Tag: darren criss

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

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 overcoat he pets with pride when we compliment it. “One of the kids from Boy Band on Good Morning America this morning was like, ‘Yo bro, it looks like you skinned the Grinch!’” Criss laughs. “I’m like, that is indeed an apt observation.”

Just as when we talked before, Criss bubbles over with the kind of giddiness, but also navel-gazing introspection, that one might expect from a lifelong theater kid—which the 30-year-old actor absolutely is, having grown up attending performance arts schools and raised in the San Francisco theater scene he joined at a young age.

And so there’s a certain amount of objectivity and pragmatism as we discuss the arc of his career, not to mention a pinch-me enthusiasm in promoting a leading role in Ryan Murphy’s follow-up to the blockbuster The People v. O.J. Simpson series. There’s also a refreshing eagerness to engage thoughtfully in conversations about his sexuality and sex appeal—oh yeah, we talked about those nude photos—especially in relation to the coincidence that, though he identifies as straight, the three defining roles of his career have been gay characters.

For all the talk of teenage dreams and historical crime nightmares, Darren Criss is nothing if not woke.

The fact of the matter is that, while Versace’s 1997 murder is the catalyst for the series and crucial in instigating the conversations about sexuality and fame in ’90s America that it explores, Versace (played by Edgar Ramirez), his longtime boyfriend (played by Ricky Martin), and sister, Donatella (Penelope Cruz), are all minor characters. This is almost exclusively a showcase for Criss as Andrew Cunanan, the highly intelligent sociopath with tortured feelings about his own sexuality, driven to murder.

“The thing I keep saying is I feel like I made varsity,” Criss says, about leading the starry ensemble. “I feel like I’ve been lucky enough to be invited into the school, into the program. I put in enough games on J.V. Now they’re like, alright kid, it’s your shot.”

Murphy first floated the idea of playing Cunanan to Criss three years ago. Their working relationship on Glee only bolstered a purely superficial argument for the casting: Criss and Cunanan look uncannily similar, and share almost identical Filipino-American backgrounds. “I would have been happy to audition,” Criss stresses, grinning sheepishly. “I masochistically relish that process.”

He’s fully aware that people are fascinated by the idea of the Tiger Beat cover boy thwarting that image playing the sociopathic serial killer, just as they were by the idea of the straight cisgender teen idol actively pursuing the role of a transgender rock star when he booked meetings for Hedwig when Glee was ending.

“I keep telling reporters that I’m curious what the conversation would be if I started with Versace and then three years later I do this musical comedy,” he says. “And I do think the questions would be the same: ‘Darren you’re sort of this dark brooding dramatic guy and that’s what you’re known for. It must be such a departure to be playing this happy go lucky. When I was watching Versace I never thought I’d be watching this guy singing and dancing on Broadway.’ But we have to categorize. It’s how we keep ourselves sane.”

He chuckles. “My goal in life in all respects is to keep people as off-kilter as possible.”

Well, speaking of throwing fans for a loop, let’s talk about that naked Instagram photo.

While Blaine on Glee was certainly made out to be a handsome, crush-worthy romantic lead—all the more groundbreaking, of course, because the romance was a same-sex teenage one—there was something chaste and sort of juvenile about it. Not anymore. Now, Darren Criss exudes sex.

He’s damn hot, too, and clearly leaning into it. Ryan Murphy, god bless him, is nothing if not the Patron Saint of Sexualizing Male TV Stars, and thus had Criss shooting in nothing but a red Speedo very early on in the Versace shoot. One particular day ended with a sunburned Criss as red as his skimpy wardrobe. So, after getting the blessing of his girlfriend of seven years, Mia, Criss thought it would be funny to post a nude selfie, covering his naughty bits with the crumpled up bathing suit, on his Instagram.

The gay community collectively gasped in unison.

“I learned what the word ‘thirsty’ meant after that,” Criss laughs.

“My favorite part of the post was the caption, which was completely upstaged,” he says.

Uh, there was a caption?

