The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 2 review – Dead Good

Fans of complex narratives, rejoice. Fans of simpler, more linear storytelling, lament. Only, as with so many modern films and television shows, it seems that The Assassination of Gianni Versace is taking a rather complex route in laying out its fascinating story.

Like Christopher Nolan’s Memento and the BBC’s recent serial killer thriller Rellik, this American Crime Story follow-up to The People Vs. O J Simpson is – mostly – telling its story backwards. With each episode outlining the events immediately before the previous instalment. So with last week’s opener showing us the brutal murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace, this week’s events centre around his murderer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) arriving in Miami. On the run after a rampage that saw him killing four people across the United States.

The chronology isn’t quite that simple, though. Pre-titles we’re shown the very sombre follow-on and fall-out from Versace’s shooting. So it appears that we’re running two timelines at once. Not only does it seem that the writers may well have been influenced by Nolan’s Memento, but they’re also fans of Inception too.

This second episode is called ‘Manhunt’ and shows Cunanan running from police after his pre-Versace murder spree. What we’re mostly enjoying so far here is the distinct lack of clichés around how the story is being told. That said, it isn’t exactly a very clichéd story…

Let’s put it this way: How many TV shows and movies about manhunts have you seen where the criminal on the run cleverly escapes the clutches of the police while screaming the words to ‘Gloria’ by Laura Branigan out of the window of their car as they drive away? Exactly.

Cunanan’s destination? Miami Beach (as we know). Somehow, the crazed and delusional killer instantly makes a friend there too. HIV-positive Ronnie (New Girl’s ever-excellent Max Greenfield) clearly knows there’s something off about his new pal and you get the distinct sense that he realises that nothing good can come of their relationship. But our manipulative lead character here is, bizarrely, really quite irresistible.

The pair do coke in a dingy cheap hotel room at a rather sharp contrast to Cunahan’s soon-to-be victim Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramírez) and his boyfriend Antonio D’Amico’s (Ricky Martin), who are seen living it up at their mansion, in exclusive nightclubs and at one of Versace’s huge fashion shows.

Props have to go to the costume department here. Versace’s show has a catwalk show scene full of gorgeous Versace outfits. Except they’re not really Versace outfits. The fashion house wouldn’t allow any of their pieces to be used in American Crime Story, so all the Versace apparel had to be recreated. It’s impressive work too. ‘Cameos’ from Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and supermodel Naomi Campbell add to the impressive realism of this scene.

This second episode features an early nomination for Weirdest TV Scene of the Year. Cunahan decides, to earn some money, to take on ‘a client’. An old rich guy who fancies an hour or two of submission, tied up to a swanky hotel bed. Cue our anti-hero manically wrapping the elderly man’s head up tightly in duct tape to a soundtrack of Phil Collins’ Easy Lover. So that’s a little Memento, a sprinkling of Inception and about six large bowls full of American Psycho thrown into this episode. And it’s all the better for it.

Criss managed to make Cunahan really quite scary in the opening episode. And if this second hour does anything, it really allows him to crank things up and seriously terrify us with his portrayal of the weirdly little-known murderer. Where many on-screen psychopaths scare us with their brute strength, viciousness and almost monster-like brutality, Cunanan unsettles with his unnerving verbosity. Finally making his way into Twist, the club Versace frequents, he’s approached by a guy on the dancefloor who asks him who he is and what he does:

“I’m Andy. I’m a serial killer… I said I’m a banker. I’m a stockbroker. I’m a shareholder. I’m a paperback writer. I’m a cop. I’m a naval officer. Sometimes I’m a spy. I build movie sets in Mexico and skyscrapers in Chicago. I sell propane in Minneapolis, import pineapples from the Philippines. You know, I’m the person least likely to be forgotten. I’m Andrew Cunanan.”

That’s a creepy guy right there.

The backwards storytelling may confuse a few viewers, but it’s also pretty exciting. Each week is going to let us further pull back the curtain/duct tape on this fascinating and utterly terrifying man.

Florida’s Own Elle Taylor Opens Up About Her Scene-Stealing Gig For American Crime Story | DragStarDiva

The knock heard around the world.

The second installment of FX’s American Crime Story, The Murder of Gianni Versace, is absolutely everything it’s been hyped up to be: glitz, glam, and an over-loading of gay culture circa 1997. However, one particular scene has already launched as a staple in gay culture circa now. “Gianni, it’s me, your sister.“ A new gay tagline that will most likely last all the way through pride month – or the Versace Fall collection.

