Ricky Martin: Openly Gay Gianni Versace ‘Moved Me In Many Ways’

Ricky Martin was a closeted 25-year-old Latin singer who had yet to break into the mainstream when the openly gay Gianni Versace was shot and killed in front of his Miami home on July 15, 1997. Twenty-one years later, the Grammy winner is stepping inside that mansion as the designer’s partner, Antonio D’Amico, in FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.

“I needed to be part of this,” says Martin, wed to painter Jwan Yosef. “The ups and downs, the frustrations, the uncertainty, the fear of losing your career because you’re gay is something that is there. I needed to talk on behalf of the many people who are, unfortunately, not able to feel as complete as I feel right now.”

The dad of 9-year-old twins Matteo and Valentino opens up more.

Q: Back in the ’90s, how familiar were you with Versace?

Ricky Martin: At that moment, I had a campaign with Giorgio Armani. Even though the Versaces invited me to all their fashion shows, I couldn’t go. Mr. Armani would have been like, “What are you doing there?” But I knew how sophisticated Mr. Versace was in many aspects. His art collection was outstanding. The way they lived was intense. And the way this incredible production is bringing that to life is brilliant, even scary.

Q: What was your first meeting with Antonio like?

RM: I couldn’t talk to Antonio before because the network advised me not to. Talking to him was emotional. I had tears and I was choking. We talked about the love he had for Gianni. That is something that I really want to bring out. There’s a lot of injustice, but love they had was indestructible.

Q: On a personal level, how did this story affect you?

RM: I’m a gay man that lived in the closet for many years. To see the process of Gianni actually coming out and sitting down in front of a journalist to talk about his reality is something that moved me in many ways. Even though everybody knew about the relationship with Antonio, the fact that they couldn’t be as open as I am right now with my relationship is something that really frustrates me.

Q: How did you shake Antonio off every night?

RM: Driving home, I opened the windows and screamed and cried and laughed. I immersed myself completely. I told my family to please back me up because this is as serious as it gets in the sense of the amount of emotions I dealt with.

Q: How does this differ from performing on stage?

RM: I can be in front of an audience of 100,000 and the vulnerability is amazing. But there is something about this story. Something about how respectful we have to be about every decision, how we talk, the mannerisms of Southern Italians. I have no words to describe how powerful this has been.

Q: Will you swap music for acting?

RM: Music will never stop. We can do acting, we can do music, we can do dancing. Let’s do the three of them!

Darren Criss Talks Playing Spree Killer Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace

The second series in Ryan Murphy‘s American Crime Story franchise premieres tonight with the story of the murder of Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) outside his palatial Miami Beach home in 1997 at the hands of spree killer (Darren Criss).

Inspired by actual events and based on the book Vulgar Favors by Maureen Orth, The Assassination of Gianni Versace begins with the shooting of Versace outside his home in South Beach, but also traces the cross-country, three-month spree of murders committed by Cunanan and examines how cultural homophobia and prejudice delayed law enforcement’s capture of the murderer.

Parade.com spoke to the former Glee star about getting inside the head of the murderer who was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List.

Is this the most difficult role you’ve played?

An actor’s job playing anybody has to take into account not only the worst moments, but the best moments, and you have to find as many common denominators between you and that person as possible, and that’s a lot easier than you’d think.

He was not your typical, American serial killer where there’s a lot of tells a year prior to their acts. He was loved by many, and he was an enjoyable, delightful, smart, brilliant kid brimming with potential. So you kind of reverse engineer that. You latch onto those things, and you have to ask yourself: At what point could this have been me? At what point in my life could I have done these things that we would conventionally understand as abominable?

How did you get into the mindset of Cunanan every day on set?

I guess with any character, you have to approach everything from a common denominator. This is very eye-roll-y actor jabber, but you find the primary colors, the very basic things that aren’t so complicated. We’re all ones and zeros. So, the first couple of ones and zeros are things like what it feels like to want something that you’re not allowed to have or wanting to rise higher than your station.

Then you add on the other layers of what was happening in his home life, what was happening in his socioeconomic situation, and what was happening with his own sexuality, and that adds the other colors. But you start with the things that you can relate to, and then you let the script and the world around you, at least the one that Ryan’s curating, do the rest of the work.

It’s not as hard as it would seem. And any time you’re doing things that seem extreme and hard to relate to, these extreme acts of violence, if you go far enough back in the ones and zeros, you remind yourself that these acts come from places of pain, places of hurt and places that I can relate to.

I don’t relate to the execution of said emotions, but I can relate to the emotions. And so, I’m not saying it makes it easy by any stretch of the word, but it makes it more accessible.

What were some of the relatable things in Andrew’s life you found?

We both went to Catholic school. That’s a big one. There’s basic things. We both had a desire to stand out. His was for social gain. Mine was because I just didn’t want to be like everybody else, so they were routed to different places. He did something very interesting where he was the kind of kid, people said, that would put dimes in his penny loafers, not put pennies. And I thought, “Hell, yeah, I would’ve put dimes in my penny loafers.” Our motivations were different, but I understand the desire to not be ordinary.

Would Andrew have been a good actor if he decided to go that way?

I think he would have. We are both performers. I do it professionally and he did it personally. That’s a very good question. I was always curious why I never saw him involved in drama at school or anything. My two-penny analysis would be that he wasn’t a hard worker. Part of his sociopathic pathology is that he wanted greater things than what he had, but didn’t want to work for them. He wanted fame, fortune, glory, and recognition, but he wasn’t willing to put in any of the actual labor, like memorizing lines.

