‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 1 Recap: Starting With a Bang

Mere minutes pass in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story until Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) assassinates Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez). This is your first clue that you’re not really watching a show about Gianni Versace.

Welcome to Ryan Murphy’s latest exploration of 1990s celebrity crime. After sufficiently dazzling everyone with his take on a well-known story — the murder trial of O.J. Simpson — Murphy has chosen to take a broader, more difficult swing. He’s named the series after the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace, I assume largely because it was Cunanan’s most high-profile killing. But Cunanan, and thus Criss, takes center stage in this story. The relatively balanced storytelling that puts both Cunanan and the Versaces in the spotlight this episode won’t return until we’re nearly through our nine-episode-long journey.

Criss gets plenty to do in this premiere installment: the killing, meeting Versace at a nightclub in San Francisco, stalking him to the San Francisco Opera, and even revealing his butt! But we’ll be talking mostly about him in the following weeks.

So let’s take this opportunity to focus on the Versace side of things; in particular, Penelope Cruz as Gianni’s sister, the iconic Donatella Versace.

Cruz as Donatella doesn’t step into the episode until it’s nearly over, arriving in Miami Beach via private plane upon hearing of her brother’s murder. Murphy, who directed this episode, frames her in a way perhaps only a gay man could: reverent, awestruck. Even the stairs descending from her private plane are shot with epic sweep. You’d feel compelled to let out a YAS if she weren’t there to identify the body of her dead brother.

Donatella is emotional upon arrival in her face, but none of that carries over to her body. She’s outfitted in the House of Versace’s finest, her long, blonde hair cascading over gorgeous leather. When she steps out of her limo upon arriving at the Versace residence at night, She wears sunglasses, so as to hide her tear-filled eyes from the paparazzi.

She is a wounded warrior; her brother’s clothes are her armor.

When you first hear Cruz’s take on Donatella’s accent, it sounds downright bizarre. It’s like she’s taken a long drag of a cigarette and is holding the smoke in her throat at all times. But that’s fitting; Donatella’s is a nearly impenetrable accent, which the fashion icon herself knows all too well.

Explaining her method of replicating Donatella’s speech back in October, Cruz told People she thinks the female Versace’s accent is “Italian with a very international flavor — very rock ’n’ roll.” That description doesn’t really mean anything until you hear it; once you do, it makes perfect sense, and matches the character’s presentation perfectly. Donatella sounds hardened, but her voice falters easily. She’s strong, but with tremendous emotion bursting at the seams.

After a few scenes of barely holding it together, Donatella lets her guard down, if only slightly, in a meeting with Versace’s board. She speaks emotionally but firmly about her brother, and the ways in which he will live on through his brand. “I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice,” she says, words trembling as they leave her mouth, tears welling in her eyes.

In her final scene of the episode, Donatella shuts down the planned public offering of the House of Versace. Gianni wanted it, and delaying would likely prevent the House from trying again for years. (Indeed, the company is still working to go public in present day.) It’s bad for business, but right for the moment.

“This is not a time for strangers,” Donatella insists. “This is a time for family.” And that’s Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith’s idea of her in a nutshell: Donatella loves her brother deeply, and loves the people who work at the House. But she trusts no one else — her armor is fully secured to avoid giving the public an inch of herself.

Cruz will pop up in a few scenes here and there over the next few episodes, including one crucial story about Donatella and Gianni’s creative collaboration. But this first impression was her moment: how Donatella, icy goddess with a fiery heart, protected herself against the pain of her brother’s death.

Recapping the First Episode of ‘American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

The first thing you need to know about FX’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is that it’s not really about Gianni Versace. While O.J. Simpson—and his fame, his race and his abusive history—were central to Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology in its first season, this story focuses on the man who killed Versace and the society that aided in that murder.

The new season is based on Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, a 450-page tome the journalist Maureen Orth published in 1999. Much of the book is devoted to the life story of Cunanan, the 27-year-old spree killer who shot Versace in 1997. Her reporting is thorough and revealing, but much of her analysis is dated. When Orth explores Cunanan’s demimonde of meth, escorts, sugar daddies and BDSM, it feels as though she’s unaware that this milieu isn’t representative of gay male culture as a whole.

Especially considering that Murphy—who is gay and has created some groundbreaking queer characters—has also been known to perpetuate the occasional homophobic stereotypes, the interplay between the book and the series is bound to give us plenty to discuss. At the very least, Vulgar Favors is handy for determining which parts of the show are confirmed fact and which are purely conjecture. (I’ll also be using Deborah Ball’s House of Versace, a breezy history of Gianni, his family, and the brand from 2010, along with a few other sources.)

I don’t want to call these recaps “fact-checks,” though, because fiction doesn’t have any responsibility to stick to the official record. Instead, I’ll look at how the discrepancies between what Orth dug up and what Murphy depicts reveal the show’s real agenda. These pieces may take a different form from week to week, but since the premiere was mostly a reenactment of the crime and its immediate aftermath, we’ll start with some pretty basic background stuff.

July 15, 1997

Orth’s book ends with the death of Versace and the intensified hunt for Cunanan, who had already killed four men by the time he came to Miami Beach. American Crime Story begins with the murder and goes backward from there. It’s a promising approach, because the real suspense here is in the question of how the smart, charismatic, cultured young man we meet in flashbacks ended up on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

The show sticks fairly close to the facts in recounting what happened on the day Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez) died. He really was returning home from an early-morning excursion to buy magazines when Andrew, played by Darren Criss in a performance that’s already riveting, gunned him down on the steps of his palatial home (more on that later). One bullet also killed a turtle dove—a symbol that initially led authorities to suspect a Mafia hit. While Versace’s longtime partner, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), stayed at the designer’s side, the couple’s neighbor Lazaro Quintana chased Andrew until Andrew pulled a gun on him. Versace was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he was declared dead at 9:21 AM.

