The Versace family has now issuedtwo statements denouncing FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. But the producers and stars all maintain that the second season of FX’s Emmy-winning anthology is a respectful portrayal of the famed fashion designer, who was gunned down by wanted killer Andrew Cunanan on the steps of his Miami mansion in the summer of 1997.
“The primary thing is that we are celebrating Versace,” writer Tom Rob Smith tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We are exploring why he was a genius, why he was important, the impact that he made, and why it was such a loss when he was murdered — both on a personal level in terms of all the people that loved him, all the people that admired him, and on a cultural level as well. It’s a show that celebrates and admires him.”
The family’s main point of contention seems to be the portrayal of Gianni Versace as HIV-positive, which reporter Maureen Orth contended in her book Vulgar Favors. (The season is based on Orth’s book and reporting.) Orth, who covered the hunt for Cunanan for Vanity Fair at the time, was told on the record by a Miami Beach detective that blood tests done after Versace’s death confirmed his HIV-positive status. Orth, for her part, told THR that more than a decade later, she stands by her reporting.
“I was told on the record by the lead detective on Miami Beach that he had heard from the medical examiner who did the blood work that he was [HIV-positive],” Orth said. “And it also goes along with other people who told me that he was very weak at one time and he needed [partner] Antonio to help him walk, and they came over to his house when he was having breakfast and he had 27 bottles of pills in front of him. Now, does that mean they’re for HIV? But the blood thing from on record from the Miami Beach, that’s pretty [solid].”
The Versace family has blasted the FX drama as a “work of fiction” and Orth’s book, saying that the FX series relies on a book they say is “full of gossip and speculation.”
“Orth never received any information from the Versace family and she has no basis to make claims about the intimate personal life of Gianni Versace or other family members. Instead, in her effort to create a sensational story, she presents second-hand hearsay that is full of contradictions,” the family said in a statement. “Orth makes assertions about Gianni Versace’s medical condition based on a person who claims he reviewed a postmortem test result, but she admits it would have been illegal for the person to have reviewed the report in the first place (if it existed at all). In making her lurid claims, she ignores contrary information provided by members of Mr. Versace’s family, who…were in the best position to know the facts of his life…. Of all the possible portrayals of his life and legacy, it is sad and reprehensible that the producers have chosen to present the distorted and bogus version created by Maureen Orth.”
Showrunner Ryan Murphy responded to the family’s criticism, telling THR that Donatella Versace’s actions seemed to indicate she wasn’t entirely displeased with the series. “Donatella Versace sent Penelope Cruz [who portrays her in Versace] a very large arrangement of flowers when she was representing the show at the Golden Globes,” he said. “I don’t know if she is going to watch the show, but if she did, I think she would see that we treat her and her family with respect and kindness, and she really is sort of a feminist role model in my book because she had to step into an impossible situation, which she did with grace and understanding.”
But regardless of Versace’s status, the fact that he overcame a serious illness and was excited about his life provides a sharp contrast to the desperation of Cunanan’s outlook.
“To me if you look at just the facts of his illness, he did get very sick at that time, and he did recover at the time of the new [HIV/AIDS] drug therapy. So it does seem to fit that,” Smith said. “But even all that aside, what I found most amazing about it is this is a guy that came so close to death, and still clung on. He really fought for life. Life was very important to him. Contrast it with someone who gave up, and someone who was beaten by circumstance. And what’s interesting in some of the reactions was, ‘Oh, he’s the killer. He must have AIDS.’ Actually, Andrew didn’t have it.”
Cunanan (played by Glee alum Darren Criss) shot Versace as he returned from his morning walk to the newsstand, something the designer did regularly when he was staying in Florida — even when he was sick.
“Gianni did the walk to the magazine store in Miami often. Once he did it when he was so sick he could barely make it that couple of blocks. He was carrying the magazines back, and he couldn’t even hold them. That morning [of his death] when he walks, he’s so alive again. It’s really powerful to think that he must’ve been like, ‘This life is great,’ and he can do that walk and carry the magazines. And then Andrew comes up,” Smith said. “It’s really terrible when you look at those two. I thought that was a really powerful part of his story, so that was why we did it.”
Edgar Ramirez, who plays the late designer, did not contact the Versace family for both legal and personal reasons when he was preparing to take on the part in theMurphy-produced drama.
“What this family went through was a horrible tragedy, and I would understand [not wanting to discuss it], had it been my case to be contacted to talk about something that caused so much pain and also was infused with so much misrepresentation, prejudice, and so much stigma and confusion,” Ramirez told THR. “I was lucky enough to have people who were very very close to Gianni to talk to me and to open to me. They were the ones that were very generous to me.”