But he certainly was a successful actor in his everyday life, convincing people that he was different people, but this was also at a time where you could do that. Nowadays, social media would call it out immediately.

When you were doing research was there anything that really surprised you about Andrew that was not what you were expecting?

He was not your typical spree killer, at least in the way that we think of that conventionally. This was not somebody who had a history of killing small animals and burying them in the back yard. There was no behavior that would point to what we now know as a spree killer. So, he’s an anomaly in that sense. He was a charming, affable, liked person, despite everything that we know on the outside looking in.

I’ve had an overwhelming amount of people who have come up to me, specifically to say, “I knew Andrew in different parts of his life.” They either knew him as a teenager or in his early 20s and for the most part, people loved Andrew. “Oh, he was the life of the party, he was this, he was that. ” They have all these positive things to say, and they always say how mortified they were when they found out what happened.

I’m less disturbed and creeped out than I am just utterly heartbroken by the loss of so much clear potential that was misappropriated, put through the wrong avenues. But your question was did I find anything surprising? Yeah, that there were so many positive things about him. What was surprising to most people was that he’s not your conventional killer type. He defies all of those sort of textbook analyses.

Was there something eerie about walking up to the actual steps of Versace’s house with a gun in your hand?

That was an overwhelmingly emotional day. We spent a lot of time in that mansion, and there I was dressed as Andrew with his likeness put on my face and into my hair. Andrew never made it inside the mansion, and there I was, hanging out having lunch for a couple weeks. That was not lost on me.

You have this overwhelming sense of this is where it happened. It was the stairs, the street, everything is as it was, the only difference is it’s been 20 years, and the stains have been removed. I had a moment when I walked in the building where I really could feel Gianni’s presence, not to be super Hollywood medium.

If you walk into any other house, it’s a house with walls and a door. You walk into Versace’s house and the very fabric and infrastructure is steeped in him. It’s just dripping with his oeuvre, because you see every design. Granted, things have changed a little bit, but for the most part, it’s still Gianni Versace, so I found myself walking in there and sort of talking to Gianni, and being like, “Look, man, this is a really horrible thing that happened here, and I’m so appreciative of what you’ve given the world.”

It’s really given me a new appreciation of his legacy. I’m playing this guy that ultimately did something really horrible, but, hopefully, we can find some light within this story from the darkness that was the end of the story.

We can begin a new one and a new dialogue that he would have been interested in and would have liked people to tell, so I found myself trying to make peace with it a little bit, driving the car of this person that represents something so horrible.

When you’re done with a role, do you just leave it, or do you take something from every role you’ve played and carry it with you?

No. It lives and dies on the stage. I say that now, I don’t know, talk to me when I’m in an insane asylum in a couple years, and I say, “Oh, they never left, I couldn’t get them out of me.” But for the most part, they do.

Darren Criss Talks Playing Spree Killer Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Review: A Mild Second Helping of ‘American Crime Story’

Early on into the second season of American Crime Story, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the titular victim, portrayed by Edgar Ramirez, is outfitting an opera singer with a dress and gives away his secret. He makes a number of final alterations and explains to her that the way he can tell if a piece is done is when the model looks happy in it, not when he’s happy with it. It’s the pleasure, trust, and comfort of others that gives him satisfaction, even as he follows his own unique track of taste when envisioning his latest lines of clothing.

The importance and danger of carefully tailored aesthetics is at the heart of Ryan Murphy‘s latest, in which he serves as executive producer and directs the first episode. Just as Versace tailored his works to suit the humans who wore them, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), the man who killed Versace, tailored everything from his outfit to the way he spoke to blend in, to not be noticed unless he specifically wanted to be. He is the inverse of Versace, whose creations bore a boldness that initially hid his homosexuality and HIV-positive status. The show harps on the contrasting forces of Versace’s awakening as an out gay man with money, vision, and a dedicated partner (Ricky Martin) and Cunanan’s expertise at creating a pleasant, seemingly thoughtful exterior to hide an eternal emptiness. It’s interesting material but not long in, you wonder if that’s all Murphy and his creative team have on their mind.

In truth, the style of exteriors that Versace and Cunanan glom onto respectively feeds into one of Murphy’s chief obsessions: the art of storytelling. Where Versace uses stories to open up others and connect with them, Cunanan is written as a nimble yet desperate creator of his own history and personal experience. In an early scene, he’s confronted by a would-be lover about his constant lying, and eventually icily tell his friend that he just does what he has to fit in. It’s why he prepares a story about his mother’s time in Italy for Versace, who seemingly constantly ached for the days of his youth and his mother’s home in Calabria. In Murphy and company’s estimation, what both of these men understand is how personality and experience grip people, whether they happen to be illusory or not.

It would be unfair to say that Murphy’s series, as written by Tom Rob Smith, is as empty as Cunanan comes off as in the first few episodes, but there is a certain feeling of coasting here. The variety of personalities and levels of intimate detail that powered the first season of American Crime Story has been narrowed here to largely focus just on murderer and victim. Murphy and Smith add a number of characters to fill out the story, most notably Penelope Cruz‘s Donatella Versace, Gianni’s little sister and inheritor of his empire, but there’s a beguiling hesitancy to dig into their own interior lives in the same manner as Versace, Cunanan, and, to a far lesser extent, Martin’s Antonio D’Amico. The series’ one potent thematic idea is worn down to a nub by the time the third episode begins.