Cops really did spot someone who matched Andrew’s description on the roof of a parking garage around the same time, but he escaped. (Orth doesn’t mention them tackling the wrong man.) It’s not clear what he was doing later that day, when police found the stolen red truck Andrew had abandoned and he became the suspect. The scenes that show him changing into fresh clothes and watching gleefully as the media descends on Versace’s house aren’t just plausible; they underscore how easily Andrew blended in among the town’s gay beachgoers.

One character to keep an eye on is FBI agent Keith Evans (Jay R. Ferguson). The Bureau was searching for Cunanan long before he killed Versace, and Evans was its man in Miami. Sadly, he was also inexperienced and unfamiliar with the city’s gay community. Sgt. Lori Wieder, the lesbian cop played by Dascha Polanco, wasn’t on the scene that day, but the officers who were there did find boxes of undistributed Wanted flyers in Evans’ trunk. The scene where the pawnshop owner complains to police about the legally mandated transaction form she’d filed a week earlier, which included Cunanan’s full name, is another embarrassing real-life detail. But the emphasis Murphy, who directed the episode, places on Evans’ neglect of his assignment is crucial, because it’s the first suggestion that law enforcement’s homophobia—its literal fear of engaging with gay men—contributed to its failure.

October 1990

Did Versace really know his killer? Well, sort of.

It’s true that Versace designed the costumes for a production of Capriccio at the San Francisco Opera, and stayed in the city during its run in 1990. At the time, Cunanan was living rent-free in Berkeley with his friend Liz Coté (Annaleigh Ashford), who Orth describes as a “rich and spacey debutante,” and her husband, Phil Merrill (Nico Evers-Swindell)—the couple we see in the flashback. A fixture in SF’s gay scene, Andrew met Versace at a club called Colossus. But, Orth reports, it was the designer who approached him: “I know you,” said Versace. “Lago di Como, no?” he asked, referring to his Italian lake house. It was, most likely, a flimsy pickup line. Andrew, who’d never been to Italy but had also never heard a flattering lie he couldn’t get behind, went along with it. On another night, Versace, Andrew, and a local playboy named Harry de Wildt were spotted together in a limo.

That dreamy encounter after the opera, though? It’s pure fantasy, although Andrew was known to lie about his Filipino father knowing Imelda Marcos, owning pineapple plantations and having a boyfriend. What’s important here is the conversation about Andrew’s future. “You are creative?” Versace asks, and his date answers in the affirmative. In fact, the only things Andrew ever created were fictions about himself, passed off as fact. (I won’t get too deep into that, because his lying is sure to come up later in the show.) “I’m sure you’re going to be someone really special one day,” says Versace. The distance between Andrew’s ambitions and the life he ended up with—as well as the reasons why he was such a failure—is going to be important.

The Family Business

The episode’s strangest divergence from the facts comes during the same scene. Versace explains the history of his company’s Medusa logo, recounting that he first spotted the image while playing in ruins as a child in Calabria. In fact, as Ball notes in House of Versace, he borrowed his logo from a door knocker at the Milan palazzo he bought in 1981. Perhaps we’re supposed to suspect Versace is a liar, too, but I’m inclined to believe the line is pure exposition, a hint of the designer’s humble beginnings that will soon become relevant to Andrew’s story.

Meanwhile, Versace’s mourning siblings/business partners, Donatella (Penélope Cruz) and Santo (Giovanni Cirfiera) provide some insight into the company’s status in 1997. Poor Cruz, normally a fantastic actress, has a thankless role (and a distracting accent) in this episode. All she does is sob, scream and provide dry background info that writer Tom Rob Smith doesn’t bother surrounding with believable human dialogue. For the record, it’s true that Santo, the oldest Versace sibling and the company’s most pragmatic voice, wanted to take the business public. And Gianni, after accepting a large dividend to subsidize his lavish lifestyle, agreed to do so. The plan was to make an initial public offering in the summer of 1998. It never happened. Two decades later, Gianni Versace S.p.A. remains a billion-dollar private company. None of this is particularly interesting, so here’s hoping it becomes relevant to the Cunanan story eventually!

Gianni Versace’s Fucking Insane House

There isn’t much art in this workmanlike premiere, but it does begin with a shot of the clouds painted over Versace’s bed that leads to a lovely, nearly wordless sequence contrasting Gianni’s civilized morning with Andrew’s primal scream. If you paid attention to the Renaissance-style art and the stained-glass windows and the gold accents and the massive tiled courtyard, it probably occurred to you that Versace’s home was totally off the wall. (“If Donald Trump had taste,” I said to myself, “this is what Mar-a-Lago would look like.”) Surely it was exaggerated for TV?

Actually, it was not. Built in 1930, Casa Casuarina, as the home was known, was inspired by Christopher Columbus’s son Diego’s residence in the Dominican Republic. In the courtyard of the 20,000-square-foot villa were busts of Columbus, Pocahontas, Mussolini and Confucius (all of which Versace kept). After Versace bought the property in 1992, he spent a million dollars restoring it. An army of artists and artisans filled the place with murals, mosaics and baroque furniture. Versace published a typically bizarre coffee-table book about his many bonkers properties in 1996, and in it you can find photos of the family frolicking poolside at Casa Casuarina alongside busy interiors and shots of naked men ironing. My favorite page shows a close-up of a burger, fries and a milkshake served on gilded Versace china, atop an ornate gold table. America! If you can’t track down a copy, this Google Image search should give you an idea. Look, here’s a bare-assed dude with a lampshade over his head! See you next week!

