his victims die before we get to spend time with them. We see Cunanan in the days leading up to the murder of Versace, then we see him bludgeon Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell), a prominent Chicago real estate developer, in Miglin’s garage. We see him shoot a cemetery caretaker in Pennsylvania just so that he can steal his red pickup truck. When these victims appear again on-screen, beaming and unaware of their bloody future, it can feel like agony. They die in front of you all over again, and you are mourning them even while they are simply talking and moving.

The best episode of the series is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which follows Jeff Trail through the trauma of being gay in the military. In one scene, he tries to hang himself in uniform; in another gruesome moment, he takes a box cutter and begins to slice a tattoo from his calf, after hearing that officials can identify homosexuals by their body markings. The anguish and shame that Trail feels is devastating, especially as we know what fate lies ahead. He is forced to leave the Navy, but as he leaves, he gives an interview to a news program about the struggles of being gay and wanting to serve your country. The fact that this act of bravery—and its promise of a new, more open life—so closely precedes his death haunts the episode.

No one is safe in Cunanan’s world, but then, perhaps, it was never safe to be gay in 1990s America, even for gold-plated celebrities like Versace. The media of the time blamed the victim for his own murder as much as it blamed Cunanan. While Cunanan was “a killer on the loose,” Edward J. Ingebretsen has written in At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture, Versace was seen as “a different threat entirely, that of a profligate and well-traveled member of the upper class, whose mobility, like the killer’s, is also the stuff of myth.” The media wrapped Versace’s and Cunanan’s stories together, frequently drawing parallels between the two: both gay, fashion-obsessed men, enchanted by wealth. Yet they couldn’t have been more different—one of them created, while the other destroyed.

In the end, The Assassination of Gianni Versace belongs to Cunanan, because it is a singular story: the story of a boy who wanted everything in the world but never figured out how to get it. This is an American crime story, in that we see in the rearview how the consumerist ’90s could warp those who treated celebrity like a religion, how some were even willing to commit vile acts for a taste of rarefied air. Very little is, at its core, more American than that.

Big Dreams Are Deadly in American Crime Story Season 2

‘He was willing to kill to become noticed’: How the US’s most elusive killer came to the small screen

The first ‘American Crime Story’ series centred on OJ Simpson – now, Gianni Versace’s murder is on the agenda. Jane Mulkerrins reports

In the summer of 1997, Gianni Versace was at the top of his game. The company he had built from scratch from one boutique in Milan in 1978 was valued at $807 million, and had 130 stores across the world. In under 20 years, this son of a Calabrian dressmaker had transformed the industry with his brazenly sexy, luxury fashion and couture, breaking down the traditional barriers between conservative high fashion and popular culture.

The front rows of his fashion shows were filled with all of his A-list friends, including Diana, Princess of Wales, Elton John and Michael Jackson, while on the runway supermodels such as Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington walked for him.

But on the morning of July 15, Versace was shot dead on the steps of his mansion on Miami’s South Beach by Andrew Cunanan, who it later transpired had also murdered four other men, at least two of them gay.  Cunanan, a notorious liar, was also gay but initially struggled to come to terms with it, and unable to find a job after dropping out of college, had taken to befriending rich gay men to fund a wealthy lifestyle he was unable to afford.

“It was a political murder,” believes Ryan Murphy, who is recreating the story in the second instalment of his American Crime Story series, The Assassination of Gianni Versace. “[Cunanan] was a person who targeted people specifically to shame them. He wanted to out them and to have a form of payback for a life that he felt he could not live.”  

The Assassination of Gianni Versace follows the extraordinary success of Murphy’s first American Crime Story series, The People vs OJ Simpson, an account of the trial of the former NFL superstar for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. It won nine Emmys and two Golden Globes for its unflinching confrontation with the police corruption, racism and Nineties celebrity culture that helped lead to OJ’s acquittal.

The second instalment – based on the book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in US History, by former Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth – has been adapted by the British screenwriter Tom Rob Smith, who has flipped the story to tell it backwards, starting with Versace’s murder, in order to understand how Cunanan could have evaded arrest for so long.