What’s left is all plot, a wildly interesting and entertaining story filmed and told competently with exuberant performances, but without much to say about what Versace’s death or Cunanan’s murder spree meant to Smith and Murphy. The only scenes that really pop are those in which Cunanan is trying to figure people out and, in response, attempts to figure his own sense of performance out. There’s a hypnotic sequence in which he nearly suffocates a potential victim with duct tape as he dances around in bikini briefs to Philip Bailey and Phil Collins’ “Easy Lover.” In moments like these, there’s a feeling that the show is trying to retread a similar path as American Psycho in critiquing an obsession with veneers and frivolous culture over the interior and personal mettle but it’s developed haphazardly and there’s no attempt to dig into the politics of the 1990s with any seriousness.

Most of all, The Assassination of Gianni Versace feels like Murphy’s victory lap after The People vs. O.J. Simpson did so well, both critically and amongst audiences. For all its weightlessness, Smith’s writing is propulsive and not without its flourishes of wit, and the cast elevates the more monotonous passages with physical vigor and an unwaveringly attentive sense of timing and delivery. Versace and Antonio’s relationship is delicately and convincingly rendered, which initially gives off the sense that Murphy is also attempting to discuss and critique the perception of AIDS, the fashion world, celebrities, and gay relationships in the 90s. If that’s so, none of it hits home beyond a base fascination, and the show’s creators seem a bit apprehensive of getting into the messy details, as much as their depiction of a working artist as with the meticulous planning of a serial killer or the building of a celebrity’s public persona and subsequent personal repression.

For those who have a fascination with serial killers, there’s bound to be something here that will exhilarate, even in its flippant treatment of sociopathic behavior and obsession. There’s even a notable reference to Tom Noonan‘s Red Dragon in Michael Mann‘s Manhunter that makes Murphy’s fondness for serial-killer dramas of the 1980s and 1990s palpable, but the style that he and his creative team fashion here is neither as dazzling and captivating as Versace’s nor as deceptive and studied as Cunanan’s. What might have been a furious reflection on the worth of style and aesthetic as compared to the humanity encased within such frames and settings is boiled down to an extensive Wikipedia page, more interested in the facts of the case than why the case was so important and shocking to the zeitgeist in the first place.

Rating: ★★ – Fair; Only for the dedicated.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Review: A Mild Second Helping of ‘American Crime Story’

Opinion | ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ is a chilly fable for the Trump era

This column discusses Andrew Cunanan’s crimes, which took place in 1997, and the treatment of them in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” which generally tracks with the facts. The series premieres on Jan. 17.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who yearned for all the things he believed America had promised him: wealth, respect, access to the finest things and the most sophisticated people. But he had a strange resistance to pursuing the substance of those goals, rather than the appearance of them. He scorned hard work and legitimate achievement as ordinary, delusions for suckers who couldn’t embrace a workaround. He overvalued himself and then was shocked when the people around him detected that what he presented as gold was actually dross. And yet, despite the increasing risks that he would be exposed, he continued to pursue this gambit to the point of self-destruction.

It may sound like I’m talking about the president of the United States: After all, the defining feature of the Trump administration is a confusion about what’s ersatz and what’s real, and why the distinction matters. But, in fact, I’m describing Andrew Cunanan, the serial killer who murdered the designer Gianni Versace and four other men, and who is the subject of the latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s “American Crime Story” franchise, in which Cunanan is played by Darren Criss. I didn’t always enjoy watching “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” which is substantially more brutal and substantially less inclined to paint a truly broad social portrait than “The People v. O.J. Simpson.” But it’s still got a chilly resonance, even if it’s not the one Murphy intended.

Murphy said when the series was in production that he was interested in “More than why [Versace] was killed … was why it was allowed to happen,” something that he attributes to a homophobic reluctance by law enforcement agencies to work with the gay community. He’s also suggested that Cunanan’s murders took on an intellectual quality, that he murdered victims “specifically to shame them and out them and have a form of payback for a life that he felt he could not live.”

Having seen eight of the nine episodes of the mini-series, I’m not convinced that this installment of the franchise makes either of those cases effectively, or even that homophobia is what the series is actually most interested in.

The series is full of deft little sketches that detail how homosexuality made an impact on the lives of Cunanan and his victims. Gayness was something Cunanan lied about, even when it was unnecessary. Homosexuality was a deception at the heart of Lee Miglin’s (Mike Farrell) marriage to Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light) that became unsustainable after Cunanan killed him and the police struggled to understand the connection between the two men. The series presents sexual orientation as a source of David Madson’s (Cody Fern) sensitivity and creative insight, qualities Cunanan envied but couldn’t emulate or ultimately lock down by convincing Madson to marry him. For Versace (Edgar Ramirez), gayness seemed to be a professional obstacle and ultimately wasn’t. Most searingly, homophobia was the factor that ended Jeff Trail’s (Finn Wittrock) Navy career and set him profoundly adrift, leaving him vulnerable to Cunanan, who came to believe that Trail somehow owed him.

But it’s simply not clear that gayness or homophobia was the key dynamic in any of the murders. Even as presented by “American Crime Story,” Cunanan killed Trail out of jealousy; Madson, who witnessed the first killing, out of self-preservation; Miglin for his money and car; William Reese (Gregg Lawrence) for his truck; and Versace in a bid at notoriety and an expression of jealousy. And the cops fade from the story so quickly that even if law enforcement is the sole subject of the final episode of the series, it will be hard to argue that law enforcement homophobia is a major subject of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.”

Instead, the key through lines are covetousness and entitlement. Time and time again, Cunanan seems baffled by people who are dedicated to the idea of substantive accomplishment.