We either have Ryan Murphy to thank for writing that line, or the fabulous Key West performer and local celebrity Queen Elle Taylor for delivering it. We at DSD couldn’t help but reach out to see how such a small little scene became an early highlight of the show, and who was the queen that landed the Drag Donatella role.

Drag Star Diva: How did this part come about?

Elle Taylor: Well. I was on my way back home from Tampa, and as I was driving down the Keys, I received a call from Kimball, the owner of Aqua nightclub (the bar I work at) saying I should call Glenn – the agent looking to fill the roll for the casting department. Once I got off the phone with him I gave Glenn a call and he was ever-excited to possibly have found someone. After talking to him we agreed that first thing in the morning I’d film my audition at
my home and send it in. A few hours I got a call saying I got the roll.

DSD: What were thoughts about playing “The Queen” Donatella?

ET: I was incredibly honored.

DSD: How many other queens auditioned for the part?

ET: At first I thought they only were searching in Miami, but I came to find out from one of the producers and directors that they were looking worldwide to try and fill the roll.

DSD: Was there a buzz in the Queendom about this part?

ET: I’ve gotten mixed feelings from queens some and some jealous.

DSD: Your part unfortunately is only mere minute or so (We wished it went on and on). Why do you think it was such a highlight of episode 3?

ET: I think it was an important part because it showed how humble Gianni actually was. He wasn’t a stranger to going to drag shows or having drag queens over at his house.

DSD: What do you think it is about Donatella that people seem to live for?

ET: She is so strong, and such a resilient woman.

DSD: We noticed your tattoos, but didn’t notice them on the show. Where did they all go?

ET: I hate to cover them but for the show I had to. I have a process of covering my tatoos with different makeup that I have used over the years, but while I was on set, they were using a makeup palette from Jordane Cosmetics called the Total Tattoo Coverage palette on Ricky Martin. It is by far one of the best tattoo coverage makeups, and it’s nontransferable to clothes and water resistant.

[…]

DSD: Back to the show… Will we see any more of drag Donatella?

ET: Sadly no, though the scene that I did shoot was much lengthier, but do to editing it got cut down a lot. But who knows, as you can all tell from the series, Ryan Murphy is known for his flashbacks.

Florida’s Own Elle Taylor Opens Up About Her Scene-Stealing Gig For American Crime Story | DragStarDiva

TV review: Lucy Worsley’s Fireworks for a Tudor Queen; The Assassination of Gianni Versace

The Assassination of Gianni Versace BBC Two ★★★★☆

The Assassination of Gianni Versace is in its second episode and Darren Criss as the fantasist serial killer Andrew Cunanan is mesmerically convincing. The scenes in which he drove towards Florida singing euphorically to Laura Branigan’s Gloria (pretty much proof of madness), then, having been hired for sex by a businessman, manically disco-danced around the room in gerbil-smuggler undies as his client thrashed on the bed suffocating because his head was wrapped in parcel tape were so good that I rewound to watch them again.

The programme opened in 1994 and clearly implied that Versace was HIV positive, a claim that the family angrily dispute. The froideur of Donatella (Penélope Cruz) for Versace’s partner, Antonio (Ricky Martin), whom she blamed for their promiscuous lifestyle, dripped with the contempt of someone who suspects opportunism. I must say I’m not really getting the sexual chemistry between Versace and Antonio. The latter’s grief-stricken facial expression often reminds me of a constipated pine marten. But Criss alone, sulky yet calculating, is reason enough to keep watching.

TV review: Lucy Worsley’s Fireworks for a Tudor Queen; The Assassination of Gianni Versace

Intriguing but also baffling: The Assassination of Gianni Versace reviewed | The Spectator

By common consent, including Bafta’s, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story was one of the best TV dramas of 2016. Produced by Ryan Murphy, it laid out the story in a beautifully clear, largely chronological way that made us appreciate, all over again, just how strange the whole O.J. business was — not least thanks to the wider social forces at work. Now, we’ve got The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (BBC2, Wednesday), also produced by Ryan Murphy and also tackling an event from the 1990s that manages to seem both shockingly particular and neatly revealing of more general trends.