“The idea behind American Crime Story was that every season should be not just about a specific crime, but about a crime that America is guilty of, something that implicates us culturally,” says executive producer Nina Jacobson. With the OJ trial, the “cultural crime” was the racism of the LAPD, who were accused of attempting to racially incriminate Simpson. With Versace’s murder, Murphy and his team believe the crime is homophobia, including within the police who were criticised for not prioritising an investigation into Cunanan’s previous victims.

“It’s about the degree of shame and secrecy among gay people in America in the Nineties, in the wake of the Aids epidemic and the difficulty of living an authentic life,” says Jacobson. “It is very easy to think that the way it is now is the way it always has been. But there have been so many changes, in terms of visibility of the gay and trans community, compared to 20 years ago.”

Using Versace’s story as a base, The Assassination of Gianni Versace weaves in other narrative strands that delineate specific aspects of recent history. The fifth episode, for example, examines the impact of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, the US policy, introduced in Clinton’s presidency, that attempted to improve life for gay people in the military so long as they hid their sexuality, while openly banning gay people from serving. The episode zones in on the story of one former Marine who left the military because of his sexuality and became one of Cunanan’s victims after he spurned his advances. While that episode was being filmed, Donald Trump was revealing his new plan to ban transgender people from the military.

The series also serves as a dark comment on the celebrity culture that blossomed in the late Nineties, with Versace and his love for the spotlight right at the epicentre. “You see it in the frenzy when Versace is murdered,” says Jacobson.

“Something that should be an outpouring of grief and horror is turned into a commercialised event. People were stealing X-rays, just to have a connection to a famous person.”

Cunanan, too, was obsessed with status and wealth. “One of his traits early on is this absolute infatuation with fame; he was willing to kill for it,” says Orth. “What he was willing to do to become noticed, I don’t see it as that different to making a sex tape, like the Kardashians, or becoming US president because you were a reality TV star.”

Filmed, in part, on location in the Versace mansion – a lush, colourful, wildly over-the-top property – the show has a particularly colourful dramatis personae. Edgar Ramirez plays the designer, and Ricky Martin his long-time partner, the former model, Antonio D’Amico. Glee star Darren Criss is Cunanan, while Penélope Cruz plays the imperious Donatella Versace, Gianni’s sister, business partner and muse. It’s suffused with the same glossy eroticism that Versace epitomised.

There were tales of torrid parties and orgies behind closed doors, which Versace would task D’Amico with arranging, and which are referenced, although not shown, in the show. Such assertions may go some way to explaining the Versace family’s statement that Murphy’s drama “should only be considered as a work of fiction”.

Martin, however, believes that such alleged details of Versace’s private life should not be deemed shocking. “There is nothing wrong with a relationship being open,” he says. “You have got to evolve. And if this is what is needed for the relationship to be more solid, then why not try it?”

While the series will no doubt rekindle interest in the personal story of Versace, his fashion legacy remains undimmed. To mark 20 years since her brother’s murder, Donatella launched the Versace Tribute Collection at Milan Fashion Week last September. But the clothes were overshadowed by the finale: five of the original supermodels – Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Helena Christensen and the former French First Lady Carla Bruni – took to the catwalk. Social media lost its mind. Gianni would, no doubt, have heartily approved.

‘He was willing to kill to become noticed’: How the US’s most elusive killer came to the small screen

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace S02E05: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

JEFF TRAIL TAKES CENTRE STAGE IN A FANTASTIC EPISODE

When this season of American Crime Story began it was hard to imagine how it would compare to the popularity and acclaim of its first season. If anything, this season had a much tougher job than the first, tasked as it was with proving if this type of show could maintain said quality in the long term while telling distinct and different stories each season. Part of season two’s success is how different it is to The People v OJ Simpson. Instead of the equivalent of a Law and Order episode stretched to ten meticulously researched and dramatic hours, The Assassination of Gianni Versace has utilised the fact that, as a genre, crime is an environment for expansive story-telling.