Recapping the First Episode of ‘American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Premiere Recap: Miami Vice

Editor’s Rating: ★★★☆☆

In an episode that is so steeped with terrazzo floors, bulbous gold watches, and even servants’ uniforms that are chicer than anything I could pull out of my closet, there is one image that I just can’t get out of my head: old men in tiny red bathing suits. Seriously, what the hell is up with that? There’s at least three of them in the premiere of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. I think it might be a hint the next season of Ryan Murphy’s other shows. Stay tuned this fall for American Horror Story: Thongs.

Seriously, though, this first episode of Versace is absolutely gorgeous. Just think about all of the lush images that pop out of the screen like an IMAX version of a Vogue issue. There’s the elegant pool of the opera singer’s sequin dress as she belts on stage. There’s Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramírez), delicately sipping his espresso from a black gilded cup, shot from above so his breakfast table is just off center of the Medusa logo that he made famous. There’s the hollow chime of crystal champagne flutes clinking together on the set at the opera. There’s Gianni’s sister Donatella (Penélope Cruz), with that famous platinum hair and doorknocker of a nose standing at the top of a little portico. And let us not forget that perfect peach emoji of an ass as Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) strides into his roommate’s husband’s closet to steal a suit.

Oh, there’s just so much beauty! So many surfaces! It’s fitting for a story about a man who made his fortune creating beauty and cultivating the world around him in his own image. And the cinematography has that round golden glow one can only find from the light in Miami. But when we’re looking under all of those surfaces, it’s unclear if there is anything there yet.

It is an interesting choice to start the series with Versace’s murder, as we watch that day unravel much as it did in 1997 with the mourning of a fashion icon happening at the same time as a statewide manhunt for his killer. We only get one real flashback, to Cunanan and Versace’s first meeting in San Francisco when the designer was in town to design the costumes for the opera. Cunanan tracks Versace down to the VIP section of a gay club and slowly weasels his way into the designer’s orbit. Versace is totally disinterested at first, batting this cute twink away with the same forceful courtesy that he uses to deny an autograph seeker.

Cunanan is charming, however. He uses his skills as a liar and his knowledge of Versace to charm him with stories about his parents moving from Italy, weaseling his way not only into both a seat next to him (savagely dispatching his friend with the VIP pass to get him a drink), but also into a date with the designer. In these flashbacks, we also learn that Cunanan will lie about things large and small, like when he erroneously retells his story to his girlfriend and her husband, or his school friend.

The scene with his gay friend at school is the most revealing when the friend tells Andrew, “You tell gay people you’re gay and straight people you’re straight.” Rightfully, he’s confused about Cunanan and his ever-changing stories of himself, ones that crop up to serve whatever need arises at that minute. (That didn’t confuse me, though. I was just confused by how those glasses without temple bars managed to stay on his face without falling off.) Cunanan’s answer to his friend? “I tell people what they need to hear.” Yup, that seems to fit the profile.

That is just one of the moments in this episode that seem a little bit on the nose. The whole opening is a tad bit obvious, where Versace swans around his house in his pink robe while his killer walks into the surf wearing all of his clothing (a mark of a true mad man) screaming the whole time. Versace is sunning himself by his tiled pool while Cunanan is puking in a dirty public restroom with “Filthy Faggots” scrawled on the wall.

Then, of course, there is Gianni’s corpse with the bullet through his cheek, lying next to the dead dove that is similarly afflicted. Yes, people, we get it. What about when Andrew hears the news of Versace’s murder in the lobby of a fancy hotel and then watches a woman’s shocked reaction and mimics it perfectly? He doesn’t know emotion. He doesn’t know anything real.

But the most glaringly obvious symbolism is when Gianni’s partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) tries to follow Donatella into a family meeting and she literally shuts the door in his face. Oh, I wonder what’s going to happen to him during the rest of the season?

Antonio definitely gets the worst scenes of the whole night, especially his grilling by Det. Scrimshaw (Will Chase), who you know is a jerk because he has a mustache. Scrimshaw’s casual homophobia and disregard for Antonio’s feelings after the loss of his partner and his callous disregard for a non-monogamous, non-heterosexual relationship is pretty disgusting. Just as The People v. O.J. Simpson asked us to reexamine the issues of race, gender, and celebrity surrounding that case, it seems like this season is going to ask us to reexamine how Versace, Cunanan, and D’Amico’s sexual orientation factored into this case. In no place was it more obvious than these unsettling scenes.

It’s also obvious in the way that Donatella treats Antonion, and how she’s fixated not just on preserving her brother’s saintly image but also the family business. She says she doesn’t want to talk to the board so soon after her brother has been gunned down in front of his house, but there she is, doing just that. She also shoots down taking the company public just days after her brother signed the papers to do just that. Donatella says she wants what her brother wanted, but it’s clear that she has a separate agenda all of her own as well.

From this first episode, ultimately, I’m curious to wonder how the series will unfold. Will we see things in 1997, as the cops and FBI continue to hunt for Cunanan, alongside flashbacks to how we got here? Or are we going to take a giant leap backwards and start with both Cunanan and Versace’s beginnings to show us what led the murder in the first place? The structure is still unclear, but it doesn’t seem like there is enough meat left for 10 episodes set just in 1997. Or is there? Will the reexamination of this case reval details that those of us who lived through it aren’t even aware of? Or is it just taking the facts and putting them in a dramatic light? We won’t find out until we delve beneath the surface, something that hasn’t quite happened yet. But, man, what a very gorgeous surface it is.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Premiere Recap: Miami Vice

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story — Grade It!

Whether Darren Criss was shooting people in the face, puking in public bathrooms or casually rubbing his crotch while standing over a sleeping couple, he sure made Wednesday’s season premiere of American Crime Story feel like the darkest episode of Glee yet.

