Tag: acs versace

Five Ryan Murphy TV shows to binge before ‘Pose’ – Style Birmingham

The Assassination of Gianni Versace (2018)

The second outing of Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology series recently concluded its run on BBC2, and saw former Glee star Darren Criss transition from teenage dream to American nightmare. Opening with the murder of fashion designer Versace at the hands of Andrew Cunanan in 1997 and then travelling back in time to explore the making of a serial killer, Versace works as both a compelling character study and an indictment of the institutional homophobia and disregard for queer lives which allowed Cunanan to evade the authorities for so long. Filmed in Murphy’s trademark lurid style, with shades of Hitchcock and Highsmith, Versace also features stunning supporting performances from Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin.

Five Ryan Murphy TV shows to binge before ‘Pose’ – Style Birmingham

Murder, So Rote: How True Crimes and Traumas Are Endlessly Mined for Your Viewing Pleasure

[…] The Assassination of Gianni Versace, based on Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors, is the most extravagant entry to date in FX’s American Crime Story franchise (Fellini, American-style). The first installment opens with the shooting of the mercurial fashion designer (played by Edgar Ramírez) at the gates of his Miami Beach estate by Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), a heat-seeking, fame-craving psychopath, the camera propelled as if adopting the P.O.V. in a first-person-shooter video game. So stylized and iconized that it seems custom-made for replay on an endless art-snuff loop, Versace’s murder didn’t carry the jolt of a life prematurely taken—it tolled the fulfillment of a reckoning preordained, the fatal final collision of a fashion emperor and an envious castoff. Given the extravagance of Versace’s kingly lifestyle, the mini-series couldn’t be expected to practice tasteful frugality, but nine episodes seems a lot of time, money, and scrutiny to expend on a punk whose sole claim to notoriety were the corpses he left behind, even if the series does posit him as the poster child for the dark side of the American Dream.

Murder, So Rote: How True Crimes and Traumas Are Endlessly Mined for Your Viewing Pleasure


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Ep. 8 The Stacks Book Club – Vulgar Favors by Maureen Orth

Choreographer Sam Pinkleton is back in time for The Stacks Book Club to take on true crime, with Vulgar Favors: The Assassination of Gianni Versace by Maureen Orth. Vulgar Favors examines the serial killer Andrew Cunanan, who murdered 5 men in 1997 culminating in the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace. We discuss Cunanan and his victims, but mostly we focus on the tone of the book. We examine the term “gay crime” and why we find this and so much of the book to be problematic. While there are spoilers in this episode, this book covers a real life event, which means all of the information is out in the public. You can listen without ruining the book. | 23 May 2018


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The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Darren Criss, and more

Margaret and Graeme review The Bookshop, sci-fi thriller Anon, and The Assassination of Gianni Versace, as well as talking to star Darren Criss. | 23 May 2018

Darren Criss was concerned about playing serial killer Andrew Cunanan

Darren Criss first rose to fame as gay teenager Blaine Anderson on musical series Glee. Since the show finished in 2015, Criss has tried his hand at Broadway – appearing in Hedwig and the Angry Inch in the same year – as well as releasing music alongside his brother Chuck with their project Computer Games. Now, the 31-year-old has stepped into the shoes of Andrew Cunanan, the serial killer responsible for gunning down legendary fashion designer Gianni Versace in 1997, for the new nine-episode series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. Criss sat down with WHO whilst in Australia to chat all things Versace, his future plans and his upcoming tour with former Glee co-star Lea Michele.

WHO: How much did you know about Andrew Cunanan’s role in Versace death?

About as much as I think most people [knew] unless you were working in fashion in the ‘90s or living in Miami. I knew that he was shot and I vaguely remember that he was shot by someone who was half Filipino, that was about it, I only would have clocked that in because I’m half Filipino but other than that, I didn’t know a whole lot so like most people when you start to realise that he had a much larger history, not only personally but as far as how many more homicides there were, you just go ‘Oh my god how did I not know about this?’ and then the answer to that question is in the show, like ‘How did we not know about this?’ well X, Y and Z.

WHO: Did you feel any pressure in how you represented Andrew in the series?

I didn’t feel any more pressure than I feel for any role, which is to say that I treat all roles with the same sort of TLC, I’m really making sure that everyone’s taken care of. Now Andrew’s tricky because he was a real person and so I think there was less pressure and more… there was a great deal of concern that I had in that this was a real person that destroyed the lives of people who are still very much alive 20 years later and in the immediate aftermath of everything that happened in 1997, the family and friends of these people were bombarded with media.

Darren Criss was concerned about playing serial killer Andrew Cunanan

Andrew Mercado on TV: My Ryan Murphy obsession

I watched all 100 episodes of Nip/Tuck, convinced with every riotous instalment that it could not possibly get more morally corrupt. Every week I was proved wrong as the show always scraped new lows in reprehensible behaviour. And after six seasons of scandal and silliness, its producer Ryan Murphy proved he was only just getting started, with a prolific output ever since (and Netflix is his next home).

His dramas have sometimes been hit (Feud) and miss (Scream Queens) but they are impossible to ignore. And his incredible American Crime franchise, is unmissable, beginning with the multi-award winning The People v. O.J. Simpson and now on Foxtel’s showcase The Assassination of Gianni Versace.

This is the international TV drama of the year so far for me. Over nine episodes, it effortlessly recreates the most opulent of worlds, with Versace’s over the top mansions, and serial killer Andrew Cunanan (played by an actor Ryan Murphy discovered for Glee, Darren Criss). And despite it covering some of the creepiest territory yet (and that’s saying a lot, given Murphy’s wildly uneven American Horror Story), this is totally mesmerising from start to finish. It opens with the gunning down of Versace and then bounces around in time but, by showing every murder first and then following it with Cunanan’s twisted machinations, it helps make the tale even more twisted.

Murphy is never afraid to cast the biggest of stars, all of whom make you forget who they are. OK, maybe Cuba Gooding Jr wasn’t a great OJ Simpson, but others (like Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange as Bette and Joan) were totally convincing.

This time round, you will believe that Penelope Cruz is Donatella Versace and Ricky Martin will break your heart as Gianni’s partner. Australian audiences, used to seeing him on The Voice, won’t see anything they recognise here – he will amaze those fans.

Which brings us to fellow Voice judge, Delta Goodrem, who nailed Olivia Newton-John’s singing voice but could not get the rest of the illusion. The second part of Olivia: Hopeless Devoted To You, which one wag on rightfully described as “Hopelessly Convoluted”, was a ratings disaster, leaving all to declare, yet again, that the Aussie biopic is over.

And in that format, maybe it is. Covering an entire lifetime is getting old and, if the story needs to be set all over the world, that’s when we really get into trouble. There is not one second of The Assassination of Gianni Versace that is not dripping in authenticity or lushness, and Aussie productions cannot match multimillion-dollar budgets like that. It’s no longer good enough to re-create the climax of Grease, originally filmed at a high school oval in Los Angeles, at Luna Park in Melbourne.

Andrew Mercado on TV: My Ryan Murphy obsession