Tag: brad simpson

Edgar Ramirez Talks Transforming into Gianni Versace for ‘American Crime Story’

“I’m going a little Versace with my lunch,” says Edgar Ramirez as a sumptuous plate of spaghetti Bolognese is placed before him on the sun-dappled patio restaurant of the legendary Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. “So you see, I haven’t shaken him off completely.”

It’s not just a taste for Italian cuisine that’s lingered with the 41-year-old Venezuelan-born actor after his much-lauded performance as the iconic fashion designer in TV uberproducer Ryan Murphy’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story for FX. Having already garnered a reputation for a string of transformative performances—most notably his stint playing the infamous revolutionary Carlos the Jackal in the 2010 miniseries Carlos—Ramirez admits his experience playing Versace, for which he’s topping shortlists for an Emmy nomination, has lingered longer than previous roles.

“The character is still with me,” he explains, noting that a year-plus of filming and press duties has kept Versace—murdered at age 50 in Miami Beach by serial killer Andrew Cunanan in 1997—at the forefront of his consciousness. And then there’s the 20 pounds he gained for the part (“a constant reminder that I was in the process”) and has since shed. “It was intense,” he says, “but also a beautiful experience.”

Initially, Ramirez wasn’t so sure it would be beautiful—literally. Along with the added weight, he required some prosthetic assistance. “I didn’t use anything for the face, just a bald cap and the wig on it.” But after his first makeup session, looking in the mirror “freaked me out,” he says. “I was even willing to shave my head and just apply the wig because the prosthetics thing made me nervous!”

Murphy explained that the look would be convincing on camera, but as shooting commenced, Ramirez was still texting photos to confidants “all over the world” looking for reassurance. It was his longtime friend and co-star, Ricky Martin—who plays Versace’s enduring romantic partner, Antonio D’Amico—who helped quash any insecurity. “Ricky cried when he saw it: ‘God, this is Versace,’ and that calmed me down.” Soon enough, Ramirez inhabited the look so completely that when he’d show up on set for costume fittings, people would just walk by. “Nobody recognized me!” he says.

The son of a military officer who traveled extensively around the globe with his family, Ramirez was first a journalist in his native country and later a filmmaker before acting lured him away from his earlier passions. That reporter’s attention to detail, the artist’s search for deeper meaning and a historian’s view for patterns were critical when it came to capturing the two sides of Versace: the private man and the public icon.

“Where I found a huge connection is he was obsessed with history, and so am I,” Ramirez says. “I’m fascinated by the human experience. And Versace designed clothes while very aware of the human experience at large. He was democratic in his connections to other people. He was surrounded by people from all walks of life, so basically he was doing a topological research in order to make his clothes.”

In the end, Ramirez realized the intimate and iconic aspects of the character weren’t all that different. “Gianni was the sun within this system, and he had all these amazing planets orbiting around him. When he went down, the whole universe collapsed. And that really moves me, because we’re never really ready for that kind of loss.” Ramirez also believes, as the show reveals, that the designer’s life existed in sharp relief to that of his murderer. “They were both outsiders; they were both people trying to look in from the outside. But one became destructive, and the other became constructive.”

Versace executive producer Nina Jacobson says the creative team knew Ramirez brought both a superficial resemblance to the designer and well-established acting chops to the table, but admits she wasn’t prepared for the depth of humanity Ramirez displayed on screen. “Edgar has incredible warmth and charisma as a person, but he also brought that to the character,” she says. “There was no way you couldn’t fall in love with his Versace… that you couldn’t feel the loss of that person.”

Brad Simpson, another of the show’s EPs, adds that despite Ramirez being Murphy’s first choice, it took several months of courtship to secure his commitment. “I actually think Penélope Cruz signed on more quickly [to play Donatella Versace],” Simpson says with a laugh. “Most actors are, and should be, focused on ‘Who’s my character? What’s the journey?’ But he was a guy who didn’t just look at his role on the page. He wanted to talk about what our intentions were thematically. He wanted to discuss what the entire show was about, and how his character fit within those themes of the project.”

Ramirez recognizes he’s attained a sweet spot in his career, but he continually strives to take on unexpected creative challenges. His next projects are Wasp Network and Disney’s Jungle Cruise, the latter for a longtime friend, director Jaume Collet-Serra. It’s a high-profile popcorn movie and a fresh but recognizable franchise with blockbuster potential and marquee-familiar co-stars like Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, which allows Ramirez a new experience through epic-scale production and CG flourishes. “It’s a whole different vibe,” he says, noting his fondness for genre-shifting. “That’s how I watch movies. It’s basically a reflection of my taste as a viewer because I’m a huge cine-fan.”