I’m half-joking, but considering this is Criss’ first series-regular TV role since Blaine Anderson warbled his final warble in 2015 (not to mention Criss’ first professional reunion with Glee boss Ryan Murphy), I trust you’ll overlook my inability to disassociate — at least in this first week.

Truth be told, Criss’ take on Andrew Cunanan — the sexually manipulative serial killer who murked fashion icon Gianni Versace in 1997 — is impressive, thoughtful and downright chilling, a far cry from the singing bottle of hair gel in a sweater vest he brought to life on the Fox comedy. Let’s discuss:

1990 | Wednesday’s premiere turned the clock back to the year Cunanan first encountered Versace (played by Edgar Ramírez) at a gay club in San Francisco. He was basically “that guy” at the party — the one who shows up uninvited, then proceeds to inject himself into strangers’ conversations — but his boyish charm and Harry Potter glasses worked their magic on Versace, earning him a date to the opera. I guess it helped that Cunanan presented a completely fictitious backstory, one that made him approximately 100 percent more Italian than he actually was.

Cunanan excitedly (and inaccurately) relayed this meeting to several of his friends the next day, a series of conversations that offered a glimpse into his twisted psyche. While speaking with a straight married couple, Elizabeth and Phil Cote (played by Annaleigh Ashford and Nico Evers-Swindell), he labeled Versace the F-word. But during a subsequent chat with a fellow gay, Cunanan had no problem referring to his and Versace’s opera meet-up as a date. “You tell gay people you’re gay and straight people you’re straight,” the friend protested. “I can’t keep up.”

1997 | Before diving into Versace’s history with Cunanan, the episode introduced us to the fashion icon in all his Miami Beach splendor. And despite his international fame, Versace was also painted as somewhat of a local celebrity — like a post-Christmas Carol Ebeneezer Scrooge, receiving hugs and hellos from all the Muppets people he encountered in town. And it was after one of these jaunty strolls that Versace was confronted by Cunanan, who shot him point-bank at the gate of his mansion. (The dead dove next to Versace felt a little on-the-nose, so I fact-checked — it really happened.)

Versace’s sister (played by Penelope Cruz) sauntered into the party about three-quarters of the way through the premiere, and while Donatella always commanded attention, most of her mourning breath was spent belittling her brother’s lover. When Antonio broke down in tears, her response was, “That’s not what I need from you right now.”

Speaking of Ricky Martin’s character, it was kind of shocking to hear how Donatella — and even the police — regarded his relationship with Versace. Donatella berated him for not protecting her brother, which she called his one job, and the police seemed far more interested in details about Versace’s sexual behavior than the details surrounding his untimely demise. 1997 doesn’t feel like it was that long ago… and yet it was.

The premiere concluded with Cunanan still at large, though the authorities — led by a mustachio’d Will Chase — were hot on his trail. (Also, yes, that was New Girl‘s Max Greenfield playing Ronnie, the guy found living at Cunanan’s last known address.)

Your thoughts on Crime Story‘s second season premiere? Grade the episode below, then drop a comment with your full review.

(A secret confession for those who have scrolled this far: Do you have any idea how difficult it was for me not to make a stupid joke about Darren Criss showing his butt in this episode? Believe me, I thought of ’em all, including “he put the ‘ass’ in ‘assassination.” But I refrained, for I am a professional… and that’s what Twitter is for.)

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story — Grade It!

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Season Premiere: Someone Really Special

A half-hour into the second season of FX’s “American Crime Story” comes a scene that is startling in its brazenness. A tourist, whose request for an autograph the designer Gianni Versace politely declined moments earlier, is gawking outside the Versace mansion. Versace has been shot to death on his own front steps, where a pool of blood remains after the body has been carried away. She dashes under the yellow police tape cordoning off the crime scene. She dips a page from a glossy magazine — could it be Vogue? — into the still-wet puddle and gingerly inserts her ghoulish souvenir into a transparent plastic pouch.

The murder of Gianni Versace outside his palatial Miami Beach home on July 15, 1997, had so many elements of a made-for-TV scandal — fashion, celebrity and psychopathy, all against the backdrop of a 1930 Mediterranean Revival villa where a room can now be had for $1,000 a night — that recounting it could easily devolve into a grotesque act itself, with the audience in the position of the memento-hoarding tourist. To its credit, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is related in a mostly respectful manner thus far, allowing this Verdian tragedy to unfold at a stately pace under the South Florida sun, though not in chronological sequence.

The season premiere works backward from the morning of the crime: Versace (Edgar Ramírez), having awakened in his mansion and eaten breakfast in a pink house robe, is gunned down as he returns from a stroll down the beach to buy some magazines. The killer is 27-year-old Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), whom we first see cradling a backpack stuffed with a handgun and a copy of Caroline Seebohm’s 1982 book “The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Condé Nast” inside. Before steeling himself to commit murder, Cunanan takes the time to throw up in a public bathroom; we see that an anti-gay slur has been etched onto the stall.

The cliché of the homicidal (usually closeted) homosexual — driven to kill by envy, lust, self-loathing, etc. — is so common and tired that the heavy-handed bathroom-graffiti scene gave me pause: Are this serial killer’s motives sufficiently complex to sustain nine hours of television?

My concerns were allayed for now by the robust performances — Mr. Ramírez as the soft-spoken Calabrian genius, Mr. Criss (“Glee,” “American Horror Story”) as the not-so-charming sociopath — and by Tom Rob Smith’s script and Ryan Murphy’s direction, which evoke a time that feels both recent and remote.

For those who could afford it, antiretroviral therapies had granted a reprieve from the death sentence that AIDS represented, but gay men were still routinely regarded with fear, if not contempt. Basic mainstream acceptance of their lives and relationships, much less legal recognition, was a ways off. A taint hung over discussions of gay sexuality, yet the yearning for companionship, love and joy had become far more open since the worst of the AIDS crisis a decade earlier.