He’s bored by Lee Miglin’s excitement about his dream architectural project and impatient with David Madson’s dedication to his work. He’s furious with Jeff Trail’s insistence that he misses the meaning he found in the Navy, rather than focusing on the homophobia that made it impossible for him to stay in the service. When an accomplished older patron reveals that he’s figured out just how much Cunanan is lying to him and suggests that he’s willing to support Cunanan in his efforts to get an education, it’s hard to tell what horrifies Cunanan most: the idea that he’s been discovered, or that he might actually try to make the accomplishments he’s claimed real. And most disturbingly, Cunanan appears entirely unable to understand why Gianni Versace is successful and acclaimed but he is not.

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” doesn’t quite penetrate Cunanan’s delusions, though it does journey into his childhood for the supposed source of them, a trip that turns out to be less immediately revealing than the show imagines it to be. But what it does do over and over in its reversed chronology is show why people fell for Cunanan in the first place and how they came to realize his falseness.

The show is most effective when it’s debunking our self-delusion that we’d never be dumb enough to fall for someone so obviously fake and dishonest. Miglin, Madson, Trail and many of Cunanan’s other friends, acquaintances and lovers are all smart, accomplished people. But they all had something they wanted or needed that Cunanan was, for a brief period, able to supply: He could play a convincing and grateful lover, bolster the confidence of a young man venturing out into the world, provide an introduction to gay bars and gay life, talk about the opera, decorate a house. That they eventually realized the limits of Cunanan’s performance was to their credit; that their good sense and intelligence wasn’t enough to save them from him is a tragedy.

Most of us won’t face consequences this severe on the occasions that we allow ourselves to be taken in. Even on a national level, the fraud we’re presently entangled with is playing out more in terms of collective degradation and a dismantling of the social safety net, rather ending in a claw hammer to the face. Which is not to say we shouldn’t be profoundly frightened by this present moment. “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” is a story about a clash between falseness and authenticity where the former destroyed the latter before being destroyed in turn. Though it has a terrible cost, that’s a more comforting narrative than the one we’re living through. This time around, fakery outflanked reality, and it’s not clear that enough people care to tell the difference.

Opinion | ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ is a chilly fable for the Trump era

American Crime Story Season 2 Writer Talks Versace

American Crime Story returns tonight. Ryan Murphy’s anthology series, which captivated audiences with The People Vs. O.J. Simpson, now tackles The Assassination of Gianni Versace. This murder is a little different than Simpson’s, though. Andrew Cunanan murdered Versace at the end of a spree totaling five murders. The series is about the crimes, not the trial.

Executive producer and writer Tom Rob Smith spoke with /Film after a Television Critics Association panel for the second season. Based on Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, The Assassination of Gianni Versace begins with the killing and moves backwards. Smith explained some of the details we’ll see in the show’s opening scenes and later episodes.

If The People Vs. O.J. Simpsons was a circus, like the trial was, what is the tone of The Assassination of Gianni Versace?

Of course, the media circus didn’t happen until Versace was killed. Part of that is one of the stories, which is when you go back with these murders, you’re de-escalating the scale of the police investigation. In Miami, it was the biggest failed manhunt of all time, but the murders in Minneapolis got almost no press coverage. They got a tiny bit in the Minneapolis local paper. No national coverage and the police investigation was as small as you could imagine. So you’re watching the evolution of a cultural phenomenon rather than going straight into the cultural phenomenon.

So we’ve seen the very last scene of the story right up top?

No, we will jump at the end and show how he was caught. Episode nine jumps forward.

But Versace remains a main character even though it opens with his death?

He’s a presence all the way through, yeah. We’re taking his story backwards and Cunanan’s story backwards.

With Edgar Ramirez and Penelope Cruz, did you try looks that maybe were too much and scaled it back?

They have a real sense of “what is the sense of this person?” It’s almost like they embody a sensibility rather than a series of physical characteristics. They both have this extraordinary kind of empathy for the character, this person would say this but not this, this person would sit like this. The detail is really precise and thorough. There’s a real love actually. When we’re looking at these characters, one of the tragedies is all of this love, family love, relationship love, love for the work was destroyed. That’s the real loss so we’re trying to really get into that.

Of the four other murders, were some more well known, if not as well known as Versace?

Some were really well known like the Versaces. Lee Miglin in Chicago was well known in the city but not well known nationally. And in Minneapolis, those murders are not known at all, so it’s really interesting to give everyone that equality, to say everyone’s story is worth exploring.

Is the series compassionate towards Andrew Cunanan?

I think what Darren was trying to say is if you go back far enough, you find a human and not a monster. I mean, he becomes someone who is terrifying, someone who is very disturbed, someone who caused a huge amount of misery. So there are parts when this man is despicable. In some ways that was one of the reasons why we decided to tell it backwards because then you’re taking him and saying he is secondary, less than the victims and their life because they’re the heart of these episodes. The killer becomes pushed back, almost this force that drives a destructive force through them, but they were the center. Then when you go back before the murders, you can say this person is a human then. You’re looking at what went wrong.

There’s a lesion on his leg in the pre-title scene. Did he have AIDS himself?

He didn’t have HIV/AIDS. That was known. One of the early things was they were like, “Oh, he must’ve had HIV/AIDS because he’s this killer.” That’s just not true. It was one of the stigmas of HIV/AIDS. The autopsy said he didn’t have it.

So is it a misdirect?

No, it’s one of those clues about story. He had this horrific abscess on his leg. It’s from drug use. It’s trying to signal physical decay. You’re looking at this man who was once beautiful, coveted and wanted, and his disintegration physically.

