Tag: darren criss

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

‘American Crime Story: Versace’: Darren Criss and Edgar Ramirez Unpack the Meaning Behind that Mysterious Final Scene

The first time Darren Criss and Edgar Ramirez saw “Alone,” the complicated finale of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” they had no idea how their respective stories would end. For Ramirez, it turns out that Gianni Versace’s last scene came at the very beginning of his journey with the character.

“That was my very first scene in the show,” Ramirez said earlier this week at an “American Crime Story: Versace” screening event at the Directors Guild Theater in West Hollywood. Joined by assorted cast and crew from the entire season, Ramirez and his scene partner Darren Criss both spoke about their reactions to the finale — which they had just seen for the very first time, and were still struggling to process.

In one of the final moments of “Alone,” as federal agents are descending on Andrew Cunanan’s hideout, we trip back to the past, as Versace (Ramirez) and Andrew (Criss) have a conversation on the stage of an empty opera house. After a long discussion about the nature of beauty in the world, Andrew leans in for a kiss. Even when Versace gently declines, the sequence still ends on a note of peace and calm. Immediately shattering that atmosphere, the show snaps to its present, when Andrew fatally shoots himself in the head.

Although the two knew that scene might be used, it came as a surprise to both actors to see that on-screen conversation between their two characters placed where it ended up. For them, it created a sense of ambiguity about whether or not that interaction was meant to have occurred in real life.

“Were we watching one of Andrew’s machinations? Were we watching something that actually happened? I love the way that I wasn’t even sure anymore. And I kinda like that, because it made me think, ‘Is everything I just saw a machination of Andrew’s brain?’ I don’t know,” Criss said. “It was very effective to me because he lived in this nebulous sort of world. Considering how pivotal, whether fictional or non-fictional, that moment would have been, to put it right there at the end of his life was quite powerful to me.”

Added Ramirez, “I think that’s the beauty of good storytelling — that, in the end, it will fill the holes and connect the dots that reality can’t. No one will ever know what went through the heads of Gianni Versace or Andrew Cunanan. No one will ever really know if these two guys ever looked each other in the eye and connected or passed any kind of energy to each other.”

For Criss, the moment also crystalized an idea that he’d had after hearing questions about how many other Andrew moments actually transpired the way they did in real life.

“People constantly ask us, ‘Did that really happen?!’ I don’t know. But that’s irrelevant to me. It actually doesn’t matter to me. It’s the emotional content that we’re providing for this particular narrative. And that’s what hits me harder,” Criss said. “Whether it happened or not, if Andrew had believed that the emotional value of a moment like that happened, whether it was a handshake, a high five, a glance across the room, or a poster on his wall, the emotional content of that scene existed in his brain. It’s what carried him through what we watched these past nine episodes. That’s what’s more important to me.”

Many of the panelists reiterated that for them, the series is a reflection of love in many forms. Whether it was Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light), who returns in the finale for an affecting coda, Versace’s partner Antonio (Ricky Martin), or the memories of lost companions that Ronnie (Max Greenfield) refers to in his passionate interrogation room monologue, that message came through for them just as much as the pain that one young man inflicted twenty years ago.

“You know what really happened? The love between Gianni and Antonio. That really happened. I met people who know and were witnesses of that love. I think that’s what the show brings. We all feel that we know the story, but the reality is that we didn’t know the story,” Ramirez said.

In assembling the rest of the episode, writer Tom Rob Smith wanted to address the kind of reality that Andrew would have created for himself. But a central driving question of this episode came down to why Andrew would decide not to continue his moment of notoriety into a drawn-out court case.

“You’re looking at a man who everyone said is obsessed with fame, why does he not take the showcase of a trial? This is someone who was put on this earth to impress people. That’s what he wanted to do. He lost his money, he lost his looks, he lost the ability to impress people, and he turns to notoriety,” Smith said. “But I think when he gets to this endpoint, I think he’s disgusted with himself. That comes through very strongly in this episode. This is someone who wanted to be loved and who screwed that up so badly that when that news coverage fades, he’s left with this sense of profound shame. That was at the heart of the episode.”

Part of that process involved digging deep into what really happened during the Cunanan manhunt. Key scenes at the Miami Beach marina, the state of Andrew’s hideout, and even the priest’s refusal to take Antonio’s hand at Versace’s funeral all came from verified accounts of the aftermath of the murders.

“We know that the thing with the boat, they found bits of bread and Andrew’s newspaper clippings. We know that he was trying to escape. His dad did say that he rang him. That is all true. The ‘A Name to Be Remembered By’ title is the title that Modesto Cunanan wanted Andrew’s life to be called,” Smith said. “Actually, when you look at it, there were loads of fragments that were absolutely true. The Versace magazines by the head, again, that was real. And the coverage is all archive. We’re just trying to string them together.”

Executive producer Brad Simpson explained that the process of putting together the final episode was something that came at the very end of the process, a more gradual way to piece together the culmination of a season-long reverse approach to understanding the crime.

