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Within seconds of meeting Darren Criss, you can tell that his mother raised him right. He has a firm handshake, repeats everyone’s name, and looks them right in the eye. He has the casual affability of a Cub Scout troop leader or someone sitting next to you in the back row of a SoulCycle class. He hands out compliments like full-sized candy bars. In a room full of people, waiting to take his picture and ask him questions, he seems most excited to talk to a fifth grader about the minutia of Harry Potter mythology.

This wouldn’t be so odd except that all of these people are waiting to ask him questions about playing a serial killer. Criss’s latest role is Andrew Cunanan, an openly-gay escort turned spree murderer whose last crime before he killed himself is the titular one in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which premiered on Wednesday night. Watching Criss bound around this hotel room would be normal for a 30-year-old actor on the rise if we all hadn’t watched the second episode of the series, where he dances around a Miami hotel room in his underwear torturing a man to the point of suffocation while Phil Collins’s “Easy Lover” blasts in the background.

But maybe Darren, the precocious star next door, and Andrew, the precocious killer next door, aren’t so far apart after all. “Of the many things that break my heart about Andrew is that after this all came out, and friends and loved ones of his found out about it, they were mortified. They couldn’t believe it,” Criss says. “Andrew was a very bright, affable, lovable guy. He had so much promise, and you wonder a little, then, how does a kid with all this go down such a destructive path.”

FULL ARTICLE | W MAGAZINE

Beware of Darren Criss, the Sweet Serial Killer Next Door