At which point, all similarities end, because here Murphy (who also directed the first episode) takes a far more fragmented and less viewer-friendly approach. The show hops backwards and forwards in time, showing us scenes and several unnamed minor characters that are yet to be linked, and for quite long stretches it appears perfectly content to leave us somewhere between intrigued and baffled.

Last week’s first episode, for example, began with a long, pre-credits sequence that intercut scenes of Versace’s highly agreeable life in his (literally) gilded Miami Beach villa with regular sightings of a handsome young man beside the ocean, alternately reading a history of Vogue and fondling a gun. The man then headed to the villa, saw Versace returning from a morning stroll and shot him dead. The sequence certainly established the programme’s ability to blend sumptuous visuals with the slow cranking-up of something very sinister indeed. But it also demonstrated an equally characteristic willingness to be deliberately enigmatic about what on earth was going on — and, more specifically, why.

Two episodes on, and we’re not much the wiser. We do know that the killer, Andrew Cunanan, had already murdered four men when he arrived in Miami Beach a few weeks before Versace’s death in July 1997. Yet, the details of his background, crimes and motives still remain distinctly mysterious. Admittedly, Cunanan was a fantasist, a compulsive liar or both, telling different people different stories wherever he went. Nonetheless, the drama could presumably have set at least some of the record straight by now. So why hasn’t it? The reason, I’d suggest, is a pretty good one: to make us realise that, when it comes to a man as weirdly malevolent as this, being somewhere between intrigued and baffled is an entirely justified response.

Meanwhile, the snapshots of Cunanan’s past also served as snapshots of gay life in the late 1990s, a time when a treatment for Aids had finally been found, and when, it seems, the obvious sense of relief was combined with a feeling of mild incredulity, as people slowly recovered from a collective trauma. For their part, Versace and his partner Antonio were faced — perhaps not uniquely — with the choice of whether to throw themselves cheerfully into their old promiscuous ways or to opt for cosy monogamy.

Despite the strength of the individual scenes, Darren Criss’s fantastically unsettling performance as Cunanan and an impressive supporting cast — including Penelope Cruz as Versace’s sister Donatella and Ricky Martin as Antonio — it’s clear that for viewers of The Assassination of Gianni Versace a certain degree of patience will be required. Luckily, those very same things also give us enough confidence in the show to believe that our patience will ultimately be rewarded.

Intriguing but also baffling: The Assassination of Gianni Versace reviewed | The Spectator

Darren Criss on the Vulnerable Moments, Lesbian Subplot, and Skeet Ulrich Role Cut from American Crime Story

Fans watching American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace will have noticed that the episode running times tend to fluctuate in length. This week’s episode, “Ascent,” clocked in at around 77 minutes with commercial breaks. Next week’s installment will be even longer. But in a wide-ranging interview with Richard Lawson on Vanity Fair’s weekly podcast Still Watching: Versace, series star Darren Criss reveals that, as is often the case, the first cut of each episode was initially much, much longer and entire subplots and characters wound up on the cutting-room floor. “I’d be curious to see the director’s cut because a lot of episodes ended up at 90, 100 minutes,” Criss explained. Whether or not viewers will ever see a director’s cut of the series, Criss shared a few of the gems audiences might be missing.

For one thing, there was an entire sequence involving Riverdale and Scream star Skeet Ulrich as a porn czar who rejected Andrew Cunanan’s attempts to find work in the industry. (According to Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, Cunanan was obsessed with pornography.) Criss explains:

There was this really interesting scene in the second episode where [Andrew’s] already on the lam. He hasn’t killed Gianni yet, but Andrew goes into—this happened, apparently—a small boutique porn studio … looking for work. Shout out to Skeet Ulrich, who got cut out of it. I really, really enjoyed his performance. He played this … porn Ziegfeld guy, producer dude, with his cigarette, sort of skeezy dude.

For more of what that Ulrich plot entailed—including Andrew going into a “berserk” rage that caused Criss to injure himself on set—you can listen to the complete interview. Though Ulrich mentioned having a part in American Crime Story, in interviews last year, the actor was snipped out of the marketing material for the show entirely. But Criss points out that you can see vestigial remains of some of the other cut storylines in trailers and promotional photos. Take, for example, this character portrait of Orange is the New Black star Dascha Polanco who played a Miami investigator in the first two episodes of the series and will likely return for the finale.