“It was the hardest episode. It was the only one that we didn’t have a plan at the beginning of how it was going to lay out. I think [Tom] did a brilliant job figuring out exactly how to let you know what’s going on inside Andrew’s hand and surmise what might have been happening,” Simpson said.

“We’re dealing with fragments, but when you have ten pieces of a puzzle and they’re all a cathedral, you can kind of work out the rest,” Smith said.

‘American Crime Story: Versace’: Darren Criss and Edgar Ramirez Unpack the Meaning Behind that Mysterious Final Scene

‘American Crime Story: Versace’ Finale Is a Warning About How a Killer Is Made

While the weeks after the premiere of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story illustrated the path that took Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) on a killing spree across the U.S., Wednesday’s season finale returned to the death of the famed fashion designer and the aftermath of his murder as Cunanan spent his frantic final days before killing himself on a Miami houseboat.

The episode brought back many of the series’ all-star guest roster — Judith Light as widow Marilyn Miglin, Max Greenfield as Cunanan’s junkie friend Ronnie, Annaleigh Ashford as Cunanan’s oldest friend Elizabeth Cote, Jon Jon Briones and Joanna P. Adler as Cunanan’s parents — to show how all of the series’ major players were coping with Cunanan’s crimes.

Miglin, on business in nearby Tampa, was hoping her husband’s killer would be caught. Adler’s Mary Ann was dumbstruck that her son was responsible for such heinous crimes, Cote pleaded for the return of her kind-hearted friend, and Briones’ Modesto, whom Cunanan called in a desperate haze after realizing he wouldn’t be able to escape the cops, told his son he’d help him but then gave an interview on the news about a potential movie instead.

Much of the hour-plus episode featured Cunanan becoming increasingly more emotional and hopeless as he took shelter in a houseboat, watching Gianni’s (Edgar Ramirez) Italian funeral on television and reminiscing about his time with the designer. “What if you had a dream your whole life that you were special, but no one believed it,” Cunanan asked. Versace responded that it wasn’t about potential, it was about following through.

Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin returned as Versace’s grieving sister, Donatella, and partner, Antonio D’Amico, respectively, for emotional scenes coming to terms with Versace’s death. And, after Cunanan ultimately shot himself, a final scene juxtaposing Cunanan’s unremarkable final resting place and lack of mourners with Versace’s opulent mausoleum and Donatella’s palpable grief.

For viewers surprised that Versace himself was present in so few of the series’ nine episodes, writer Tom Rob Smith tells The Hollywood Reporter that it was not his intention to tell Versace’s story.

“We were upfront about the source material,” he explains. “We were never doing a biopic of Versace, because that’s this amazing success story. We were always doing a crime story, and the crime story is Cunanan. And what is interesting in relation to the crime story is the symbolism of Versace. What he represents, how he overcame everything that Andrew failed to overcome: homophobia and relative poverty. All the things that made Versace a success compared to things that made Cunanan destructive.”

The finale, Smith explains, is “bringing together all of these people that were destroyed and damaged by Andrew, and really exploring what it is to lose someone. I think this is one of the few stories where the victim’s loss is at the center of this piece — this hole that was created by Andrew.”

While Cunanan’s final moments were largely fictional, since the killer was holed up in Miami alone, Criss tells THR that he first thought that Cunanan’s suicide was largely an act of desperation. But after speaking with Smith about it, he realized that the decision was very deliberate.

“This is a guy who could have gone to court,” Criss says.“He could have stretched it out forever. He could have been Charles Manson. If he was looking for fame and notoriety then he could have stuck with that. He could have been incarcerated and continued to be on magazines for the rest of his life.

He adds, "This is a guy who has curated his entire life’s story very specifically, to the T. His backstory, what his parents did. Different people knew different versions of him because he was very specific of how his image would appear and what his story was. So I think he must have come to a point where he realized that if he was incarcerated, that narrative was taken away from him and the only way to control or almost canonize his notoriety and infamy would be to take his own life.”

The season also touched on the internalized homophobia within law enforcement at the time that potentially hindered the investigation of Cunanan’s other murders before Versace — David Madson, Jeff Trail, Lee Miglin, William Reese — but Smith tells THR the way the homophobia affected Cunanan was also incredibly destructive.

“Ultimately the homophobia, I think, is much more about Andrew’s homophobia — the way it beat him as a person and the way he soaked up everything, rather than it just being a personified police officer doing it,” he says.

But the juxtaposition between the two men from similar backgrounds who grew up to do vastly different things with their latent potential is what the finale ultimately drove home.

“You can’t just say Andrew was beaten by society. Other people overcame the things that he didn’t,” Smith says. “You’re contrasting, I think, two very different people who have many similarities in the beginning and why one person was full of love and created so much — Versace and this genius — with one person who became such a monster. That, to me, is one of the central shapes of the story.”

‘American Crime Story: Versace’ Finale Is a Warning About How a Killer Is Made