Despite his clear dedication to his craft, the actor sticks close to advice he once received from a former co-star and acting idol, William Hurt, who counseled that in order to be able to focus sharply on his performances, he also needed to pull back frequently and expend his focus on life. “I know how to find my buckets full of fun—I mean, I love snowboarding. I love sports,” Ramirez says. His professed passion for history and the vagaries of the passage of time inform even his sense of style: He’s an ardent collector of wristwatches. “I think those are the accessories for men, our jewelry,” he explains. “Because I love time and history, they’re completely correlated; there’s something very romantic about watches!”

In 2017, Ramirez turned 40, a significant occasion that provided an opportunity to consider his journey. “I’m very happy with the life I have, but at the same time, I’m always considering the things I still want to explore,” he says. “I wasn’t fearful when it happened—it was a great moment to think, to reflect. That’s always very important, to just take a moment to do that.”

Still, Ramirez admits it took an outside perspective to spark a personal revelation while he was celebrating that milestone birthday in Barcelona. Renowned Catalan chef Ferran Adrià not only crafted his meal, but also offered a canny theory as to why Ramirez is so frequently attracted to playing real-life characters. “He said, ‘It’s because you’re a journalist. What you’re doing is like a metaresearch of those characters. You’re becoming the subject.’ That rang true.”

“I want to live so much, but my physical life won’t allow for all the choices I want to make,” Ramirez concedes. “So acting has allowed me to explore many things I couldn’t explore otherwise… It’s very interesting to put myself into the shoes of these characters—to become a doctor, a military hero, a fashion designer. In a way, it’s my own exploration of history. I become the subject.”

“Up until that moment, clearly, it was something unconscious, but then [Adrià] opened the door for me to think about those things,” he says. “I mean, it’s like, do we look for the characters or do the characters find us?” Whoever’s doing the choosing, here’s to all the future lives of Edgar Ramirez.

Edgar Ramirez Talks Transforming into Gianni Versace for ‘American Crime Story’

Writers on ‘Versace,’ ‘Tupac’ and More Reveal Secrets to Bringing True Tales to the Screen

While the challenge often is truncating an abundance of material, sometimes the dilemma is the opposite. In producing the follow-up to the hit limited series American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, producer Nina Jacobson found that FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace proved a more difficult story to tell than its predecessor.

“Whereas with the O.J. Simpson trial virtually every person involved with the story had written a book, in the case of Versace, we had much less information available to us,” she says.

The series creators based many of the key events in the story of Andrew Cunanan, who murdered the famous fashion designer outside his Miami home, on Maureen Orth’s 2000 book Vulgar Favors. They gathered additional information from newspaper accounts and available video footage. “But what happened between David Madsen and Andrew Cunanan, for example, when they went missing for several days, or how exactly some of the murder scenes went down — the only people who know about them are dead,” says exec producer Brad Simpson. “They had to be imagined based on what we knew of the personalities and the crime scenes.”

That’s where the storytellers must rely heavily on what they call “emotional truth.” “Marcia Clark used that phrase after she saw [People v. O.J.]. She said, ‘It’s not a documentary, but they captured the emotional truth of what happened,’” recalls Simpson, adding that producers did not, for either season, contact any of the people involved. “We want to be cognizant of the victims, but at the same time we think it’s best to tell the story based on historical evidence and to try to unpack what happened but not be beholden to telling one particular story in one particular way. That’s been our approach for the Crime Story series in general.”

Writers on ‘Versace,’ ‘Tupac’ and More Reveal Secrets to Bringing True Tales to the Screen

Chicago attracts true-crime TV, but with limits

It seems like every week there is a new TV special about a grisly crime that occurred in the Chicago area.

The 10th anniversary of the disappearance of Stacy Peterson recently sparked an onslaught of programming about her husband, former Bolingbrook police sergeant and convicted killer Drew Peterson, who is the sole suspect in Stacy’s disappearance. “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” which aired earlier this year, explored Andrew Cunanan’s 1997 cross-country killing spree that included a stop in Chicago.

[…] Over at FX, a January episode of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” imagined how Cunanan killed Chicago real estate tycoon Lee Miglin at his Gold Coast home weeks before killing Versace in July 1997.

Mike Farrell, who played Miglin, and Darren Criss, who played Cunanan, filmed last year outside a Lincoln Park house that doubled as the Miglin home. Brad Simpson, an executive producer, said the scenes of Cunanan and Miglin inside the fictional Miglin home were actually filmed in Los Angeles.

“We re-created the Miglin’s brownstone interior by dividing a home in Los Angeles with false walls,” Simpson wrote in an email. “For the exteriors our cast and crew flew to Chicago and shot on streets that had the same look and feel of the street the Miglins lived on. The particular feel and look of brownstones in Chicago are not present in LA.”