Though she’s captured here in a club scene, American Crime Story never reveals any information about Detective Lori Wieder outside of work. But according to Criss, there were lengthy scenes of Polanco’s character “going to the gay clubs and she was really kind of connecting the dots” in pursuit of Cunanan. “There’s huge sequences that we shot, huge parties and a lot of people, that took a long time that are just gone.” In the lengthier versions of the episodes, Polanco’s character’s familiarity with the gay scene in Miami came first hand: this more “prominent” version of her character was openly gay.

Critics and fans alike have noted the way The Assassination of Gianni Versace has broadened its scope far beyond the lives of slain designer Gianni Versace and his murderer Andrew Cunanan, to engage in a number of other themes and issues concerning the homosexual community in 90s America, including gays in the military, midwestern conservatism, the drug scene, H.I.V. survival guilt, and more. But for all the various male-gay-experiences represented in the series, American Crime Story is awfully light on any engagement with the lesbian community, despite the fact that several gay women orbited Cunanan’s social circle, and gave interviews to Maureen Orth.

As Criss laments, the dynamic between Polanco’s Detective Wieder and Will Chase’s Detective Paul Scrimshaw added a few more layers to those earlier episodes. Chase plays the “hardened straight-bro who is not necessarily homophobic, but just doesn’t really get it” while Polanco “had this whole thing of being this lesbian investigator that understood what was going on a little more.” Detectives Wieder and Scrimshaw are both characters named for real people who spoke to Orth, for her book, but in the context of the show act as composite characters.

Most of all, though, Criss says he misses a certain vulnerable scene between his character and Cody Fern’s David Madson. “You see [Andrew] with the phone in his hand and he’s saying, ‘David, I’m not the person that I said I was,‘ and there’s this real brutal, vulnerable moment of honesty, of unadulterated honesty that, as a viewer, you‘re like, ‘Oh. Oh, thank God. Oh, great,’ ” Criss recalls. “Then, it’s not real. Then, he finally calls David and he just says, like, ‘Hi. I had a great time. Bye,‘ and that’s it. It’s all those moments where you go, ‘Goddammit, no, man, you’re really … You were so close.‘”

These little missing scenes and characters are really just the tip of the iceberg of what Criss covered in nearly an hour of discussion with Still Watching: Versace. To find out more about the true story of Versace, Cunanan, and more, you can listen to the full interview with Criss—as well as past guests Maureen Orth, Ricky Martin, Max Greenfield, Judith Light, Cody Fern, Finn Wittrock, and more—by subscribing to Still Watching: Versace on Apple Podcasts or your podcast app of choice. New episodes of the podcast air every Wednesday night.

Darren Criss on the Vulnerable Moments, Lesbian Subplot, and Skeet Ulrich Role Cut from American Crime Story

#ACSVersace trended in the UK during the airing of episode 2 of The Assassination of Gianni Versace | 7 March 2018

What’s on TV tonight

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story
BBC Two, 9pm
Two episodes in for this “true crime” drama about the 1997 shooting of Gianni Versace, and the show is definitely being stolen by Darren Criss’s portrayal of his killer, Andrew Cunanan. As we follow Cunanan round Miami — bizarrely gaffer-taping his face and carrying out disposable-camera reconnaissance on Versace’s mansion — Criss switches seamlessly between self-deluded mania, terrifyingly emotionless psychopathy and moments of gleeful camp abandon. The showrunner Ryan Murphy is successfully treading the line between considered drama and the soapy froth that it could otherwise have been — overhung by only the slightest waft of spuriousness.

What’s on TV tonight

The Assassination of Gianni Versace, a playlist by Malinda Kao on Spotify

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Spotify playlist | updated to episode 6

Adagio in G Minor for Strings and Organ, “Albinoni’s Adagio” • Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life • All Around the World • Capriccio, Op.85 – Letzte Szene: “Kein andres, das mir im Herzen so loht” • Bellini: I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Act 1: “Oh! quante volte” (Giulietta) • Gloria • Easy Lover • Back to Life • You Showed Me • Giacomelli: Merope: “Sposa, son disprezzata” (Merope) • A Little Bit of Ecstasy • Be My Lover • This Is the Right Time • A Certain Sadness • It’s Magic • St. Thomas • Pump Up The Jam • Fascinated • Sensitivity • Self Control • Freedom! ‘90 – Remastered • Sérénade mélancolique, Op. 26