“Exactly! That’s what’s so funny about these things. When something goes viral, all context gets thrown out the window.” (For the record, the caption mocked his sunburn: “So what’s more red? My sunburn, my Speedo, or YOUR FACE???”)

Criss takes it all in good humor, of course. “It tickles me, and I think it’s, in a weird, twisted way, endearing,” he says when we mention that his nude scene from the Versace premiere—a lingering look at his naked body and butt from behind—has already leaked and is circulating on gay porn sites. But he gets a little weary when all that becomes the focus of discussion around Cunanan. At the premiere in Los Angeles, for example, gossip rags bombarded him with questions about how he got into shape for the show, the usual tired questions about an actor’s exercise regimen. “I freaked out,” he says. “Like, no, no, no. Andrew’s not supposed to be a sexual object.”

You can take sex appeal out of the conversation, of course, but you can’t take sexuality out of it. And it’s an interesting, if complicated, conversation in relation to Criss’ career. As we mentioned earlier, Andrew Cunanan marks the third time Criss has played a LGBTQ character, after Blaine on Glee and Hedwig.

At a time when the visibility and normalization of gay characters is trumpeted in tandem with a cry for opportunity for LGBTQ performers and creators, it’s a coincidence that invites a certain amount of scrutiny for a straight actor whose career has benefited from these characters.

“I’ve been really fortunate in that, while I almost bizarrely invite that, there hasn’t really been any scrutiny,” Criss says. “As a straight, cisgender white guy, I can definitely see how people in the LGBTQ community could be a little weirded out about the consistency of these roles. But it’s not conscious. I’m not going, ooh, I’m going to go after all these queer roles. It’s sort of no different than a gay actor only doing straight roles. I think in our political climate those things are important to talk about and important to notice.”

“Especially for a community who’s had to fight for its voice to be heard and recognized for so fucking long, I completely understand the sensitivity to what my approach or reasonings are,” he continues. “But I think hopefully the art transcends the politics in that I’m an actor. Just plain and simple. Maybe that sounds pandering, or maybe it sounds like I’m trying to put that curiosity down. I’ve been thrilled that no one’s ever really given me grief for this. Because I think we all agree the stories are more important than the pieces that make them.”

Rather than shy away from questions about this, skittish that something he says might be deemed controversial, Criss actually continues to elaborate, saying “there’s so much to unpack here.”

“I like talking about it,” he says. “Because I feel like the gay community has embraced me when it really didn’t have to. I am aware that I’m an outsider. I didn’t grow up gay. I didn’t go through the same journey that a lot of gay men and women went through. That is something that binds the gay community together in a very real way. I would never deign to say that I deserve to be included, but I’ve been so touched and privileged to be a voice and connected to a part personally and professionally that I’m just thrilled there hasn’t really been any visible or audible backlash.”

Plus, he reaps the benefits of being a satellite member of the community, such as trusting whoever encouraged him to wear that fabulous—and hardly heteronormative—green overcoat.

“That’s true!” he laughs.

It reminds him of a joke that was in Hedwig at the expense of an actor, whom he’d rather not name now, talking about how he enjoyed “all the privileges of homosexuality and none of the responsibilities.” It always got a big laugh, to the point that when co-star Lena Hall filled in for him as Hedwig, he suggested that she make the same joke but using his name instead.

“I tend to step outside my body and look at this all from the back seat. I was like that is a really, really funny joke,” he says. “Because it’s true. I’ve been really lucky to have all the privileges, all the fun things of the gay community without all the responsibilities and burdens that come with it. And I’m so aware of that.”

He then launches into a story that he apologizes several times for having told before to other media outlets, but which seems to so genuinely reflect his attitude about his place in the gay community as an outsider who plays these characters.

“This is the nerdiest analogy,” he starts, before likening the experience to being given the Green Lantern ring from some LGBTQ powers-that-be and being told to be a symbol for the community, thinking in response: “Me? Are you sure?”

