Tag: 2.04

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Actor Explains Why David Madson Didn’t Run

[Caution: Spoilers about Episode 4 of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story ahead!]

FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is now, and for the foreseeable future, the story of how Andrew Cunanan became one of the FBI’s most wanted during his 1997 murder spree. That story becomes especially disturbing in Episode 4, “House by the Lake,” which includes the gruesome depiction of Jeff Trail’s (Finn Wittrock) murder, filmed more or less exactly as it happened according to the source material Vulgar Favors.

More will be explained later in the series, but Jeff, a clean-cut Naval alum who was closeted for most of his life, befriended Andrew (played by (Darren Criss) in San Francisco. Over time, he got fed up with Andrew’s constant lies and manipulation and tried to cut him off. Andrew and Jeff were also friends with David Madson, a man Andrew dated briefly who eventually tried to cut him off for the same reasons. Jeff was the first person Andrew killed. It was his most barbaric attack too, ambushing him in David’s apartment as depicted. But the terror didn’t stop there. For several days after killing their friend Jeff, Andrew took David Madson (Cody Fern) on the run with him, and David made no known attempt to call authorities or escape.

As Ryan Muphy did with The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, Versace makes decades-old events, the outcomes of which are already public knowledge, feel like they’re happening in the exact moment. Darren Criss’ intoxicating performance makes Jeff’s murder and David’s unforced captivity urgent and believable too — so much so that it’s almost impossible to watch the scenes play out and not hope, scream or pray that David runs. Of course, no one can know what was said between them in some of the moments portrayed — whether Andrew constrained David with explicit threats or by psychological manipulation will forever remain a mystery. But the tragic truth is that David died at Andrew’s hand. From April 27, when Jeff was murdered, until David’s body was found May 3, David stayed with the man who later killed him, likely terrified. But why didn’t he run? For Fern, the question was central to playing David on screen.

“I think it’s such a complex bag of questions,” he told TV Guide. “He was Andrew’s lover. He’d experienced something traumatic — he was in shock. He was afraid for other people’s lives as much as he was afraid for his life.”

David and Andrew met in December of 1995, according to Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors. Their relationship was built on fraud and manipulation from the start: Andrew was living with an older rich man, Norman Blachford, during a good chunk of their relationship, so he didn’t let David call him or send mail with a return address. Andrew plied David with gifts though, as he did many people, and indulged his S&M fantasies with David until Andrew’s increasingly rough sexual demands became a source of strife between them. They broke up in the spring of 1996, but Andrew kept David’s picture taped to his refrigerator door. When his life began to crumble as a result of constant deception and drug use, Andrew became fixated on the idea that David was his only love. As it happens, Andrew wasn’t David’s only unstable lover, either: a previous ex had become a stalker, calling David as much as 120 times a day and eventually being jailed for violating a court order to stay away. In any case, Madson was a “peacemaker,” Orth wrote, a man who loathed violence and avoided confrontation. He frequently talked his way out of things.

Vulgar Favors’ intensely researched study of Andrew and David gives it license to theorize why David didn’t try to flee. Andrew knew David avoided confrontation and was squeamish around violence. Orth even speculates that the handcuffs and leg restraints Andrew enjoyed could’ve been used to hold David captive. More than likely though, Andrew simply kept David paralyzed with fear. Experts in the book said that Andrew could’ve easily convinced David that he’d be a suspect if he went to police, which is exactly how Versace depicted depicted their relationship. A law enforcement official said that the brute force shown in the murder would’ve easily convinced David that Andrew had power over him, instilling a fear that’s common in violent abusive relationships. The intense fear of retribution — even after a break — makes the Stockholm syndrome theory in David’s case not at all surprising. Other issues were at play too.