Perhaps the most poignant scene in the episode is when the local police are interviewing Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), Versace’s partner. His white tennis shirt and shorts encrusted with his lover’s blood, a forlorn and exhausted D’Amico is asked to explain why “dancers, models and escorts” have been in and out of the house.

“I was his partner, not his pimp,” D’Amico replies. He loved Versace. They were together for 15 years. The officer is mystified.

“The other men, did they consider themselves to be Versace’s partner too?” he asks.

Whether such a lack of understanding affected Cunanan’s evolution as a killer will presumably be a dominant theme for the rest of the season, which is loosely based on the journalist Maureen Orth’s “Vulgar Favors: The Assassination of Gianni Versace.” The first suggestion that he might be lacking a moral compass comes in a flashback to 1990, when a fawning and flirtatious Cunanan approaches Versace and his entourage in a crowded nightclub in San Francisco, but later tells his friends that it was Versace who initiated the conversation.

It emerges that Cunanan — who graduated from an elite private high school in San Diego and, after dropping out of college, lived off a series of benefactors — tells so many lies that even he may have come to believe them. A Catholic and a former altar boy, he passes himself off as a Jew. Asked why he tells straight people that he’s straight, and gay people that he’s gay, he replies, “I tell people what they want to hear.”

Versace invites the young fabulist to a night at the opera: a production of Richard Strauss’s “Capriccio,” for which Versace designed the costumes. They exchange origin stories. Versace’s centers on his muse — his sister, Donatella — and love of family. Cunanan’s outlandish tale involves a wealthy father who owned a pineapple plantation in the Philippines, became a pilot for Imelda Marcos, and later ran off with a farmhand, who also served as the chauffeur of his Rolls-Royce. Got that?

If Versace is incredulous, he’s too polite to say so. He is downright avuncular as he tells Cunanan, “You’re handsome, you’re clever, I’m sure you’re going to be someone really special one day.”

That’s some understatement: Returning to 1997, we learn that Cunanan was wanted for four other murders before Versace’s. A botched nationwide manhunt, it seems, has failed to prevent a serial killer from striking again. The F.B.I. has joined the Miami Beach police as they home in on Cunanan.

Meanwhile, Donatella Versace (Penélope Cruz) flies in from Italy and asserts control over her slain brother’s business empire, which was headed for an initial public offering on the Milan and New York stock exchanges. She comes across as fiercely protective of her brother’s legacy, if a little sinister. “My brother is still alive as long as Versace is alive,” she declares, making clear that the brand has transcended the man. She later brushes aside a grieving D’Amico, telling him: “This is not a time for strangers. This is a time for family.”

The term “assassination” is, so far, an enigma. The hotels of South Beach, the nightclubs of San Francisco, the gay demimonde and the Italianate arias so lavishly depicted in this series seem fairly removed from the world of politics, particularly at a time when AIDS had begun to recede as a public health crisis and when legal recognition of same-sex relationships still seemed like a distant prospect. How will this show’s creators define politics, including the politics of the closet? What criteria will it use to deem Gianni Versace’s death an assassination? Or — as the bloodied turtle dove found next to his body suggests — was it more like a martyrdom?

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Season Premiere: Someone Really Special

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Still Watching: Versace

Ricky Martin spoke with Vanity Fair’s Still Watching: Versace podcast about his devastating turn in the show’s premiere.

American Crime Story: How Ryan Murphy Transformed Ricky Martin’s Real-Life Pain into Stunning TV

This post contains frank discussion of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story premiere: “The Man Who Would Be Vogue.”

Though he’s been in the spotlight for 35 years now, former Menudo member and “Livin’ La Vida Loca” singer Ricky Martin has always presented a comfortable and familiar on-stage persona. White teeth glinting, eyes sparkling, hair styled to perfection—when you see a showman like Martin, be it in Vegas or on Broadway, you know what you’re getting. But in the first Ryan Murphy-directed episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, Martin gives his fans something they’ve never seen from him before: despair, and lots of it. The Puerto Rico-born Martin plays Antonio D’Amico, longtime lover of Gianni Versace, who—spoiler alert, if you ignored the title of this series altogether—dies on the front steps of the lavish house he and Antonio shared in the show’s opening scene.

Martin spends the rest of the episode grief-stricken and covered in Versace’s blood. In a striking, wordless, and unscripted moment, Martin lets his eternally optimistic mask slip off entirely and he’s fantastic. The gleaming smile gone and eyes sagging with exhaustion, Martin—wearing the personal grief of his own decades spent in the closet—stares at himself in the mirror. “I guess Ryan wanted to use and take advantage of that vulnerability,” Martin said in a new interview for Vanity Fair’s American Crime Story companion podcast, Still Watching: Versace. Approaching Martin after nine hours of filming both the discovery of Versace’s body and a confrontational police interrogation scene, Murphy said, “Rick, come on, let’s go to the bathroom. I want you to stand in front of the mirror. Wash your hands because you’ve been covered in blood for the last 10 hours and give me whatever you can in front of the mirror.” In that moment, Martin says, he was “exhausted, drained, and really sad.”

From the age of 12, Martin lived his life in the public eye—first as an earnest boy bander for the Latino pop group Menudo, and eventually as a worldwide solo-singing sensation. But until the age of 38, the Catholic-raised Martin kept the truth about his sexuality a secret. He tells Still Watching that he felt an “internalized homophobia,” which similarly plagued both Gianni Versace and his assassin: Andrew Cunanan. Martin describes those decades as “the most uncomfortable and saddest times of my life. I thought my emotions were evil because that’s what they told me. You’re not supposed to feel like this.” In past interviews, his familiar, comforting smile always in place, Martin has spoken of undiagnosed depressive periods that lifted significantly when he took to his own Web site in 2010 and came out of the closet.

