Tag: darren criss

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

‘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)

dcriss-archive:

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.”

FULL ARTICLE | THE DAILY BEAST.COM

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