“He was also a man dealing with an intense amount of shame in the 90s,” said Fern. Though David’s father told Orth he never treated his son any differently after David came out to him, his religious beliefs mandated that David’s sexual orientation was a sin he disapproved of. Though David wasn’t religious in the traditional sense, he absorbed his dad’s values. After the initial shock wore off, “[David] is asking himself, ‘Is his man redeemable?’” Fern said. “He’s asking himself, ‘How am I complicit in this? I let my friend in — I brought him into the apartment. This my fault.’”

When he was found, David had been shot three times. Orth quotes a sergeant as saying David probably got taken by surprise: he had defense wounds on his hands and his body had apparently been dragged about 20 feet from where his killing took place. It’s possible David was methodically plotting an escape — perhaps sweet-talking Andrew while psyching himself up to make a bold move. That thinking, Fern said, informs the scene with Andrew where David calls himself a coward and then attempts to commandeer the Jeep’s steering wheel in a moment of desperate bravery. “The important thing to remember is that this is a man going through something more intense than anyone could ever imagine,” Fern said.

It’ll remain a tragic unanswered question, rooted in both men’s deeply embedded shame and guilt over their sexual orientation, and fears how people would perceive them no matter what they did. “That was the whole journey of the character,” Fern said. “The whole character arc is about that question. Why didn’t [David] run?”

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Actor Explains Why David Madson Didn’t Run

“ACS: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace” Episode 4 Recap: “House By The Lake”

I wish I was not the kind of fool who roots for a happy ending because The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story keeps putting my heart in a vice. This week’s “The House By The Lake” was another visually distinct episode that started out in Minneapolis, and followed architect and nice man David Madson (Cody Fern) on the run with Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss).

The start of the episode was such a classic horror show. It was immediately tense, and Cunanan was so looming. I realized that I hate him so much now, which is impressive considering how likable Darren Criss normally is. Every interaction between Madson and Cunanan inside that ominous ‘90s apartment feels like it goes on forever, and it reminded me of the uneasy gut feeling Get Out built up, where you can’t help but yell at the screen, “Run!” I just wanted the tension to end so badly.

I lost some respect for Cunanan’s charisma in this episode since he is actually not that great of an emotional manipulator. Not that emotional manipulation is such an admirable skill, but I sense Cunanan takes pride in it. The ugly truth of this episode is that Cunanan is actually just physically threatening Madson the entire time. Some moments feel like more gentle coercion maybe, but a significant amount of the episode takes place at gunpoint. Later, when Cunanan is trying to be sweet and offer Madson the carrot instead of the stick, I just wanted to slap the glasses off his handsome face. It got to the point where it was therapeutic for me to have Madson as my onscreen surrogate, getting madder and madder at him until the very end.

I keep harping on this because I’m brilliant and always right, but women are yet again the ones who follow their intuition and check on Madson’s apartment. Maybe we were meant to feel the detective’s judgment of homosexuality, but it also felt to me like there was a subtle distrust of the women by the cops, when in fact, they appeared to be helpful. Without them, it could have taken way longer to start the investigation. I also just thought the cops were garbage because who would ever say, “your friend’s the killer” after taking a few quick glances around a loft? Ass. Plus, his comments to Madson’s parents that there’s a great deal they don’t know about their son were incredibly condescending and ultimately inaccurate, but I appreciate that American Crime Story frequently revisits the sometimes antagonistic relationship between victims, their families, and the police. All parties are human, and the system is imperfect.

The rest of the episode reminded me of Misery on wheels. After the moment when Cunanan tells Madson that he should start thinking about his new life, I realized what an insane hostage experience Madson is having. Why would he want a new life? His life seems good. He’s working as a hot shot architect in a more hip version of the American Psycho apartment. I would almost go as far as to say that Cunanan might have misjudged the extent of Madson’s loneliness and loyalty to him, judging by how much resistance he gets from him at each step of the journey.