“But I’m glad it was me,” he says. “I’m glad that these things have fallen on my plate, and that things have happened in my life that I think actually make me a good candidate for being put in the position that I was put in, having grown up like I did in San Francisco, being raised basically by gay twentysomethings in theater. These are people who I looked up to. These are people who I wanted to be around. These are people who raised my adult consciousness without them even being aware of it. So later in life, yeah, fuck yeah, those are the people I want to be connected with. It is really cool. I really lucked out.”

Teenage dreams grow up, and even become realities. Darren Criss is in the midst of his.

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

Darren Criss Is the Male Sarah Paulson and 6 More Things To Know About American Crime Story Season 2

American Crime Story made The People Vs. O.J. Simpson a phenomenon all over again, over 20 years after the actual verdict. The Gianni Versace murder was not as sensationalized a case, so the FX anthology series took a different approach on The Assassination of Gianni Versace.

Based on Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, the show opens with Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) pulling the trigger on Versace (Edgar Ramirez) and flashes back to events that explained how Cunanan and Versace collided in tragedy.

Cunanan killed four men before Versace, and Criss portrays the serial killer’s growing homophobia and escalating delusions. The show unfolds in reverse, with Cunanan and Versace crossing paths, but mostly existing separately.

Criss spoke with Rotten Tomatoes about American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, after the Television Critics Association winter press tour panel, during which creator Ryan Murphy revealed details about the series and its stars. Producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson also weighed in. Here are seven things they shared about the second season of the series.

1. RYAN MURPHY HAS CALLED HIM THE MALE SARAH PAULSON

“Darren was, to me, the male version of Sarah Paulson,” American Crime Story creator Murphy said to reporters after a panel, invoking his muse who played Marcia Clark in The People Vs. O.J. Simpson. Murphy saw her as a lead actor and gave her that role to show the world. He sees that for Criss in the role of Andrew Cunanan.

“Well, I think that’s an insult to Sarah Paulson,” Criss modestly joked. “Poor Sarah, who’s had an amazing career, done amazing work, spanning all kinds of places.”

Ultimately Criss accepts the challenge to live up to Murphy’s go-to star.

“Hey, I’ll take it,” Criss said. “I realize what he means. The person in the roster that is doing a project with a lot of eyes on it. If my name is uttered in the same sentence as her at any point, that’s a thrill.”

If anything, Criss has some catching up to do to live up to Paulson’s ongoing legacy.

“It always blew my mind that after O.J., people said that was a real turning point for her,” Criss said. “I think it has less to do with her ability and more about the visibility of the shows that Ryan touches.”

2. CRISS UNDERSTANDS CUNANAN’S LIES

We all know people who embellish their stories to make themselves sound more important. That behavior may be annoying, but most of them won’t kill us over it. Cunanan’s lies, unfortunately, turned deadly. Criss saw a parallel to some of the more harmless white lies we all commit.

“I think his lies, his stories, his delusions of grandeur were an effort for him to be in control of the way he was viewed, just the way any of us curate our lives with filters on Instagram, with selfies from a certain angle,” Criss said. “These are obviously on a smaller scale and much more socially acceptable. But if you took that to an extreme, that’s what he was doing.”

According to the show, Cunanan lied to Versace to try to make himself a closer acquaintance. Then he lied to others about how close he was to Versace.

“He needed to be in control of all the things that he didn’t have, which is to pretend they were a reality and tell other people they were,” Criss said. “Because he was such a narcissist, by telling people and telling himself, he could ipso facto make them true to himself. And if he couldn’t have it and it couldn’t be true, then he’d have to destroy it.”

Orth’s book suggested that lying was Cunanan’s way of crafting new personas, and Simpson elaborated on the killer’s pathology.

“In some ways, I think it was trying on identities and trying on personalities,” Simpson said. “I think he was taught though. His dad was a scam artist who abandoned the family when Cunanan was 18 and made them all go bankrupt. I think that idea that the truth is elastic was something he was taught by his family.”

3. CUNANAN WANTED TO BE SOMEBODY ELSE

Simpson believed Cunanan lied to craft a new identity.

“I also felt like he wanted to be somebody else,” Simpson said. “He wanted to be different. He didn’t want to be that half Filipino kid from a working-class background. He wanted to be the guy in Vanity Fair.”