Murphy’s choice of Martin for this role is genius casting for a series that explores the warping, damaging effect of closeted sexuality and aspirational lifestyles. Martin represents, for many, the epitome of the closeted 90s. Barbara Walters, who has expressed few professional regrets in her life, admitted in 2010 that she had pressed Martin too hard on the quasi open-secret of his sexuality in 2000, calling her line of questioning “inappropriate.”

The singer was living in Miami during Versace’s late-90s South Beach reign, and though the two never met—“I had a Giorgio Amani campaign at the time,” Martin explains—he was frequently invited to attend parties at the Versace mansion. As an out and proud designer, Versace was an anomaly even in the gay-friendly world of fashion. Though Versace’s open sexuality did nothing for Martin at the time (“on the contrary I was so locked in a closet”), the singer relates to the example Versace set, having done the same for many of his own fans in 2010. “No one knows how easy it is to come out until they do it.”

Martin finally showed up to the Versace house 20 years later, when, for two weeks last spring, American Crime Story moved into the designer’s old home on Ocean Drive (now a hotel) in order to meticulously re-create the scene of the crime. Martin said he “lived” as Antonio the entire time he was in that house—and unlike most of his co-stars, Martin was able to talk to the real person who inspired his performance.

Adopting a dramatic Italian accent, Martin tells Still Watching of Antonio’s initial disappointment with some photos that had leaked off the set: “Ricky! I never wear a green shirt!” But that early pushback from D’Amico turned into a close dialogue between Antonio and Martin, the man who would become him. Versace’s longtime partner answered Martin’s most difficult questions in painstaking detail, to the point where Martin was able to come armed with, perhaps, more firsthand insight than anyone else in the cast. “Everything that you see,” he says, “is based on the communication I had directly with Antonio D’Amico.”

The research Martin did paid off, as did his close friendship with Edgar Ramirez the actor playing Gianni Versace—whom Martin enthusiastically calls his “brother.” But Murphy’s stroke of genius in turning Martin’s real-life emotional exhaustion into theater is what delivers up the episode’s most arresting image. And Martin, who so bravely shared a closely guarded secret with his fans in 2010, shares yet another truth in the American Crime Story premiere: the traumatic toll that secret life took on him, even as he smiled broadly and shook his bon bon for all the world to see.

American Crime Story: How Ryan Murphy Transformed Ricky Martin’s Real-Life Pain into Stunning TV

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ series premiere recap: Versace on the floor

We gave it an A-

Before we begin our recapping journey for The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, let’s be explicit about a few points. The Versace family has released a statement in opposition to the television show — which is based on the book Vulgar Favors by Maureen Orth — calling it a “work of fiction.” So I’ll be recapping this as a work of fiction; the people I’ll be discussing will be characters, based on the show’s portrayal of real-life people. I’m watching this as a television show loosely based on true events, as a piece of entertainment, and not as history. Good?

Right away, Murphy is doing what he does best with AGV: We open with a sweeping baroque string score, and a shot of Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez) waking up in his gilded palace, sliding his feet into slippers and gliding through his ornate home to a balcony where he overlooks Miami Beach like a king.

Down below, by the water, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) wears a red hat, with a backpack by his side that contains a copy of The Man Who Was Vogue, and a gun.

The tension builds: Versace takes a pill; Cunanan screams in the ocean. Versace leaves his home and someone shouts his name, but it’s only tourists who want an autograph, which he politely refuses; Cunanan vomits into a toilet; and Versace continues his glide to a newsstand to pick up copies of magazines. Already, we know the intersection of these two men feels viscerally wrong; it’s as if they live in different galaxies, or entirely different parallel universes.

But then it happens. As Versace is reentering the gates of his home, Cunanan sees his chance. Cunanan walks towards him, arm outstretched, and shoots. There’s our introduction.

The episode immediately picks back up with Cunanan jumping into a bed where two of his friends are sleeping, bragging about meeting Versace. It takes a few seconds to register that this is a flashback — we’re now in 1990, in San Francisco — and it only takes a few more seconds to realize what sort of person Cunanan is. The real work in this scene is done by actress Annaleigh Ashford, whose polite smiles and subtle head tilts fully encapsulate a friend who’s gotten just a little bit fed up with that friend who’s too much.

Cunanan claims that he met Gianni Versace last night, and his friends humor him. He describes a scenario where Versace approached him and he rebuffed him with a perfectly flirtatious retort. As the audience, we’re privy to the real scene: Cunanan found Versace in the VIP section of a nightclub and talked his way next to him, pretending they had met before, bringing up his mother’s Italian heritage. This scene works on two levels: first, establishing that Cunanan actually did meet Versace, and second, establishing Cunanan as a liar, with delusions of grandeur and a remorseless way of ignoring the truth.

Our opinion of Cunanan is confirmed when we see him in conversation with another friend who calls him out: Cunanan has lied about being Jewish, he tells his straight friends he’s straight and his gay friends he’s gay. He lies so often that even we aren’t sure whether he’s telling the truth when he claims that Versace invited him to the opera, for which Versace designed the costumes. Andrew is there, in the next scene, but it’s possible the opera is just another place he manipulated his way into without an actual invitation. Maybe he just bought his own ticket.

But no, at the end of the opera, Versace is there, not surprised to see Andrew Cunanan. Their demeanor is flirtatious, and it’s implied that their relationship might have become sexual. Obviously, there are no witnesses here, and no way to confirm whether or not that actually happened, and so the show provides plenty of plausible deniability.