A beautiful shining oasis of calm in this episode came when I realized it was Amy Mann singing that gorgeous cover of The Cars’ ”Drive.” She was so casual, almost as if she’s rubbing it in your face that being fabulous isn’t hard for her. We also see Cunanan cry, which terrifies me, but is also a dirty trick that got me to think maybe I’ve been wrong about him. When Madson woke up alone in the next scene, for one naive moment, I was hoping Cunanan had let him go.

I thought Cody Fern did a masterful job of playing David, who was a real lover of Andrew’s. I thought he looked incredibly young, and it turns out he was only 33 when he was murdered. He was absolutely someone with a full life ahead of him, and the scene where he presented his achievements to his dad while also coming out to him reminded me of the “Best Little Boy in the World” hypothesis, or the idea that some gay men will seek out traditional and measurable successes in a potential attempt to deflect attention away from their sexuality. A little digging into Madson’s real life revealed that he had applied and been accepted to both architecture and law school. Cunanan told his friend’s that Madson was the love of his life, which must be taken with a grain of salt because of his compulsive lying, but it is interesting that he’s one of the only love interests we’ve seen so far that was roughly a peer. But as soon as you start to like someone in this series, they’re gone. Given the frantic pace, Cunanan’s red Jeep is starting to feel like the only recurring character I can count on.

I was caught off guard but not mad when the episode slipped into surrealism for its big finish. When Madson is drinking coffee with his father, I knew he was dead, but I still left 1% of my heart open to the possibility that he got away, or that someone else was inside the trailer. I think true crime does a darkly magical thing: you know what’s going to happen and it still manages to be shocking and painful.

“ACS: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace” Episode 4 Recap: “House By The Lake”

ACS: Versace Recap: Hammer Time

Finn Wittrock’s appearance on Wednesday’s American Crime Story: Versace was over as quickly as it began. (Don’t worry, we’ll see him again next week.)

This week’s installment — the second in a row to be completely devoid of all things, you know, Versace — turned back the clock yet again, this time to a week before Andrew Cunanan drove to Chicago and killed Lee Miglin.

At this point, he was living with a handsome young architect named David Madson — played by Cody Fern, the latest in a series of phenomenal guest stars — but we quickly learned there was trouble in paradise. In fact, David had recently turned down Andrew’s marriage proposal, leading him to suspect that David was in love with a guy named Jeff, played by Wittrock. To be fair, David and Jeff did have feelings for one another, but I hardly think Jeff deserved to be bludgeoned to death with a hammer and rolled up in a carpet.

Yet that’s exactly what Andrew did, planning out the whole evening so that David would appear to be the one who let Jeff into his apartment. “They’re not going to see two victims,” Andrew argued when David tried to call the police. “They’re going to see two suspects.” And when that didn’t work, Andrew resorted to Plan B, letting his gun do the talking.

Andrew had essentially taken David captive at this point, forcing him into the life of a fugitive on the run. But they never made it to Mexico, no sir. After David attempted to steer their truck off the road, Andrew pulled over, giving David a head start before pumping his chest full of lead. Tragic as it was, though, there was something beautiful about the portrayal of David’s death; in his final moments, he imagined entering a cabin and seeing his father, finally connecting to a man with whom he’d had a complicated relationship in life. (Andrew cradling David’s corpse, on the other hand, was notably less beautiful.)

Prior to his murder, David gave Andrew the full dressing down audiences have been waiting for, telling him that his entire life is a lie, an act, which is why no one would ever truly get close to him. The two also had an honest — as honest Andrew could be, anyway — conversation about shame, which David thought he might fear even more than death.

ACS: Versace Recap: Hammer Time

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 4: Feline Intuition

By now, it seems clear that the most compelling characters in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” are neither the slain fashion designer, shot to death outside his Miami Beach mansion in 1997, nor Andrew Cunanan, the psychopath who killed him.

Instead, that distinction belongs to more transient characters: in Episode 3, Marilyn Miglin, the widow of a Chicago real-estate developer whom Cunanan murdered; and now in Episode 4, David Madson, a semi-closeted Minneapolis architect who has the misfortune of attracting Cunanan’s amorous attention.