The Assassination of Gianni Versace, a playlist by Malinda Kao on Spotify

TV review: Hugo Rifkind on American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace

I’ve been trying to figure out the best word to describe American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, but I just can’t get a handle on it. At first I thought it might be “gay”, but that’s not right at all. “Gay” just means gay. It’s no more a vibe than “straight” is. Then I thought it could be “camp”, but that’s even more wrong. Most of the gay characters in this startling show aren’t remotely camp. They’re muscular, toned and dangerous, but also quite often dressed as Louis XIV’s lamé curtains. Best understood, I suppose, it’s a deep dive into the aesthetic of 1990s American homosexuality, in much the same way that American Psycho was a dive into that of 1980s Manhattan finance. Which is not, I’d imagine, quite what anybody expected.

Technically, it is also a sequel. The first series of American Crime Story was better known as The People v OJ Simpson, a show that won big plaudits and numerous awards, yet which was also, at least in my experience, oddly easy to stop watching. This, obviously, focuses on the killing of Versace in Miami in 1997 and could easily be very similar, with gawkers and a media circus and cops and lawyers on the make. It isn’t, though, and not only because its title character clearly has to spend quite a lot of time dead.

The focus is instead on Darren Criss, as his creepy killer, Andrew Cunanan. You may remember Criss from Glee, a show in which he was more inadvertently creepy as an exhaustingly kind and gentle enthusiast of musical theatre. If you ever thought to yourself, “Man, that Blaine guy could be a serial killer,” then it turns out you weren’t the only one.

Last time around, Cuba Gooding Jr and John Travolta led the cast. This time we have Penélope Cruz as a frankly odd choice to play Donatella Versace. I’m loath to be unchivalrous, but it’s like getting Brad Pitt to play John McCririck. Up against her, as brilliant as the whites of his own teeth, is Ricky Martin as Versace’s bereaved partner, Antonio. Versace is played by Édgar Ramírez. It’s a little odd to hear these three Spanish-speakers pretending to be Italian by chatting in heavily accented English, but a greater distraction is the way they’re all blown off screen by their backdrops.

Every shot that features any one of them is like one of those insane Versace advertisements with Madonna in them as a businesswoman. Remember them? She was always on the phone, halfway between buying half the FTSE and having an orgasm. I think it’s actually more of a mid-2000s Donatella aesthetic, that, than a 1990s Gianni one, but crikey, ask somebody else. It’s all bright lights, patterned satin, patent leather belts and expensive sexiness you’ll never afford. Pre-death, Ramírez wakes in bed and strides down corridors more glitzy than a Swiss chocolate box, across a patio decked out with so many houseboys standing to attention in shorts that it could be a Wimbledon tennis court. When the plot gets going, you’re almost sorry. You don’t want to think. You just want to watch.

Before long, though, and at least by the second episode (I’ve sneaked ahead; they let us do anything) it turns out to not be that sort of show at all. More interesting than Versace’s gaudy closet is the role he plays being so uncompromisingly out of it. Out in the wider world the Aids epidemic had only just passed its height and even George Michael wasn’t out yet. Mass acceptance — let alone equality in law — was still far away.

From his palace in Miami Beach Versace existed as a sort of approachable living saint of the local gay community, which itself seems to have been a collection of nomads, lost souls, addicts and pioneers, all of whom had made the conscious and probably painful choice to build their identities anew. The heroin addict Ronnie (an unrecognisable Max Greenfield, better known as New Girl’s Schmidt) is indicative of the more desperate flotsam this world attracts; Cunanan, although very definitely a fantasist and a psychopath, is its extreme form.

The easiest way to write a story is to take the first chapter of somebody else’s and see where your imagination wants to go. The Assassination of Gianni Versace may not go to all the places it feels it should, but that would be a shame. In the US, which is a few weeks ahead of us, it hasn’t quite been the hit of The People v OJ Simpson, but for my money it’s a whole lot more interesting. Apologies for the spoiler (look away now), but history tells us that Cunanan took his own life eight days after the murder. What did he do before? Who made him what he was? Callous as it may seem, we already know what happened to Versace. At its best, this isn’t about his assassination at all, but his assassin.

TV review: Hugo Rifkind on American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace

The Assassination of Gianni Versace, a playlist by Malinda Kao on Spotify

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Spotify playlist | updated to episode 5

The Assassination of Gianni Versace, a playlist by Malinda Kao on Spotify