The last two episodes, the first centring on the murders of Lee Miglin and William Reese, and the second on the murders of Jeff Trail and David Madson, have kicked the season into high gear by putting the victims of Andrew Cunanan front and centre. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell finally puts the spotlight on Andrew’s first victim, Jeff Trail.

To say that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is the best episode of the season may not mean that much coming from me, considering I felt the exact same way about the previous two, but that just goes to show what a hot streak American Crime Story is on at the moment. The story that is being told here, the different aspects that branch out from Andrew killing Versace, create a rich tapestry that the late designer would have been proud of, if he made tapestries that is.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’s main focus here is rejection filtered through the attitudes towards homosexuality in the early to mid-90s. It’s an episode of contrast, taking us through the different experiences that Gianni Versace and Jeff Trail went through when coming to terms with who they are.

We begin with Versace, as he reveals to his sister Donatella his plans to officially come out as gay through an interview with Advocate. So far, the Versace family, apart from Gianni’s death. Have been used to add flavour to the main story rather than be the main course themselves; which is surprising considering the heavyweight talent playing them. Gianni coming out here is used as a contrast to the fact that Jeff, living in completely different circumstances cannot. Of course, Donatella has her own suspicions about why her brother is choosing to come out now. Apart from rhyming off a list of ways that this revelation could hurt their business, something that didn’t actually come to pass, she outright accuses Antonio of using the it as an opportunity to achieve a kind of fame of his own, confirming in the process that these two never got along. Finally, Gianni shouts both of them down, saying that it was his idea, his decision, words that reverberate throughout the episode.

The point of Versace’s role in this episode is that he wasn’t rejected by the industry that made him a superstar. Before his death there was no other fashion designer whose image was as deeply connected to his brand as the clothes he made. He even became an icon in the gay community which is one of the reasons he came up on Andrew’s radar in the first place.

Jeff Trail is a different story all together. A decorated and respected Naval Officer, Jeff’s identity is just as defined by his career as it is his sexuality. The problem is that these two things are directly opposed to each other. Homophobia in the military was a such heights in the mid-90s that most gay officers hid their sexuality from their colleagues for fear of abuse. For Jeff this culminates in the bravest moment of his life, when he came to the aid of an officer who was being beaten to death because he was gay. Jeff admits in a 60 Minutes interview, in which his face is hidden, and his voice is distorted, that he wishes sometimes that he let the officer die: that way he could have stayed hidden. He eventually leaves the Navy because he can’t take hiding anymore, but that doesn’t mean that he can fully come out of the closet.

This is where Andrew comes in as we see his and Jeff’s first meeting. Andrew comes across as everything that Jeff wants to be: comfortable in the gay scene, confident, kind, and generous. It’s Andrew that points out the fallacy of Jeff having to hide in order to do the interview while the men against him and his gay colleagues are free to talk about killing faggots in full uniform. Andrew’s not wrong, although he is clearly manipulating Jeff into needing him more.

So, Jeff is rejected from what he sees as his true calling in life, he even keeps his naval uniform in a place of almost worship in his bedroom closet, if that isn’t symbolism then what is? Now it’s Andrew’s turn to be turned away from people he thought cared about him. After years of his lies and manipulations, he even sent Jeff’s father a postcard to try and out Jeff, he arrives in Minneapolis to see Jeff and David only to be continually turned away.

As well as these deep thematic discussions, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell also boasts the best performances of the season so far. Finn Wittrock, known for playing psychopaths on American Horror Story, broke my heart as Jeff. His turmoil and anxiety was palpable in a performance of tragically human proportions. He is the only actor so far that has come close to Darren Criss in terms of quality.

10/10 – American Crime Story continues to rewrite the crime genre’s rule book when it comes to adapting a true crime case. No other show has put this much effort into the killer’s victims, giving them full stories where other shows relegate them to gory crime scene photographs. Halfway through the season, and American Crime Story is already one of 2018’s most important shows.