Unlike “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” this second season of “American Crime Story” lacks larger-than-life characters like Marcia Clark and Johnnie Cochran, with their operatic personalities, ambitions and clashes. Cunanan’s homicidal outburst captured headlines, but largely because of the fame of his final victim. His earlier victims remained mostly obscure.

As “Versace” moves backward in time, it attempts to draw out those victims’ lives — and in the case of Miglin’s husband and Madson, their closeted sexuality is a unifying theme. Whether the portrayals are accurate is for others to decide — several relatives of Cunanan’s victims have criticized the series and “Vulgar Favors,” the book by Maureen Orth on which it is based. But I admit, almost grudgingly, that it has worked powerfully as a narrative frame for portraying the victims, even if their killer’s motivations remain a mystery so far.

Just as Judith Light, portraying a widow in denial about her husband’s homosexuality, was the breakout star of the last episode, so Cody Fern, as David Madson, stands out in this one. His journey of self-discovery is both literal — Andrew coerces David into joining him on a road trip after killing David’s secret lover — and symbolic. David realizes who he is, and what he is running from, only when it is too late. It is the stuff of tragedy.

The episode begins in Madson’s warehouse-size loft apartment, which is lined with gray-metal shelves. David and Andrew have been bickering, and while their relationship isn’t exactly explained, a romance gone sour is implied. The buzzer rings; downstairs is a man named Jeff, whom Andrew has asked over, much to David’s irritation.

Andrew sends David downstairs to let him in. In the lobby and elevator, we learn a lot:

• David tells Jeff that Andrew proposed marriage, calling David “the man of his dreams” and “his last chance at happiness.”

• David says that he declined, noting that gay marriage isn’t legal, but that Andrew thinks Jeff is “the reason I said no.” Jeff is surprised that Andrew knows that Jeff and David have been together. “He has this feline intuition,” David says.

• Jeff says that Andrew took a gun from Jeff’s apartment, and that he has come to get it back.

As we are processing all this, the two men enter the apartment, and what happens next is a murder with a claw hammer too vicious and grisly for me to watch.

Terrified and stricken, David seems to go numb. He asks why Andrew killed Jeff; Andrew replies, “I lost control.”

David calls 911, but Andrew compels him to hang up by saying that if the police arrive, they will both go to prison, disingenuously eliding the fact that it was he who set all this in motion. He goes on to argue that homophobia makes justice impossible anyway. “When the police open the door they’ll see two suspects, not two victims,” he says. And when David insists he is no killer, Andrew replies: “They won’t believe you. They hate us, David, they’ve always hated us. You’re a fag.”

Queer people have a term for such self-serving cynicism: Chutzpah.

As he’s forced to flee with Andrew, David comes to see the journey as a symbol for a life of evasion: “I’m playing over everything the police are going to find out about me, and I realize I’ve been doing this my whole life: playing over and over the moment that people found out about me.” On the road later, he adds: “Was I really afraid, when I got in this car with you, that you were going to kill me? Or was I afraid of the disgrace, the shame of it all. Is that what I’m running from?”

In David’s hometown, Barron, Wis., his stunned parents learn from the Minneapolis detectives that a stranger named Jeffrey Trail was murdered in David’s home, with 27 blows from David’s steel claw hammer. The detectives tell them about another stranger, named Andrew Cunanan, whose friends in San Francisco have described as reliable, intelligent, generous. David’s father insists his son is innocent.

“I can see with certainty, there’s a great deal you don’t know about your son,” the detective says. But as we soon learn in a heart-wrenching scene, he probably knows more than the detective assumes.

In one of several flashbacks, David is shown speaking with his dad in the garage. It’s a workingman’s garage (in an earlier flashback, the two of them had gone hunting), and David has graduated from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, at the top of his class. He tells his father he is gay.