Back in the present (or rather, the 1996 present), we’re treated to some of the beautiful, slightly extra symbolism that feels so exquisitely Ryan Murphy: a bloody dove, also shot; the tourist who had asked for Versace’s autograph running past the police barricade to get his blood on her magazine page (beats a signature!); the medics cutting through Versace’s medusa logo on his T-shirt in the hospital.

Cunanan freaks out for a while in his car, and then pulls out a clean shirt — this was clearly a pre-meditated murder, not just an impulsive shooting. The police know the suspect is in the parking garage, and whether it was planned or luck, they end up tracking and tackling a stranger in an identical red shirt.

From the identification information on the car, the police are able to ID the suspect as Andrew Cunanan, already wanted for the murder from which he stole the truck. We learn Cunanan has already killed four people, but the FBI had apparently done an atrocious job of trying to track him down. No posters went out with his face on them. A woman who ran a pawn shop had reported him selling something a week before the Versace shooting (using his real name, and real ID) and no one followed up. It becomes sickeningly obvious that if anyone had been paying attention, Cunanan could have been stopped before his most famous murder.

Within the walls of the Versace compound, Gianni’s sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz) arrives to establish dominion over the Versace empire. The FBI have been interrogating Versace’s longtime partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), trying to shift the conversation to frame him as a pimp or a cheater, and not as a boyfriend. It’s true that D’Amico brought men back for Gianni to sleep with, and their Greco-Roman inspired home was the site of all types of debauchery, but D’Amico tries to make it clear that he was different from the others. They lived together for 14 years.

Donatella is obviously not a fan of D’Amico. He symbolically extends his hand to her; she rejects him. And when she walks into a board meeting to discuss the future of the brand, she closes the door behind her, leaving D’Amico in the hallway. She doesn’t see him as a member of the family, and because the brand is Versace, he’s no longer relevant, especially because, in her view, he couldn’t accomplish his single task of keeping Gianni safe.

The FBI do manage to find Cunanan’s motel room, but when they break in, smoke and guns blazing, it’s not Cunanan in the bed but a twitchy junkie named Ronnie.

And there we have it: a pilot that sets all the pieces in motion and promises many more hours of fashion, intrigue, and stylistically splattered blood.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ series premiere recap: Versace on the floor

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ premiere recap: When doves die

Warning: This recap of “The Man Who Would Be Vogue” episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story contains spoilers.

The best part of Peak TV is how excellent television no longer has to appeal to everyone. Sure, we can discuss giant hits like The Walking Dead with total strangers, and grandma won’t stop talking about Breaking Bad. But increasingly — and often thanks to producer Ryan Murphy — mass audiences are not what the best shows aim for. About fourteen people watched last year’s best series (Twin Peaks) and just try bringing up Insecure at a dinner party. We’re not all watching the same great shows anymore, but man, what a time to be a fringe TV viewer.

This is to say that The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the stellar new entry of Murphy’s already perfect American Crime Story series, will be most appreciated by the chicest of bubbles. It’s gaudy, terrifying, campy, tragic, heartfelt, gorgeously filmed… And probably too specific in its milieu to excite a mainstream audience. But if the past 1.3 years taught us anything, it’s that bubbles may not always win elections, but damn is our art better. Definitely comment below if you disagree jk.

“The Man Who Would Be Vogue” was one of the most spellbinding and compelling (and timely!) episodes of television I’ve ever seen, and we should talk about it!

We began with a typical morning in Miami, particularly if you are a wealthy Italian designer at the top of his game in the mid-to-late ’90s.

This, friends, was Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez), and between his gilded beach palace and servants in black tennis shorts we could gather that he was pretty successful. Not so successful that he didn’t eat revolting honeydew melon for breakfast, but doing well enough by most standards.

By this point Versace was so famous that obese, pale midwesterners would wait outside his home begging for him to autograph old issues of Vogue. Now THAT is fame.

A few blocks away at the beach, a young man named Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) was just finishing up screaming at the ocean. He had a big day ahead of him. He was ready to MURDER.

And in a wordless, artfully directed, heartbreaking sequence, Cunanan ran up and shot Versace right there on his front steps. Several times. In the face. In other words, this ended up being not that great of a morning for him. Probably a Top 5 worst morning, if we’re being honest.

We then flashed back to the first time Cunanan met Versace, at a gay dance club in San Francisco. Right off the bat (which is a baseball term and therefore probably not relevant to this scene) we learned that Cunanan’s ambitions to hang out with a famous man were outshined only by his ability to lie and exaggerate the details of his own life. Despite Versace’s initial reluctance to talk to this weirdo nobody, he was eventually intrigued by Cunanan’s claims of Italian heritage and other rich boy jazz. Cunanan was IN.

Except we then saw Cunanan replay the evening’s events to the skeptical straight couple he’d been living with, omitting certain details like how it’d been in a gay club (Cunanan was posing as straight to his roommates) and making it sound like Versace was picking HIM up. But I loved when the roommate dude looked at his wife and they rolled their eyes knowingly. Cunanan clearly loved to spin fanciful yarns, but it was also clear his friends were no longer believing his wild tales.

Like his college friend over here, who called him out for lying to everybody about not only his sexuality but also his ethnicity and social class. Except what he SHOULD have called Cunanan out for was his glasses that only attached to the bridge of his nose. What kind of Bond villain was Andrew Cunanan trying to dress as? Anyway, regardless of all this, he was verifiably invited to the opera that Versace had designed gowns for, and that meant he needed to HUSTLE if he wanted Versace to believe that he was knowledgable and worldly.

I am honestly not sure what those papery rectangle stacks are, but they appear to have ‘words’ on them and in this case Andrew Cunanan was reading them? I don’t know, ask an old person. (I’m 57.)