If Cunanan wanted to be someone else, it was important to cast someone who could embody who he was. Criss’s heritage was a factor; the actor is actually half Filipino on his mother’s side, like Cunanan was.

“The idea of not whitewashing the half Filipino side and casting a white dude was important,” Jacobson said. “Darren had Ryan’s endorsement and understanding of him as an actor, great look for the part, and then was authentically half Filipino like Andrew was.”

4. CUNANAN’S OBSESSION EVOLVES VICTIM BY VICTIM

Three of Cunanan’s four prior victims get their own episode to explore their relationships with Cunanan. The fourth, William Reese, was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, as Cunanan stole his truck. Criss explained how each killing builds off the prior one.

“It escalates,” Criss said. “This was somebody whose crimes were a crime of passion in the beginning. He crossed a certain threshold, and there was a change of his pathology.”

His third victim, Lee Miglin, was a Chicago real estate mogul who’d hired Cunanan as an escort. Miglin was married at the time. His wife Marlyn discovered his body, staged by Cunanan.

“It became less something personal to people around him, more about proving a point on a larger scale to hurting someone like Lee and hurting someone like Versace,” Criss said. “Yeah, there’s a differentiation between each of the murders for sure.”

Each victim was also a step towards Cunanan’s ultimate target, the title of the show.

“The throughline of Andrew’s obsession with Versace, once he snapped, he’s on this mission,” Jacobson added. “Really, the shock of killing people who are dear to you, I still get very disturbed by. The idea that he’s not somebody who has one moment; it’s these sequential moments of calculated choices from a guy that was not a murderer born. I think there are people who are born missing the empathy gene, missing the fear gene. That wasn’t him.”

5. THE SHOW IS GRAPHIC. CUNANAN MADE SURE OF THAT

The show portrays murders like Lee Miglin’s as they must have happened to end up where they did. Miglin’s body was bound with wounds from a screwdriver and saw, ribs broken, throat slashed, and stabbed.

“We’re always trying to strike a balance of you know what the crime scenes look like so you can glean what the murder was,” Jacobson said. “You don’t want to be exploitive and at the same time, you don’t want to shy away from the horror of it.”

The show spends time on Cunanan’s psychological torture of his victims leading up to the murders.

“The Lee Miglin murder was staged to shame and embarrass him,” Jacobson said. “The way he manipulates David by saying, ‘This is what they’ll find. You’ll be assumed to be guilty.’ Those things all seem very important to cover.

6. IT GOES ALL THE WAY BACK TO CHILDHOOD

Episode 8 ultimately shows Cunanan as a child and in high school, exploring motivations and warning signs that early. It was important to Criss that the show try to explain this tragedy.

“It all has to add up,” Criss said. “It all has to connect together, otherwise there’s no point in showing the horrible stuff, because then it’s just exposing something horrible that we already know is horrible. We have to keep having every moment beforehand connected to it in some way so it’s not just gratuitous.”

Learning of his father’s scam was certainly a turning point for Andrew.

“I think finding anybody when they’re younger tells a bit of an origin story as it were,” Criss continued, “of not only where this guy came from, a better sense of how and why it went wrong, how it went astray.”

Criss still plays Cunanan at 18, by the way.

“For the first half we have a great young actor, Edouard Holdener who plays young Cunanan,” Simpson said. “For the rest of it, it’s Darren because Darren is very youthful looking and can still play an 18-year-old luckily.”

7. CRISS WILL BE BACK FOR MORE RYAN MURPHY SHOWS

If he is going to be the male Sarah Paulson, that means Criss will have to come back for every show Murphy does. Criss is on board, but isn’t aware of any future roles just yet.

“Who knows what the future holds,” Criss said. “Ryan is a dear friend, a true collaborator, and he’s been a champion for me. So f— yeah, if I can keep doing what we’ve been doing, I should be so lucky.”

Criss’s dream was to be part of a theater company where the same troupe performed different shows. Murphy’s managed to keep most of the same cast together across American Crime Story, American Horror Story, Feud, and Glee.