“I won’t lie and say that it doesn’t make a difference,” the father responds. “You know what I believe. And maybe this isn’t what you wanted to hear. Maybe you wanted to be told I don’t have a problem with it. I can’t say that. But what I can say is I love you more than I love my own life.”

It is a bittersweet moment, one that in its overall contours many lesbian and gay people may recognize. That someone with reasonably tolerant parents in the mid-1980s could nonetheless feel such shame and self-loathing says a lot, by implication, about those who lacked such emotional support.

We get another look at how crushing that shame and self-loathing might be, when Andrew and David stop at a roadside bar. As David ponders escaping from the bathroom, Andrew is brought to tears by a singer’s rendition of the Cars’ 1984 song “Drive,” a rare moment of true emotional vulnerability from him, his pain brimming to the surface. David, whether because he feels he can’t escape or won’t be believed, forgoes the chance to save his own life and returns to the table with Andrew. Perhaps their need for human connection is mutual.

In a diner the next day, David recalls how Andrew dazzled him when they met at a bar in San Francisco, a year and a half earlier. “What’s this man going to see in me, a small-town boy?” he remembers thinking. They ended up in a $1,000-a-night room at the Mandarin Oriental. David continues:

I remember thinking: How hard do I have to work to live like him, like Andrew? ’Cause I’ll do it. Except it was all a lie. You’ve never worked for anything. It was an act. Is that why you killed Jeff? You loved him. It was so obvious. But he figured you out in the end, didn’t he? It took him a few years but he finally saw the real you, and you killed him for it.

Andrew tries to change the subject, promising David that they’ll lead a glamorous life in Mexico. He can’t stop lying.

Back in the car, David arrives at a further, belated discovery — that Jeff was set up, that Andrew planned all along to kill him in David’s presence. “Why are you always talking about the past?” an enraged Andrew asks. “We had a plan. We had a future.”

They pull over. David’s fate is sealed.

Episode 3 argued that denial could be a tool of survival. Episode 4 points out that recognition — of oneself, of the true character of others — can exact a lethal price.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 4: Feline Intuition

American Crime Story jumps back to Andrew Cunanan’s first murder

“House By The Lake” B+

There’s a surrealness to “House By The Lake” that manages to heighten the creepiness—and trust me, this episode is plenty creepy. From the bizarre opening advertisement for Minneapolis to that strange dream sequence toward the end, “House By The Lake” plays around with reality, all while remaining completely unsettling as we watch the cruel control Andrew has over the people in his life.

In “House By The Lake,” we see how the series is a character study that examines Andrew—without providing easy answers—and how it does so without erasing or justifying the horrible things Cunanan did. It takes place a week before Lee Miglin’s murder and introduces us to Andrew’s first two victims: Jeff Trail and David Madson. Andrew and David had once been in a relationship—some reports said that Andrew frequently claimed David was the love of his life—though they were broken up at the time of his murder. Post-Minneapolis ad, the episode is immediately tense and awkward: It begins the day after Andrew proposed to David and was turned down. When David, who goes downstairs to let Jeff in, explains this, he recounts that Andrew “said I was the man of his dreams, his last chance at happiness.” (It’s easy to think back to Andrew telling Ronnie that the “love of his life” died, though under different circumstances.)

Jeff’s murder is quick and brutal: Andrew slams the door shut the moment Jeff walks in and begins bludgeoning him with a hammer—27 hits. By the end, there’s blood on the floor, walls, all over Andrew, and even some on David who can’t do anything but stare, horrified. The dog barks the whole time. What’s arguably more chilling (and “chilling” is indeed the word of the episode) is Andrew’s calmness afterward, seamlessly switching from murdering to mothering. “Arm’s up,” he instructs David, the way you do with a child, taking off David’s shirt and putting him into the shower to clean off the blood. Even this feels surreal.