It made me nostalgic seeing Cunanan swig a Jolt cola. Are there other signs of the ‘90s you include?

There were all kinds of things. You have to get into the way the police work, the way in which cell phones were used to track things, all these details that are really important period details that aren’t just random. They’re part of the story.

Does Jolt cola still exist or did they have to dress that up?

I don’t know. I actually scripted it as an energy drink. The props department are amazing. The thing about that is where it’s important, like in the book it will tell you, and you can Google it and find pictures. The gun is the exact same gun, all that kind of stuff. Then I just said energy drink and they found that. I can ask the props department. All I put in the script was he’s drinking an energy drink and I guess Red Bull must’ve been later or something.

I tried Jolt once and I couldn’t finish a can. It was awful.

That I will have to hand onto them. I’ll tell the props department you were impressed with that. I’ll ask them, I’m interested. Jolt Cola. It’s funny because I was looking at it, like, “What is that can?” I didn’t know it.

Did you give the entire layout of the Versace estate in the opening sequence?

That’s pretty much it. It’s that courtyard and then he knocked down the hotel that was next to it and built a pool. So it’s those two rectangles. He worked on those. So yeah, we got a really good sense, flowing through all the corridors. My favorite part of it is the Spanish villa courtyard with the planetarium on the top. That’s beautiful. It has a real magic about it. Everyone loves the pool. It was the most expensive pool of all time when they built it. Whatever was shipped in from Italy.

What might viewers learn about the fashion business in this series?

I think it’s less a story about the particulars of the fashion business, more about what it is to go from someone who has nothing to someone who builds a really successful business and the key points in that journey. Hard work, love, an amazing team. Then you’re contrasting that with someone who was of a similar position, who has actually many of the privileges, he was sent to a great school, and what goes wrong. You’re kind of building out these two stories like that. The fashion industry, we’re interested in it because it has lots of interesting elements, details, period details, but you’re kind of digging deeper and saying this is a story about someone who achieved so much. He’s a Steve Jobs-like figure.

American Crime Story Season 2 Writer Talks Versace

Roush Review: ‘American Crime Story’ Profiles Versace’s Murderer

Though top billing goes to the celebrated fashion designer, slain on the steps of his South Beach mansion in 1997, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is mostly about the tragically twisted psyche of his murderer, Andrew Cunanan. Which makes this second edition of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story franchise scarier than any season of American Horror Story, because (excepting the usual docudrama embellishments) this is real.

Opening in an operatic flourish with the shocking execution of Versace (an affecting Edgar Ramirez), the nine-part series goes backward in time, episode by episode, to reveal in meticulous and lurid detail what led the handsomely lethal Cunanan (Glee’s Darren Criss in an electrifying and layered breakthrough performance) to this terrible act. The details are less familiar than the O.J. Simpson trial, the subject of Crime Story’s acclaimed first season, which makes the reverse chronology of the parallel narratives even more compelling and disturbing.

While Versace comes into focus as a passionate creative force who worked diligently for his fame and remained devoted to those who loved him, including his combative sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz), Cunanan commands his own spotlight in a delusional world of preening entitlement and toxic narcissism, warped further by the pervasive homophobia of the times.

Preparing to come out openly as gay, Versace is reminded by Donatella “how ugly the world can be.” This isn’t news to the viewer, who sees Cunanan use his veneer of seductive sophistication to prey on vulnerable and closeted men, from wealthy older marks (including strong turns by Mike Farrell and Michael Nouri) to insecure peers, always spinning increasingly ludicrous webs of self-promoting fantasy. As one catty observer mocks: “What a volatile mix you are: too lazy to work, too proud to be kept.”

He forgot “psycho.”

The arc of Crime Story contrasts the authenticity of Versace’s achievements with the poisonously hollow fakery of Cunanan’s drug-fueled obsession with fortune and fame. “For me, being told no is like being told I don’t exist,” he confesses.

So when he’s ultimately rejected by his younger victims, the heartbreaking Finn Wittrock as a conflicted ex-Navy officer and Cody Fern as the unwilling object of his desire, Cunanan’s downward spiral propels him to stalk the superstar living the life he feels he deserves. The rest, as they say, is infamy.

Roush Review: ‘American Crime Story’ Profiles Versace’s Murderer

The Versace ‘American Crime Story’ is a chilling thriller

On July 15, 1997, fashion designer Gianni Versace was just coming back to his Miami home after a morning walk when he was shot to death on the street by Andrew Cunanan, a petty thief, con man, and, it turned out, a serial killer — Versace was only his biggest-name victim. This is the subject of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, the new miniseries that starts Wednesday night on FX. It’s another big-canvas, pop-culture epic overseen by producer-director-writer Ryan Murphy, and features an exceptional performance by one of the performers Murphy made into a star on Glee: Darren Criss, as a chilling Cunanan.

At the start, the production goes back and forth between the story of Versace (played with skill and a notable physical resemblance by Edgar Ramirez), seen initially at the height of his worldwide fashion fame, and Cunanan, angry and miserable, living an impoverished street life. It’s fun to see Penélope Cruz do such a good job of inhabiting the platinum-blond hair and pouty poker-face of Versace’s sister, Donatella, and Ricky Martin exudes a lot of smooth charm as Antonio D’Amico, Versace’s significant other. As a fashion heathen, I appreciated the way Murphy and novelist Tom Rob Smith (adapting Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors) vividly sketch the reasons Versace was considered such an innovative designer, and as the nine-part series proceeds, there are occasional jumps back in time for us to witness Versace’s youth and the hard work that went into building his empire.