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace S02E05: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story Review: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (Season 2 Episode 5)

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Season Season 2 Episode 5 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is another heartbreaking episode which showcases the homophobia of the 1990s which had been in the background on previous episodes, but is now front and center.

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is impeccably acted as always and it is interesting to see how Jeff Trail and Andrew Cunanan meet. We only saw Finn Wittrock as Jeff Trail very briefly in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story Season 2 Episode 4 “The House by the Lake,” before Andrew brutally hammered him to death.

However, the timeline is still not working as well as it should. When the episode opens in 1995 with Versace telling Donatella he is going to come out, I was glad that we were getting back to the Versace storyline.

Any scene with Donatella is mesmerizing.

The scene illuminates the stigma of being gay and what it can do to a business, even in fashion, which now, we would see as an accepting industry. Donatella assumes that Antonio wants the fame of being recognized as Gianni’s boyfriend.

But Gianni insists that it is his idea. He almost died and now he wants to share his story.

It’s something he must do.

Versace is only present at the beginning of the episode and then at the end when we see how very different Gianni and Jeff’s stories are told to the press.

It is so sweet when Gianni calls Antonio over and introduces him to the journalist as his partner for the past thirteen years. I love Ricky Martin more and more with each episode he’s on.

Jeff Trail’s conversation with a CBS camera crew is in a dingy hotel compared to the beautiful hotel suite Gianni meets Advocate magazine in. Gianni will be on the cover of the magazine, whereas Jeff will be in shadows and his voice masked like “a criminal.”

Jeff Trail came from a military family and was serving in the Navy under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy which prohibited the military from discriminating against closeted homosexuals, but at the same time banned openly gay and bisexual people from joining the military.

As we see Gianni and Antonio walk the hotel hallways on the way to the interview intercut with Jeff meeting journalists in secret, I had kind of forgotten that Versace had even been a part of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

The episode largely belongs to Jeff, but after Versace’s intro, we’re back to Andrew’s point of view, four days before the start of his murder spree.

Oh, and Andrew’s also injecting heroin.

As Andrew prepares to leave his life in San Diego, we see a typical serial killer shrine with images of Versace (including the Advocate cover) which shows that Versace was always a target. We also see that Andrew lives in a small room with very little possessions and a closet full of blazers.

He must keep up appearances.

The episode continues to jump between the fateful weekend Andrew comes to Minneapolis, the first time Andrew and Jeff meet, and Jeff’s time in the Navy.

I wish that we would have seen more of Andrew and Jeff’s relationship and how Jeff discovered that Andrew was a fraud.

The interview Jeff gives is a big moment on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” however, we see it three times. First, we actually see the incident Jeff talks about where he came to the aid of a fellow sailor who was getting beat up for being gay.

Then, Andrew watches the CBS tape where Jeff confides that he wishes he hadn’t saved the sailor’s life because it ended his military career.

And then, we hear the story again in the motel room with Jeff and the journalists.

It’s too repetitive and when we see Jeff tell the TV crew about the incident at the same time as Versace comes out to the world, Jeff’s story doesn’t make as big as an impact as it should.

What does make an impact is when Jeff tells Andrew that he has no honor.

The look on Andrew’s face is murderous.

Even more so when Jeff says, “No one wants your love.”

We don’t know why Andrew is the way he is but his motivation for murder is somewhat clear. He kills men who he either wanted to out, who he envied, or who he thought wronged him.

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is a good episode because of the way it handles the subject matter. The execution, however, however, is too clunky. It is too repetitive at times and Jeff and Andrew’s relationship could have been explored a little further.

Reviewer Rating: 3½ / 5 stars

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story Review: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (Season 2 Episode 5)

‘American Crime Story: Versace’ recap: ‘House by the Lake’ – TheCelebrityCafe.com

When hearing the phrase “House by the Lake,” it’s most likely associated with good memories for most people. Something cozy, like a nice cabin perhaps. A place to relax and let life slow down.

But Andrew Cunanan is not most people, and from this point forward “House by the Lake” is going to mean something much, much different for him.