What resonates the most in this episode is watching Andrew post-murder—by all accounts, the first time he’s killed someone—with his stoic actions and conversations. When David understandable asks if Andrew is going to kill him, too, Andrew seems surprised with the question, as if it’s something totally absurd to ask a man you just witnessed murder another man. He dismisses the murder with “I lost control.” Andrew also tests his manipulation skills, attempting to guilt David out of calling the cops (and with a healthy dose of passive-aggression thrown in the mix too). “What will happen to you?” he asks with faux-concern. “I’ll tell them you had nothing to do with it, but what are they going to believe?” After all, Andrew explains, it is David’s apartment, and it was David who let him up. When that doesn’t work, Andrew calmly pulls out a gun but the threat is only visual, not verbalized, and Andrew doesn’t let up his original argument. “I can’t allow you to go to jail. I can’t allow this to destroy your life.”

Later, Andrew switches up the argument for not going to the cops: “They hate us, David. They’ve always hated us. You’re a fag.” I went into Assassination with the assumption that it was going to be a stealth examination on homophobia and gay culture in the ‘90s, similar to how The People vs O.J. Simpson was successfully built around race. The further we go (back) in this story, it’s slowly starting to appear that that’s the case. Even when in imminent danger—forced on the run with a gun-wielding murderer—David’s concerns are about how he was outed, even about his activities (Andrew left BDSM toys and magazines on the bed) and worries about everything the police will uncover about him. Will his parents still be able to live in the same town? Will people still frequent his dad’s shop? Throughout, we get glimpses of David’s internal struggle about coming out: the dreams he has about his father, explicitly wondering aloud “Was I afraid of the disgrace? The shame of it all?” (echoing Andrew’s future murder of Lee Miglin, asking if he’s more afraid of death of disgrace), and then that devastating bait-and-switch in the titular house by the lake where David finds a calm acceptance for only a false moment.

The episode also goes back to the flawed police investigation, which was a trend no matter what city the murder was in. When the building manager lets two detectives into David’s apartment, they do a quick run through of the crime scene where a body is wrapped up in a couch and pushed aside. Immediately, they assume it’s David’s body because it’s his apartment, his wallet on the counter, and his coworker who first sounded the alarm because he hadn’t been at work. Because of the scene on the bed, the police too-quickly chalk it up as some gay hookup gone wrong (“They do what they do, this extreme stuff, David ends up in the rug” Detective Tichtich says). And when they learn about dark-haired Andrew staying with David, Tichtich finally realizes that it isn’t blonde-haired David in the rug so now they assume that it was David who killed Andrew. This mix-up, compounded with the fact that the police then leave the crime scene to instead wait for a warrant, and that they don’t properly ID the body until it’s in the morgue, is so frustrating to watch. (And, if I remember correctly from Orth’s book, it was days before any of this got sorted out.)

But back to Andrew and David, where everything still feels unreal and terrifying: David with his hands out of the window to feel the air; Andrew singing along to “Pump Up The Jam” as if it’s nothing more than a carefree road trip with a friend, or a lover. He even says “I’m so glad you decided to come with me” as if David ever had a choice in the trip or his ultimate fate. Maybe David does, just a bit, because after he smashes a bathroom window to escape, he aborts his plans and returns to Andrew. Or maybe David just knows that he can’t escape—that Andrew would’ve somehow found him—or maybe he just isn’t sure if he wants to return and face everything. (Though he does try again later, but, well.)

“House By The Lake” is bookended by murders—Jeff during the cold open and David during the last few minutes—but we only see Andrew break down once, curiously while watching an acoustic cover of The Cars’ “Drive” (“You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong / Who’s gonna drive you home, tonight?”), before reaching out to grip David’s hands. But Andrew does “lose control” again after an argument in the car, pulling over to point a gun at the man he supposedly loves. Andrew shoots him once in the back, as he’s running, and the second point-blank through the eye. He cuddles with David’s body, as if trying to recreate a past moment the two shared, before walking away and heading to Chicago, where Lee Miglin lives.