Ricky Martin, who plays Versace’s longtime partner, Antonio D’Amico, did speak to the man he portrays, and said he now counts the designer among his friends. But before they spoke, he simply wanted to get a small amount of justice for Versace’s murder, a crime he says shouldn’t have even happened in the first place.
“There’s so much injustice,” he told THR. “Why did we allow it to happen when this killer was on a killing spree for weeks, killing gay men? He was on the list of the FBI’s most wanted. He was not hiding. Why did it happen? Just the fact that we are still dealing with this level of ignorance frustrates me.”
As a gay man, he wanted to bring the story not only of the homophobia that contributed to Versace’s death, but the struggle he faced in his life.
“The fact that someone as successful and as powerful as Gianni Versace was struggling to come out of the closet, it was like, give me a break,” Martin said. “That was in 1997, but I know now in 2018, there are men and women that are still struggling with this kind of fear, of their career going to collapse if they come out. Everybody’s going to hate them at home if they come out. It is sad. But it was important for me to be vocal about how unjust life is for some of us. I’m so lucky, but it’s not right. Something needs to be done.”
When the cast and crew of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” attempted to recreate the life and fashion sensibility of the murdered Italian designer, immersing themselves in his flamboyant aesthetic was key to telling the story well.
So they set out to showcase his dramatic world with both setting and costume: Producer Ryan Murphy obtained permission to film the series, which debuts Wednesday on FX, inside Versace’s former home, Casa Casuarina in Miami, where the rooms are decorated with bold tile, frescoes and seashells. And actor Edgar Ramirez, who plays the doomed designer, embraced Versace’s creative vantage point, which was heavily influenced by classical motifs.
“He had a poster of the Roman empire in his shop in Calabria, [Italy,]” Ramirez said at a recent panel discussion of the series. “When we think about the Roman Empire, we tend to think about washed-out statues . . . But the reality is that the Roman Empire was very colorful. The blues were very intense and the gold was intense.”
Recreating Versace’s outlandish designs for the series became a painstaking project for Emmy-winning costume designer Lou Eyrich, who not only tracked down genuine vintage pieces, but created looks for the show without any cooperation from Gianni’s sister (and current artistic director of the brand), Donatella Versace, or the Versace company itself — which has denounced the entire production as a “work of fiction.”
“Gianni Versace was fearless and bold in his use of color. He understood the female physique and how to make a woman feel and look sexy,” says Eyrich, who has also designed the costumes for “American Horror Story.”
Versace was also fond of using mixed media in his designs. For example, a Greek key pattern seen on the border of the iron gates to his villa appears in his clothing for men. “The more you look [at his creations], the more you see [those motifs],” says Eyrich.
Since his death at age 50 in 1997, many of Versace’s pieces have been scooped up and preserved by collectors. Eyrich had to scour the Internet to outfit not only Ramirez, but Penélope Cruz, who plays Donatella, and Ricky Martin, who plays Antonio D’Amico, Versace’s domestic partner of 15 years.
Many pricey items were out of reach for Eyrich and her team: At stores such as the Way We Wore in LA, the asking price for a Versace shirt from the era is a hefty $1,500, and an animal-and-baroque-print skirt suit goes for $4,500.
“We didn’t have the budget to get the pieces we really wanted. We ordered a lot online,” Eyrich says. “We were competing with a lot of serious collectors.”
Of all the actors in the show, Ramirez was the one Eyrich was able to provide with the most authentic duds. “Almost all of Edgar’s costumes were Versace,” she says. “We sourced the jeans, the shoes and the shirts [from vintage shops]— which I’m sure he loved.”
One exception is a shocking-pink bathrobe Versace wears to breakfast at his Miami villa on the morning he’s murdered by Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). Eyrich had this made to Murphy’s specifications — she says the producer requested something with some “float” in it, so she used an especially lightweight silk. “When Edgar walked, it billowed,” Eyrich says.
Eyrich relied on her “genius tailor” Joanne Mills to remake a dress Versace designed for his sister — a sexy, black leather number accentuated with a series of men’s leather belts linking the bodice to a choker.
“We got every photo we could of [the original] dress,” Eyrich says of the frock that Donatella wore to a party at the New York Public Library celebrating Vogue’s centennial in 1993. “We were very careful to show our utmost respect; I didn’t want to make it look like a made-for-TV movie [design]. I want to pay tribute but not ever minimize. Joanne recreated all the hardware — the belt buckle — and made the full-leather skirt.”
Eyrich and her team also created a whopping 17 looks for a pivotal scene at Versace’s final haute couture fashion show in Paris in 1997, which plays out, in flashback, in the second episode, which airs Jan. 24. Donatella argues with her brother about the direction of their company and needles him about not being able to keep up with younger designers John Galliano and Alexander McQueen.