But yeah, Versace seemed to be the only person in the world NOT skeptical of this young, handsome liar. After the opera, as Cunanan literally basked in the spotlight while on stage, he told tales of growing up on Indonesian plantations and a Bentley-driving gay father. Perhaps Versace could tell this dude was making things up, but he seemed intrigued by the improv. Cheers to con artistry!

One of the less-reported details of Versace’s murder was the fact that he wasn’t the only victim. Well, there had been at least four other victims before this, but there was another victim in this incident. That white dove! A white dove was murdered right alongside Gianni Versace and that is the only thing that made this tragedy even sadder. Well, also the fact that Versace’s shoes fell off.

And then, in detail more graphic than any of us asked for, we watched as paramedics and doctors attempted to save a bullet-riddled Versace’s life. [Spoiler] They did not.

The sequences detailing the aftermath were visually clever and wrenching, from watching the surgeons peel off their gloves and exit the room, leaving Versace’s body alone… To the autograph seekers who literally sopped up blood from his front steps in order to create a souvenir to sell. But my very favorite was the woman who arrived at the scene in full couture and began to WERK behind the news lady.

Say what you will about her lack of propriety, but that lady had star quality.

For his part Andrew Cunanan seemed downright giddy with what he’d done, stalking through town spying on TVs and smiling at newspaper headlines. These were not the reactions of a remorseful, sympathetic person and you can quote me on that.

Then somehow the episode got even BETTER? Because this was when Donatella Versace (Penelope Cruz) showed up to mourn, accuse, and succeed her brother in his business dealings, all with a barely understandable Italian accent. Seriously, Penelope Cruz is truly next-level. Hope she likes Emmys.

Speaking of incredible: Did you guys know Ricky Martin can ACT? As Versace’s live-in boyfriend of 15 years, he sobbed and projected misery like a seasoned Shakespearean actor. Adding to this particular scene’s pathos, we were brutally reminded that in 1997 people were still not comfortable with (or even cognizant of) the existence of gay relationships.

Even though the detectives were looking to investigate a murder, they seemed straight-up flummoxed by the fact that Versace had had male lovers. Worse, Donatella Versace decided that she didn’t want these details in the press, clearly believing that her brother’s homosexuality was a danger to their brand.

Actually, even way, way worse, was the fact that Andrew Cunanan was already a known suspect in other murders, but the police had plainly not done much about it, in part due to his and the victims’ homosexuality. Yep, that was a thing back then. Crimes against gays were frequently back-burnered or ignored altogether. In this scene, a pawn shop owner (played by the majestic Cathy Moriarty) saw Cunanan’s face on TV and then angrily alerted cops the fact that she’d reported him days earlier as having sold something in her shop. Yet the cops did nothing! Ugh, the ’90s were really horrible in certain/most ways.

But enough wallowing the brutal realities of an unjust world, let’s talk more about Donatella! While obviously in mourning from the still-fresh murder, this episode made very clear that her business sense trumped all. Because Versace the company had been on the verge of going public, she now feared that power over the company would be taken from the family, so she and her other brother decided to keep it private. In my opinion this made for a good move, seeing as Versace is still sort of a thing these days. (Side note, I am not sure whether this miniseries will be re-enacting Donatella’s Ice Bucket Challenge video, but here’s hoping there’s at least one episode devoted to it.)

This episode was also full of tons of extremely good and witty visuals and that’s all credit to Ryan Murphy’s directorial eye. There were a lot of clever and downright beautiful details in this episode, but I loved elderly orange speedo man watching calmly as the Miami SWAT Team descended upon Andrew Cunanan’s hotel room. What was going through his mind? What was he thinking about all this? Hopefully we’ll find out in the next episode.

At the end of this episode Andrew Cunanan remained at large. A particularly filthy looking Max Greenfield was found holing up in Cunanan’s room, so something tells me we’ll learn more about this guy. Cunanan himself had taken to roaming around Miami in canary yellow Polo shirt and matching hat, while grinning proudly at himself on the front pages of the local papers. It may have been a violent, inglorious, shameful way to achieve it, but this charlatan had really reached the next level.

“The Man Who Would Be Vogue” was quite simply one of the best first-episodes of a show I’ve seen in a while. Relying on sweeping visuals over dialogue, and allowing gaudiness to exist beside sincerity, it gripped me right away. While we know this is not a happy story and it doesn’t end particularly well, it does feel as important and timely as ever, much like its predecessor The People v. O.J. Simpson. It remains to be seen whether this season will catch on with viewers and critics like that one did, but either way it’s hard not to be grateful for something this special.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ premiere recap: When doves die

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story episode 1, The Man Who Would Be Vogue, advanced preview

The second season of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story premieres Wednesday, January 17. Searching for a spoilery advanced preview? You came to the right place!

After the first season of American Crime Story took us on a wild ride as we watched the O.J. Simpson trial unfold, the series now shifts our attention to spree killer Andrew Cunanan and his crimes leading up to the murder of fashion icon Gianni Versace.

We have binged-watched the first eight episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story to bring you an advanced preview of what to expect! Avoiding all spoilers? Turn away now!

Episode 1, “The Man Who Would Be Vogue,” introduces Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez), his longtime partner Antonio (Ricky Martin), Gianni’s sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz), and serial killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). The episodes play in chronological order, beginning with only a few moments before Versace’s assassination and then taking viewers back in time.

While the real reason for Versace’s assassination remains unknown, American Crime Story goes on to speculate Cunanan’s motives and what leads him to murder Gianni. The final moments of “The Man Who Would Be Vogue” return audiences to the aftermath of Gianni Versace’s death, introducing his sister, Donatella.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story episode 1, The Man Who Would Be Vogue, advanced preview