  • Darren Criss has been getting immense praise for his portrayal this season and this episode really showcases his talent, putting in a performance that is truly haunting from his even speech to his lingering stares.
  • At least a TV series finally resisted the urge to kill a dog! (Though we still got a dead animal which is probably my least favorite trend in media right now.)
  • The backwards formula is finally working for me now that it’s less convoluted and because we’re learning more about the victims (and it’s interesting to see the beginning pieces, such as Andrew’s references to visiting Lee Miglin). David’s flashbacks were a highlight, and hopefully next week we’ll learn more about who Jeff Trail was.
  • So, the Versace family sure has disappeared, huh?

American Crime Story jumps back to Andrew Cunanan’s first murder

https://ia601503.us.archive.org/33/items/PPY5589729880/PPY5589729880.mp3?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
https://acsversace-news.tumblr.com/post/170636907024/audio_player_iframe/acsversace-news/tumblr_p3teyprQ1s1wcyxsb?audio_file=https%3A%2F%2Fia601503.us.archive.org%2F33%2Fitems%2FPPY5589729880%2FPPY5589729880.mp3

“House by the Lake” with Tom Rob Smith and Cody Fern

Joanna Robinson and Richard Lawson discuss the fourth episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which focuses on a very personal murder. This week’s featured interviews are episode writer Tom Rob Smith and Australian stage and screen actor Cody Fern who portrays David Madson on the series. | 7 February 2018

iTunes

American Crime Story: The Truth Behind that Surprising Musical Cameo

There has been a lot of talk during this season of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story about what is fact and what is fiction. The source material, Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors, was meticulously researched—but there are still gaps in the story of Andrew Cunanan, as well as areas in which the show’s creators took some artistic liberty (such as the fantastical onstage conversation between Cunanan and Gianni Versace in Episode 1).

But of all the tales American Crime Story has to tell this season, the six days Cunanan and David Madson spent on the road required the most artistic invention. With both men dead, neither Orth nor anyone else could uncover what, precisely, occurred during that harrowing trip from Madson’s Minneapolis loft to his final resting place. Wednesday’s episode, “House by the Lake,” leans into that challenge by delivering the most surreal installment of the series—punctuated, midway through, by the appearance of singer Aimee Mann. Film lovers may recognize her most immediately from her soundtrack work on 1999’s Magnolia, while music lovers know from her solo career and as lead singer of the 80s band ‘Til Tuesday. Here, though, Mann appears in a Minnesota dive bar, crooning out a classic 1984 hit from the Cars: “Drive.” In what is, writer Tom Rob Smith tells Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast, the most pivotal moment of the episode, Madson tries to escape out of a bathroom window as Cunanan listens, emotionally, to Mann croon. Producers Brad Simpson and Alexis Martin Woodall spoke with Vanity Fair about how Mann’s unsettling musical homage to David Lynch came about.

Vanity Fair: Where did the idea to include Aimee in this episode come from?

Brad Simpson: During the development, one of the things that [writer and executive producer] Tom [Rob Smith] and I talked about—because we had been watching some David Lynch stuff—is the use of music Lynch’s movies, and how well he uses pop music. Tom said, “I think I’m gonna try something like that for the show.” He’d come up with this idea that [Andrew and David] would stop at a roadside bar, and there would be somebody singing—a sort of woman who had a great voice. There was a backstory to her. Maybe she thought she could make it out of this area of this town, but life didn’t work out, and she’s got this sort of weathered, great voice and is stuck there.

We talked about who we could get to play this. Somebody who was first known in the 1980s, who had a strong voice and you could buy as somebody who would live in this landscape. When we went to Ryan [Murphy] for suggestions of who could it be, he instantly said, without a beat: “Aimee Mann. Send her the pages, tell her we’re gonna figure out the song, but it has to be her.”