The real focus of Assassination, however, is on the assassin. The majority of this season’s American Crime Story (following the Emmy-winning The People v. O.J. Simpson) is a deep exploration of Cunanan. A charming gay man who used his sexuality to both attract and exploit, the Cunanan as presented by Murphy and Smith is a tortured soul for whom we cannot ultimately feel much sympathy. For long stretches, Versace disappears from the production so that we can meet some of Cunanan’s other victims, such as Cody Fern’s fledgling architect David Madson, and Finn Wittrock’s poignant take on Navy veteran Jeff Trail; their stories are told with nearly the same degree of thoroughness as Versace’s.

Along the way, Murphy and company tell a cultural and political history of gay strife, from the AIDS epidemic to the fight for gay marriage to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The fractured narrative timeline — the story is told in reverse chronological order, jumping back and forth, here and there, across the trail of Cunanan’s various crimes — can sometimes seem gratuitously confusing, but once you get used to its rhythm, this American Crime Story has an irresistible pull.

Versace is filled with excellent smaller performances, such as New Girl’s Max Greenfield, so fine as a slimy South Beach hustler who briefly partners up with Cunanan, and M*A*S*H’s Mike Farrell, superb as Cunanan’s wealthy older victim Lee Miglin, portrayed here as man pathetically grateful for Andrew’s condescending attentions. With the Simpson miniseries and now Versace, it may be that Murphy has found his true métier: The true-crime genre anchors his sometimes wild flights of fancy to enough solid facts to give his lyricism weight — dramatic gravitas.

The Versace ‘American Crime Story’ is a chilling thriller

‘American Crime Story’ Star Darren Criss On Serial Killers and Queer Narratives

The title for the second season of Ryan Murphy’s true crime anthology series, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, is misleading. Yes, it concerns the murder of the famous Italian designer, but it is about the man who killed him, the serial killer Andrew Cunanan. Versace was the last of his five victims, before Cunanan killed himself.

Murphy’s first American Crime Story, which premiered in February 2016, was a critically acclaimed no-brainer for American audiences: The People v. O.J. Simpson focused on America’s most infamous modern crime. Gianni Versace’s murder, which happened in 1997, was shocking at the time and is now mostly forgotten. The luxury label Versace has been run by his sister, Donatella, for so long, a generation of fashionistas think it was she, rather than her older brother, who started it. And Cunanan? Even in a country fixated on serial killers, his name rarely comes up.

But it certainly makes sense for Murphy and his producing partner Brad Falchuk to take on this tale. The duo’s résumé of shows—Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story, Feud—are stories of excess, envy, greed and revenge; Versace lived a fabulously extravagant lifestyle in Miami, and his luxurious clothing and ad campaigns were created to titillate. Murphy’s casting hallmarks are well represented too; there are offbeat choices (Ricky Martin plays Versace’s boyfriend), A-list movie stars slumming it on TV (Penélope Cruz plays Donatella) and a plum part for a regular—in this case, Darren Criss as Cunanan.

On Glee, Murphy’s hit musical comedy, Criss played happy, confident high school student Blaine Anderson, the openly gay leader of the Dalton Academy Warblers. Cunanan is a tonal about-face. But because of some superficial similarities between Criss and his character—both half-Filipino and California-raised—Criss told Murphy, “I defy you to find somebody else.”

Murphy didn’t need persuading. He’d seen Criss on Broadway, in the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, playing a tortured, genderqueer German rocker—a notoriously taxing role. “I just felt there was an untapped, dramatically darker side of him,” says Murphy. “He was hungry and anxious to push forward. When Glee ended, that was graduation day for [American Crime Story]. I always thought he was the only one for Cunanan.”

The serial killer will certainly put a creepier spin on the 30-year-old performer’s career, which began with A Very Potter Musical, a 2009 parody of J.K. Rowling’s universe. Criss co-wrote and starred in it with University of Michigan theater friends, and it quickly went viral. “I don’t think I’m being delusional when I say that was the genesis of my career,” says Criss. “It brings a huge smile to my face when people approach me about that.”

Glee took a viral fan base and quadrupled it. The TV show’s fastest-selling single was Criss’s version of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” and he was nominated for a 2015 Emmy for writing the song “This Time” for the show’s finale. Last March, he debuted his indie rock band, Computer Games, with brother Chuck, and in December, he released a solo EP, Homework, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Chart.

Criss expects to get more serious attention for Cunanan than for covering Perry, even if he sees no distinction in the effort made. “There’s a notion, which I’m allergic to, that the darker the role—the more a departure a role is from somebody—the more weight it has,” says the actor, who took the part of Cunanan because it allowed him to “tackle someone with a huge emotional range. It was my job to understand Andrew, as hard as that may seem, [without] glorifying someone who was monstrous.”

Versace gets the titular murder out of the way in the first eight minutes of Episode 1. The rest of the nine-episode series pieces together Cunanan’s story, in reverse chronology, with glimpses of Versace (Édgar Ramírez) and his family, before and after his death. Series writer Tom Rob Smith based the show on the 1999 book Vulgar Favors, by investigative journalist Maureen Orth, who conducted hundreds of interviews with people who knew Cunanan.

Good looks and intelligence got Cunanan in doors—particularly those of older, wealthy gay men in San Francisco. A pathological liar, he spun tales about his past that eventually began to fray, as did his behavior; an affable charmer one minute, he could be calculating and menacing the next. By the time he made his way to Miami, and Versace, he was one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives and clearly unhinged.