“You were the future, once,” she says snidely. Ever defiant, Versace tells his younger sister that great design comes “from the heart.” He reduces her to tears of shame with a runway show that unveils one inspired creation after another: A sleek, white evening gown slit up the side, a glittering red minidress and the pièce de résistance — a metallic mesh mini “wedding dress” covered with crosses, worn with a silver-headband veil. The daring piece is for the “Versace bride,” Gianni declares, not a “virginal” one.
“He had this rock ’n’ roll approach to couture,” Ramirez has said. “At this level, in high fashion, he mixed sexuality and glamour, something that, until he came along, were on two different tracks.”
PASADENA, Calif. — Édgar Ramírez didn’t leap at the chance to play Gianni Versace in a TV show about the fashion designer’s 1997 murder, and American Crime Story executive producer Ryan Murphy was fine with that.
“I loved being in a room with an actor who says, ‘That’s interesting. Come back to me with another script,’ ” Murphy said of Ramírez’s initial response to The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, a nine-episode edition of the anthology series that premieres at 10 p.m. Wednesday on FX.
“And I said, ‘What?’ ” said Murphy, whose credits include Glee, American Horror Story, and The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. He’s used to hearing his first choices say yes on the spot.
But, like Murphy, the Venezuelan actor (Hands of Stone, Bright) is a former journalist, and questions come naturally. “I guess I can’t really escape” from that, Ramírez said after an FX session on the show during the Television Critics Association’s winter meetings.
Recalled Murphy: “I think the moment that I got Édgar to say yes was when he said, ‘Why do you want to tell the story?’ Which people very rarely ask me. And I said, ‘I really understand these characters and, like Versace, I really understand what it’s like to be hunted.’ And I think that unlocked something for Édgar, and he knew that as a director that I understood the pain that he was going to have to go through.”
“I do a lot of research. I think that in the end I’m also attracted to characters that are biographical because I’m just obsessed with history,” Ramírez said. “It’s like a meta-inspiration of history, to become the subject.”
Before he could play Versace — a role that required him to gain weight and don prosthetics to make him look older and more like his subject — Ramírez said he wanted to understand the times the designer lived in.
“So that’s why the first thing that I did was try to understand, to create a process, through what was going on in the ’70s, the ’80s, and the ’90s. So basically Versace, he captured the sexuality and the run-down element of the ’70s. He combined and married it to the opulence and exuberance of the ’80s. And then everyone went crazy in the ’90s,” he said.
And in asking to see more of Tom Rob Smith’s scripts, inspired by Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors, “I wanted to understand what the trajectory of the character was going to be,” Ramírez said.
“It’s very dangerous when you approach biographical characters that have a huge impact in history, in real-life history. Because we tend to think that based on the impact that those characters had in real life, that it would immediately translate into an interesting character. And that’s not always the case. A character needs to be … dimensional, needs to be complex, and not only based on the present. So for me it was important to understand that Gianni, in the story, was going to be a force, a force that would affect people,” he said.
That’s certainly the way Murphy saw Versace, the fifth, final, and undeniably most famous victim of spree killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss, Glee). This is a true-crime story, told mostly in flashbacks, one in which Cunanan gets considerably more airtime than Versace.
But it was the designer whose death earned the appellation “assassination,” Murphy said, after I questioned its use in a story about a man who’d killed others, including two once-close friends. (Among his victims was South Jersey cemetery caretaker William Reese, who was killed in Pennsville, where Cunanan stole his truck.)
“It was a political murder. It absolutely was,” Murphy said. “This was a person who targeted people specifically to shame them and to out them [like Cunanan himself, all but one of his victims — Reese — is depicted as gay] and to have a form of payback for a life that he felt he could not live. … There were obviously five victims, but I feel like this case is famous, the most famous, because of the Versace case.”
Ramírez was already friends with Ricky Martin when Martin was cast to play Versace’s longtime lover, Antonio D’Amico. Penelope Cruz portrays Versace’s sister Donatella.
Versace may have been Cunanan’s most famous victim, but Orth had been on the case for two months before the designer was killed.
“It was a Vanity Fair article. We were through the final fact-checking stages, we were ready to go to the printers, and all of a sudden the announcement comes” that Versace had been killed and that “this kid” was a suspect, Orth said.
“So that’s when the whole story blew up again. It was two stages for me. And so then I had to fly down to Miami and try to stay ahead of the story once Versace was killed,” she said.
For Ramírez, Versace’s importance lies not in his death, but his life.
“We live in a culture that was partially created and shaped by Versace. He was the first one to combine fashion and celebrity. I wouldn’t be invited to the front row of a runway [show] if it wasn’t for the culture that Versace created,” said the actor, who’s attended shows for Moncler, Armani, and others.
“I like fashion. I’m not ignorant of fashion. My grandmother was a tailor,” he said. “And Versace was not only a designer. He created the things.”