Alexis Martin Woodall: Brad and I started brainstorming music … we knew we wanted it to be something that was very familiar, but that you hadn’t heard of in a while—so you could emotionally connect with it, but it felt fresh. I got really stuck on one that I was so excited about, [by] Phil Collins. [Aimee] called and said, “Look, I think this song is beautiful, but I don’t think that I’m gonna do justice to this song.” So she’d come back with “Drive,” and it was really funny, because Ryan has loved that song, Brad loves that song—

Simpson: It was a mix tape staple for me.

Woodall: So she recorded a demo for us and sent it our way, and I think right then Brad and I got really excited. Because a demo from Aimee Mann is a little piece of musical genius.

Simpson: I was the guy—I was the ‘Til Tuesday fan in high school.

Woodall: If you’d seen his haircut, you’d really know he was a ‘Til Tuesday fan. Brad and I went out with her producer Paul Bryan—who is a genius, and I don’t use that word lightly—to his studio on a Saturday morning. We all talked about what the goal was, which was that we play it under. It’s not a star turn. We don’t turn the light on and say: “Ladies and gentleman, Miss Aimee Mann!” We just let the actual atmosphere take over, and then you get that there’s someone really legit on stage. Within two hours, we had something that you and I were just kind of flawlessly excited about, right? It was fast.

Simpson: In that scene, David is reconciling himself to the fact that he’s trapped with Andrew, and Andrew has a moment where he thinks he has lost [David]… . The song itself, once you hear the lyrics—hopefully not in an on-the-nose way— the lyrics to “Drive” can really have that double meaning.

Yeah—the lyrics “you can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong” seem pretty appropriate here. I wanted to ask for your take on what Darren Criss is giving in that scene as he listens to the song. We see Andrew overwhelmed by emotion—what emotion do you think that is?

Simpson: When Tom was writing it, I think he wanted to have two things going on. It’s a turning point in the episode. For David, he’s looking out the window of the bathroom and realizing that he’s trapped with Andrew. Maybe he could climb through the window and maybe he couldn’t, but he returns to Andrew. One of the things that’s happening for Andrew in that scene—and it’s one of the few times so far that we’ve seen any real emotion—the way Dan Minahan directed [Darren] to play it, and the way that Tom had written it, was the idea of: you’re watching the singer, David’s gone to the bathroom, and you’re feeling this sense of loss. You think he may have escaped. But either way, there’s an undercurrent of dread that you may have lost him no matter what. Darren wanted to get psyched up and do it in one take—you know, the slow push in that ends with him crying. And we gave him the space that he needed, and just did the long, slow push into the tear, and then he follows up with such joy.

This episode, which happens to be my favorite of the season, has these great surreal qualities, invoking shows like Twin Peaks or The Leftovers. I think the presence of someone as famous as Aimee Mann—even though she’s playing a character—in a random Minnesota dive bar really delivers a disorienting shock.

Simpson: And that is the David Lynch. When we were developing [the season], we talked about different episodes in terms of movies… . There’s a later episode which has nods to American Gigolo. David Lynch had made Wild at Heart, he made The Straight Story, he’s made movies about people moving across the country, he’s made movies about people who exist in the margins… . We talked about the way Lynch used Julee Cruise for the songs in Twin Peaks, the way that he used Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet, and the idea was to reconfigure a pop song much in the same way Lynch does… . We love Aimee Mann, but I think obviously there’s gonna be a whole group of people [unfamiliar with her] for whom it’s just, “Oh my God, that’s somebody with a beautiful voice.”

Woodall: Yeah. Totally anonymous.

You’re right. Not everyone is going to expect frogs to come falling out of the sky when Aimee Mann starts singing. Between this moment and “Pump up the Jam,” this is a great episode for music.

Woodall: I’ve always said that Andrew Cunanan’s favorite songs on shuffle is what we’re doing in the series. He would’ve been 15 in 1984, and there was a really cool darkness in that time period in the New Wave… . What would he have been listening to? What was popular when he fell in love with David? What was popular when he met Versace?

American Crime Story: The Truth Behind that Surprising Musical Cameo