Criss, who was only 10 at the time of the murder, had never heard of his character before Murphy offered the part. “I knew that [Versace] was murdered,” he says. “That was about it.” According to Murphy, Criss had numerous conversations with Orth, but, says Murphy, “I don’t know if you can ever prepare for this sort of role, besides learn everything you can about the real guy.”

Research revealed that Cunanan was from a broken home, that there was mental illness in the family, and that his father encouraged an inflated sense of entitlement. But where many people would have sought help, says Criss, “Andrew chose the path of destruction.”

Many scenes are necessarily fictional, since there are no existing interviews with Cunanan, says Criss. But what he came to understand was that Cunanan, like an actor, was always performing. “I gave lots of different takes for every scene, because Andrew was giving the world so many different versions of himself,” says Criss. “I would do a scene at an 11, then do another take at four. I still don’t know which ones they ended up using.”

Criss “thought about Cunanan’s victims every day”—William Reese, Jeffrey Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin and, of course, Versace, all killed within the span of three months. “My greatest fear was that suddenly [members of Trail’s family] hear there’s going to be a series about Uncle Jeff’s murder. How bizarre and twisted that must be,” says the actor, who considered contacting the victims’ families but decided that wasn’t a good idea. “I realized we had to finish the work and let it speak for itself.”

He encourages people who knew the victims to reach out to him once they’ve seen the series, “not for research or for vanity, but just to let them know that I’ve been thinking about them.” (The Versaces have condemned the series, saying, in a statement, that “it should only be considered as a work of fiction.”)

As a gay man in the ’90s, Cunanan was living in a country still struggling to accept the queer lifestyle. Orth’s descriptions of Cunanan’s wild sex life caught flack; a 1999 New York Times review said the author was “guaranteed to flout political correctness and court charges of homophobia.” Murphy, who is openly gay, avoids any stereotyping and makes homosexual discrimination a main theme of the series via Cunanan’s closeted victims. (Both Murphy and Criss have nothing but kind words for Orth, who spent time on set.)

“Your heart aches for those who have lived these lives of suppressed identity,” says Criss. He found his character’s murder of Lee Miglin (played by Mike Farrell) particularly painful. Cunanan outed the Chicago real estate tycoon, leaving him to bleed out in sexual bondage gear, surrounded by gay porn. “Andrew wreaked havoc on this closeted, sweet, good man,” says Criss. “It didn’t help that Mike Farrell is a very dear, sweet man. I just went, ‘I’m so sorry!’”

The intention behind the show, says the 52-year-old Murphy, was to expose the entrenched homophobia he grew up with. “I’m continually amazed at the pain and difficulty of being an out or in-the-closet gay person in the ’80s and ’90s,” he says.

Unlike the other victims, Versace was openly gay. “Andrew not only envied the wealth and success of Gianni, but also that he was a famous, out man who had love in his life,” says Criss. “For Andrew, whose homosexuality keeps leading him to dark places, to see somebody so victorious at it had to be infuriating.”

The actor, who describes himself as a “straight, cisgendered white dude,” has now played three queer characters. Without having experienced the emotional toll of coming out, he has great empathy for those who go through it. An advocate for the Trevor Project, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing suicide among LGBT youth, Criss says he wants “to give as much positive representation as I can to those characters offscreen.”

And for Murphy, it is less the murders committed by Cunanan than this country’s narrative of queer oppression that makes The Assassination of Gianni Versace an important American Crime Story. “It was a crime, and it continues to be a crime,” he says. “Is it getting better? A little bit. Can we do a lot better? I think we can.“

‘American Crime Story’ Star Darren Criss On Serial Killers and Queer Narratives

How Darren Criss Became Versace’s Killer (And Why He Keeps Playing Gay)

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Step-touching his way through the halls of the fictional Dalton High School—the hair perfectly parted, the navy blazer impeccably tailored, and amplifying an a capella rendition of a Katy Perry song through the sheer wattage of his all-American smile—a then-22-year-old Darren Criss, fresh out of college and making his debut as Blaine Anderson on a 2010 episode of Glee, was the epitome of the teenage dream.

Now, he’s the 30-year-old stuff of nightmares.

Well, he isn’t, exactly, but the serial killer he plays on The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story certainly is.

In many ways, Criss’ revelatory performance as Andrew Cunanan, the 27-year-old gay man who, after murdering five people including the famed fashion designer, became one of the most wanted serial killers in American history, is all the more unsettling because of its stark contrast to the genial crooner we were introduced to on Fox’s burned-fast-and-bright musical dramedy.

But then again, the surprise of a certain clean-cut progressiveness has been the hallmark of Criss’ still-young career.

“I think it’s really given me an alley-oop,” Criss says, referring to the initial shock a Glee fan might have to watching the actor as Cunanan, say, bind a rich john who hires him as an escort with duct tape and then gauge him with a hammer. “I’d like to think [audiences] would be interested and compelled anyway,” without this lingering image of Criss as Blaine, the consummate Nice Guy. “But I think it’s an extra nudge when you have that to juxtapose against.”

When we first met Darren Criss several years ago, he was wearing a thigh-length kimono and tending to his favorite blonde wig, remnants of sweat-sticky glitter smudging just about everything in sight—aided and abetted in its mission by the runoff from his sparkling go-go boots. We were in his dressing room backstage at the Belasco Theatre, high off the energy of his stage-scorching performance in as the titular transgender rocker in the 2015 musical revival Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

It was Criss’ first major gig after wrapping his run on Glee, and a thundering opening salvo in proving the breadth of his talents, let alone taste in projects.