Chicago attracts true-crime TV, but with limits

televisionacad: American Tragedy, The cross-country murder spree of #AndrewCunanan leading to the 1997 killing of designer #GianniVersace is “a very American story,” says #RyanMurphy, executive producer–director of the FX anthology series that brought the real-life tale to
television. A distorted desire for the good life and the pain of hiding in plain sight are just two of the themes explored by stars #DarrenCriss #EdgarRamírez #PenélopeCruz and #RickyMartin. Written BY#TATIANASIEGEL in the new issue of #emmymagazine
#ninajacobson #bradsimpson @mrrpmurphy @darrencriss @edgarramirez25 @ricky_martin @penelopecruzoficial
Photographed by @robertascroft
styling by @jolene.nava
Brad Simpson grooming #StephanieHobgood for #ExclusiveArtists
Nina Jacobson (makeup)#GarenTolkin for #Exclusive Artists
Nina Jacobson (hair) – #StevenMason #xclusiveArtists

American Crime Story: Versace Is A Much-Needed Lesson In Empathy

On Wednesday night (March 21), the Season 2 finale of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story placed the final puzzle piece in the jigsaw of Andrew Cunanan’s story.

The twisted narrative that spanned his 27 years and pushed further back in time with each new episode ultimately led us right back to where we started in the premiere: to the days after Gianni Versace’s murder. But the feelings toward Cunanan (Darren Criss) that we were left with as he took the life of his final victim — himself — are markedly different than those we felt as we watched him approach the gates of Versace’s (Édgar Ramírez) mansion and murder the celebrated fashion designer in cold blood.

But contrary to our usual feelings toward a central character, it’s not sympathy that we’re feeling. It’s empathy.

“When people say, ‘How can you humanize somebody like this?’ I say because he’s a human being. Everyone is human. Although, unfortunately, he’s famous for horrible things that I am not exonerating him for – they are deplorable and a tragedy and unforgivable,” Darren Criss told MTV News. “I’m not playing a killer; I’m playing a person.”

Starting with the one point of familiarity in Cunanan’s story — Versace’s murder — it felt like the only way forward was to go backwards, building a visual of the spree killer’s history with each episode and introducing us to him as a gay man in the throes of unrequited love, and before that as an escort for older men, and before that as the prized son of an immigrant who tangos with federal law and ultimately flees the country, leaving his family behind.

All the while, we have a constant reminder of who he ultimately becomes as we watch him pick off his five known victims: Jeff Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin, William Reese, and Gianni Versace.

“We start with him as this absolute monster who is doing the worst crimes, and so up front we’re saying, ‘This is who he is.’ And then we’re saying, ‘How’d he become like that?’” writer and executive producer Tom Rob Smith said. “One of the advantages of the backwards narrative is you’re very clearly telling the audience, ‘This is someone who’s done these absolutely terrible things,’ so when you get into that stuff, you’re not trying to say that forgives him. That’s just to say where he comes from.”

Executive producer Brad Simpson agreed, “It doesn’t excuse what Andrew has done, but it explains it.”

This ability to understand a person, regardless of whether they were right or wrong, is empathy in its most pure, unaffected form, and being able to empathize with someone who confidently and consistently makes bad decisions helps us identify those turning points in which they begin to lose their sense of morality. In watching Cunanan’s early missteps, one can’t help but feel that this spiral was “preventable,” said Simpson.

“When you go back to his childhood, you see that this is a kid who wasn’t born to be a murderer. He’s somebody who might’ve been a little unstable, but he was talented. He was somebody you and I might’ve been friends with in high school because he was extroverted and interesting, and something went wrong,” Simpson added. “Here’s a kid who was the product of some sort of bad childhood situation and at some point, somebody could’ve helped him and they didn’t.”

Interwoven in that dialogue is an exploration of LGBTQ culture in the ’90s, a time when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell seemed more like a blanket rule than a military creed and the AIDS epidemic incited fear and prejudice toward the gay community. Versace navigated that feeling of shame that often comes with rampant homophobia and the lingering effects of it, as told through the dual narratives of Versace and Cunanan, two charismatic men who took drastically different paths.

“It was such a lonely period of time,” described Max Greenfield, who played Ronnie, a struggling HIV positive gay man in Miami and the closest Cunanan had to a friend in the two months before he murdered Versace.

In the finale, Ronnie poignantly stands up for his marginalized sect of society while being questioned by the FBI, asserting that the authorities failed to locate Cunanan because they “were disgusted by him long before he became disgusting.” He evokes the empathy that was built upon throughout the season, adding that Cunanan was never hiding; “he was trying to be seen.”

“One of the things that we’ve talked about is how dangerous it is … when you tell people that their voices don’t matter,” Greenfield said.

“When you do it from such an early age, when you’re sending that message to a young person who then thinks without even being told that their voice doesn’t matter or that they should be ashamed of who they are and ashamed of what they think and what they believe and their voice – it’s heartbreaking, and, really, the result of it can go in any different kind of way. That’s what the story is. It can result in beauty in Gianni Versace’s case, and it can result in real chaos and terror in Cunanan’s case.”

American Crime Story: Versace Is A Much-Needed Lesson In Empathy