“I always grew up with this notion, I idolized repertory theater companies,” Criss said. “I had no idea that in my life I would be able to do that in the television world with someone like Ryan Murphy. [Sarah and I] are both lucky enough to have stumbled somehow into Ryan’s repertory player situation.”

Darren Criss Is the Male Sarah Paulson and 6 More Things To Know About American Crime Story Season 2

Darren Criss makes radical transformation in ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’

Brace yourself, “Glee” fans: You’re about to see a radically different side of Darren Criss.

In “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” the actor who gained fame as the cute, preppy singer Blaine Anderson, transforms himself into a cold-blooded serial leader.

Criss, a Bay Area native, plays Andrew Cunanan, the man who murdered five people over a three-month span in 1997. One of his victims was Versace, the iconic fashion designer who was gunned down on the steps outside his mansion in Miami Beach.

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is producer Ryan Murphy’s nine-episode follow-up to “The People v. O.J. Simpson” and Criss’ mesmerizing performance is at the center of it. If “Versace” manages to draw anything close to the amount of attention “O.J.” generated, expect to hear the actor’s name being bandied about during awards season.

Playing Cunanan might seem like a bold, image-busting kind of move, but Criss doesn’t see it that way.

“I think people have a fascination with the dichotomy between something like ‘Glee’ and this (series), but people sometimes forget that actors are actors. We are acting,” he says. “I’m always looking for interesting material. I’m looking for things with clay that I can get my hands on and really do something different and big.”

Murphy, who also produced “Glee,” says he always knew Criss had the ability to go dark. That — along with the actor’s physical resemblance to Cunanan — made Criss his “first and only choice” to play the pivotal role in “Versace,” which is based on Maureen Orth’s book, “Vulgar Favors.” The cast also includes Edgar Ramirez as the title character, as well as Penelope Cruz as Versace’s sister, Donatella, and Ricky Martin as his longtime (partner) Antonio D’Amico.

Cunanan was a closeted gay man, who after dropping out of college, settled in the Castro District of San Francisco. Over his final years, he often befriended wealthy older men. He had a tendency to lie his way into high society, telling fantastic tales about his personal life and false accomplishments. Eight days after shooting Versace, and with the FBI hunting for him, he killed himself with a gunshot to the head in a Miami houseboat. He was 27 years old.

While doing his research for the role, Criss said he was surprised to learn that Cunanan was not “your typical spree killer.”

“This is not somebody who had a history of killing small animals and burying them in his backyard,” he says. “He defied all those textbook analogies. He was a charming, affable person, despite everything we know about him now. For the most part, people loved Andrew. He was always the life of the party. There were so many positive things about him.

“I’m less disturbed and creeped out than I am just utterly heartbroken by the loss of such potential and the wrong avenues he took in life.”

Criss, who grew up in San Francisco and spent much of his youth performing in American Conservatory Theater plays, says he avoided simplistically thinking of Cunanan as just a violent psychopath. Instead, he tried to detect “common denominators.”

“You find the primary colors — basic things that aren’t so complicated,” he says. “For example, everyone knows what it feels like to want something that you’re not allowed to have, the desire to rise higher than your station. Then you add in the other layers — what’s happening in his home life, his socio-economic situation and what’s happening with his own sexuality and that kind of added the other colors. You find things that you can relate to and then you let the script and the world around you — with Ryan’s curating — do the rest of the work. It’s not as hard as what it would seem.”

“Versace” differs from “O.J.” in tone and approach. As Murphy says, the first was a “courtroom pot boiler” and the followup in a “manhunt thriller.”

“I really loved how we laid into everybody who was affected,” he says. “Not just the people who were killed, but also the relatives, the siblings.”

Even though Criss was forced to dwell in the dark side during much of the production on “Versace,” he insists he didn’t bring the role home with him at the end of the day.

“I know a lot of people who jump into these kinds of things, and it really consumes their whole lives,” he says. “…  I think what saved me is that Andrew compartmentalized so many things in his life: emotions, people, experiences. He could disassociate. And likewise, I could sort of disassociate.”

Darren Criss makes radical transformation in ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’