Things are decidedly bleaker, or at the very least chillier, when we reunite two-and-a-half years later at a café in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York to talk Versace, inarguably the biggest and certainly darkest project of his career thus far. Still, Criss’ fashion choice is doing its part to dial up the fabulousness of the morning: a knee-length, forest green mohair overcoathe pets with pride when we compliment it. “One of the kids from Boy Band on Good Morning Americathis morning was like, ‘Yo bro, it looks like you skinned the Grinch!’” Criss laughs. “I’m like, that is indeed an apt observation.”

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How Darren Criss Became Versace’s Killer (And Why He Keeps Playing Gay)

‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’: Sex, Lies, Fashion and Homophobia

The summer of 1997: Fashion designer Gianni Versace wakes up in his Miami Beach mansion, wearing pajama bottoms decorated with his own logo. He slips into a hot-pink robe, then steps out onto the balcony to admire the morning sun over the ocean waves. He strolls through his gilded palace, greeting the servants who are already standing at attention in their places. Versace plucks a glass of orange juice from a silver tray as he lounges to have breakfast – alone – by his pool. Meanwhile, a psychopathic serial killer sits on the beach, with a handgun and a biography of Vogue founder Condé Nast. Within a few minutes, Versace will be dead.

The murder was a crime that shocked the world – a haute couture icon gunned down at the gates of his own mansion. In other words, a crime perfectly designed for Ryan Murphy’s pulp imagination. He brings the case to life as the second installment of his American Crime Storyanthology series, after making a huge splash with The People vs. O.J. Simpson. The Assassination of Gianni Versace has all his favorite obsessions – sex, money, celebrity, glitz, the elusive boundaries of gay identity. The designer was such a central figure in American culture in 1997, namechecked by Biggie in the summer’s ubiquitous hit “Hypnotize.” By the end of that summer, both the hip-hop legend and the fashion maven were handgun-murder victims, and Puff Daddy was onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards with Sting, urging the crowd to raise their hands for Biggie, Tupac … and Gianni Versace.

The People vs. O.J. Simpson was an L.A. story, and the Hollywood setting was part of why it worked so well, plugging veterans from John Travolta to David Schwimmer to Sterling K. Brown into the action – truly a story where Los Angeles plays itself. But Assassination begins with the crime, then moves backward through the career of his killer Andrew Cunanan, a con man and grifter who was already on the FBI’s Most Wanted list after murdering four other men around the country that year. The story, scripted by Tom Rob Smith (London Spy), leaves the Versace-murder narrative on the backburner for much of the series, going into the backstory of how a closeted gay kid turned himself into a homicidal monster.

Darren Criss, leaving Glee far behind, is oily and terrifying as Cunanan, with desperate need in his eyes. It’s there in the way he primps for his first date with Versace back in 1990, after the designer invites him to the opera; he tries on somebody else’s expensive suits while the radio plays Lisa Stansfield’s “Been Around The World.” (By 1997, that was more famous as a Biggie/Puffy song.) He’s a social climber who sees Versace as his big score, even as he scoffs at the duds: “They say Armani designs clothes for wives. I think Versace designs clothes for sluts.”

Edgar Ramírez is charismatic yet warmly empathetic as Versace – as in his astounding performance as a Seventies terrorist in Carlos, the Venezuelan actor plays a man obsessed with his vision, determined to serve it at any cost. Ricky Martin, in a performance way beyond what most people would expect from him, is Versace’s bereaved boyfriend Antonio D’Amico. Together they became a quintessential jet-set couple known around the globe, moving in rarefied circles. At Versace’s funeral, Princess Diana sat next to Elton John; just a few weeks later, the Goodbye Yellow Brick Roadhitmaker was singing “Candle in the Wind” at her funeral.

Penélope Cruz is simply fearsome as the designer’s sister Donatella, who is no longer content to be a muse; she wants her own stake in running the business. She’s icy and imperious in her contempt for his boyfriend. “My brother has a weakness for beauty,” Donatella sniffs. “He forgives it anything. But I am not my brother.” She is such a flamboyant character, it’s difficult to play her without parody – as in Maya Rudolph’s great Saturday Night Live caricature, a diva constantly shrieking, “Cue the rampage music!” But Cruz’s Donatella is no caricature; she’s ruthless in her resolve to keep the House of Versace alive as an aesthetic. As the lady says, “My brother is still alive as long as Versace is still alive. I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice.”

A tragic theme that runs through the story is the way gay culture was changing at warp speed through the Nineties. It seemed like a much more liberated time than the Eighties, yet Assassinationdepicts how oppressive the closet still was in 1997. It was the year Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian on her sitcom, after dropping hints she was “left-handed” or “Lebanese.” Will & Grace was still a year away; the idea of gay marriage seemed like an impossible dream. The cops in charge of the Versace case are baffled at the unthinkable notion of a gay couple sharing a domestic partnership – the officer who interrogates the boyfriend asks, “What was your involvement with Mr. Versace?” The FBI agents are blinded by homophobia as they snicker over the pronunciation of Versace’s name. (“The singer?” “That’s Liberace – this is the jeans guy.”)

Although the Versace family has already denounced the series, this new American Crime Story presents the designer as a genuinely heroic figure: a visible gay man in the Nineties, living outside the closet in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier. Part of the emotional power of Assassination is that the designer, in his own way, was helping the world make the transition into a different place – a transition he tragically didn’t live long enough to see.

‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’: Sex, Lies, Fashion and Homophobia