Craftsmanship interests Ramírez, who likened the physical transformation the role required to making broth: “Is this too salty? Is this too dull?”
His accent, too, involved calibration.
“We decided not to speak Italian in the film because then it would force all the family conversations to be in Italian. So Penelope [Cruz] and I, we speak Italian — but … still, she’s Spanish, I’m Venezuelan,” he said. “We wanted to give the sense of the Italian into it. And basically what we tried to do was speak with each other and speak how they [Gianni and Donatella] spoke English,” while at the same time being understood.
“It’s English with an Italian accent, that’s what I tried. And I have enough Italian friends to be coached and inspired by.”
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. 10 p.m. Wednesday, FX.
FX’s widely celebrated O.J. Simpson “American Crime Story” focused on the theatrics and hijinks of the celebrity athlete’s televised murder trial and the colorful characters involved.
Don’t expect any such amusement from “Crime Story’s” second season, which details the murder of fashion icon Gianni Versace in the summer of 1997 and the events leading up to him being gunned down.
While viewing the first four episodes, I didn’t smile once. What I did feel was stunned, sad, chilled, mortified and thoroughly sickened, as if someone had delivered a hard punch to my gut.
The drama is breathtakingly beautiful at times, inviting us into the opulent, glamorous and often decadent world of Versace (Emmy-nominated Edgar Ramirez, “Carlos”), his handsome longtime partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) and his fiercely devoted sister Donatella (Oscar-winner Penelope Cruz), a realm made even more dreamy by pastel-washed Miami.
But that’s only the backdrop. This new nine-part “American Crime Story” is primarily a no-holds-barred depiction of the horrific crimes of sociopath Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss, “Glee”), his calculated killing of Versace, the gruesome slayings that preceded it and the effect on the various victims’ friends and families.
“Every season of this show will have a different tonality,” co-executive producer Ryan Murphy told TV critics at a recent FX press session in Pasadena, California. “The first season was very much a courtroom pot boiler. The second season that you’ve seen is a manhunt thriller.
“I loved that this was not glamorizing the Cunanan story, and we never want to do that on this show,” Murphy added. “I really loved how we laid into everybody who was affected, not just the people who were killed, but also the relatives, the siblings. I think what (Cunanan) did was very, very destructive, and the reasons why he did it — the homophobia of the day, which still persists — is something really topical.”
What both series have in common is they’re topical and reflective of the day.
“With ‘O.J.’ we looked at sexism and racism, and we are doing the same with this season,” Murphy said.
As for the drama’s honesty, the Versace family recently decried it as “fiction.” However, journalist and author Maureen Orth, whose book “Vulgar Favors” served as the basis for the drama, stands by its authenticity.
“I would say my sourcing in the book is 95 percent or more on the record, and I talked to over 400 people, and so, so many things that you might think were made up aren’t made up,” Orth said.
As indicated before, it’s not an easily digested story: Each of the murders is terrifying, as is Cunanan’s manipulation and shaming of his victims.
However, it’s portrayed with such realism and emotional commitment by its magnetic and meticulous cast that you are hooked instantly and will want to see it through to its conclusion.
The stars met with us to share their feelings about the characters they play and how being part of such a sad, brutal and disturbing series affected their lives.
Murphy said Ramirez was the only central cast member who didn’t instantly say yes when approached.
The actor eventually was convinced, however, and said he came away surprised by what he learned about Versace the man: “How family oriented he was and how strong those family ties were and how important they were in his life. And how rather subtle and intimate and private he was in comparison to the public perception of the House of Versace.”
“He was rather a quiet person that would go kind of shy, you know, extroverted, but shy at the same time,” Ramirez said. “And he would go to bed rather early and wake up rather early and had more the demeanor and the life of a craftsman than like a larger-than-life celebrity. So that’s something that even to me was very surprising.”
Martin, known best as the Latin pop star who gave us hits such as “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” said he had a conversation with his character, D’Amico, to assure him that his relationship with Versace would be “treated with utmost respect.”
“I told him, ‘I will make sure that people fall in love with your relationship with Gianni. That is what I’m here for. I really want them to see the beauty and the connection that you guys had.’”
He also got the biggest laugh during the FX press session. “I peed a little bit,” he said when he learned Donatella would be played by Penelope Cruz.
As for Criss, people who’ve seen him in lighter roles, such as the singing-dancing Blaine in “Glee,” no doubt will be astonished by the intensity of the actor’s performance here, particularly when the sadistic side of Cunanan comes out.
However, Criss made sure he also found something likable about Cunanan, such as his charm, to turn in a fleshed-out portrayal.
To preserve his sanity through filming, he said, the role “didn’t come home with me. I know a lot of people who jump into these kinds of things, and it really consumes their whole lives. And maybe that’s just the kind of person I am, but my alibi of how that, sort of, works is 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.”
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