The fourth episode of American Crime Story: Versace — “House by the Lake” — once again dives further into Andrew’s past, before he ever met Gianni (it’s a little strange how Versace in is the title of the show and we’ve barely seen him the past couple of weeks, but we’re willing to roll with it).

This episode takes place one week before everything that went down with Lee in episode three happened — showing Andrew in a far more vulnerable state.

Andrew is living with David Madson (Cody Fern) — a young architect (he’s really got a thing for architects) whom Andrew seems to be head-over-heels in love with. David, apparently, doesn’t feel the same way as he’s starting to grow tired of their relationship and is looking for a way to escape Andrew’s requests for marriage.

The two are sharing some tense moments in David’s apartment — David receiving a promotion and trying then trying leave, Andrew standing around acting all creepy — when their friend Jeff (Finn Wittrock) knocks on the door. David’s confused why he’s here, but Andrew says he invited him over pretty much just out of spite: he’s pretty sure David is cheating on him with Jeff, and he wants to give the two “a chance to talk about me.”

A frustrated David goes downstairs to let Jeff in. They talk about how weird Andrew has been lately and head back into the apartment — which is where Andrew is waiting with a hammer.

BAM. Down goes Jeff. A couple of bloody blows to the head later, and he’s out for good.

David is horrified and doesn’t know how to react. Andrew quickly reassures him that he’s not going to kill him because he still loves him and all that. Sure Andrew, sure.

Still in shock, David thinks they should call the police but Andrew won’t hear for it. He tells him that they’ll both be locked up — David let Jeff in, it’s his hammer and cops hate gay people, and Andrew couldn’t live with himself if David had to go to prison. Oh yeah, Andrew has a gun too — one he stole from Jeff at one point — which further convinces David to go along with Andrew’s schemes.

After an awkward dog walk, the two wind up making a run for it. Good thing too, because it’s not long after the crime is committed that the police come knocking on David’s door.

At first, they assume that David’s body is the one they’ve stumbled upon. Then, after noticing the hair color doesn’t match, they make the next logical conclusion — it’s Andrew’s body. Upon this realization, they instantly run out of the apartment: they don’t have a warrant to be here, meaning anything they discover at this time won’t hold up in a court of law.

Finally, after they get a warrant and send the body down to the lab, they learn the truth: it’s Jeff. They send out an APB for Andrew and David, both of whom are long gone at this point.

Long gone, on their way to Chicago to try and get some money from Andrew’s friend Lee (sound familiar?) David is still a part of all of this, despite his constant confusion. We’re constantly seen flashbacks of him and his dad — a scene in which their hunting, another in which David comes out to him .

After stopping in a restaurant and hearing a cover of “Drive” by The Cars that makes Andrew breakdown and cry (which is, by far, the most emotion we’ve ever seen from Andrew. Maybe he isn’t as remorseless as we’ve been lead to believe), David — who had the chance to escape out a bathroom window — finally commits to the situation and returns to Andrew.

At least, he did in that moment, only to realize his mistake later. The next morning, David sees Andrew holding his gun — which he promised not to use as long as David was around. Andrew won’t admit to what he was doing, which then causes David to crack. He lets him know how much of a manipulator and terrible person Andrew is, how he killed Jeff just because he was in love with him.

Huge mistake. Huge. Like, yeah, David is right and everything but saying that face-to-face with a psycho killer probably isn’t the best idea in the world.

That’s what leads them to a house. After driving in tension for awhile, Andrew pulls over by a lake and drags David out of the car. David begs for his life, but there’s no saving him at this point.

David makes a run for it — and for a moment it looks like he might make it. We see David imagine that he makes it inside a nearby house, only to find his father there, offering him a cup of coffee. The illusion is touching, but only last a second. We snap back to reality to find David has been shot in the back and is bleeding out. Andrew lays with his corpse for awhile, only to then get back in the car and continue to his journey to Chicago. Look out Lee. Look out Versace.

‘American Crime Story: Versace’ recap: ‘House by the Lake’ – TheCelebrityCafe.com