Cody Fern (‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’) chats with Gold Derby’s Tony Ruiz about his ‘wild’ role on the run with a serial killer and ‘gay shame.’ In “Versace,” Fern plays the real-life David Madson, who was forced to go on the run with serial killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) after Cunanan murdered a mutual friend right in Madson’s apartment. Madson was briefly suspected to be Cunanan’s accomplice until he was found murdered several days later. | 29 March 2018
He might be winning plaudits for his role as Gianni Versace’s former partner Antonio D’Amico in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, but for Ricky Martin, every part on Ryan Murphy’s hit drama series feels personal.
In a world-exclusive interview in Attitude’s May Issue – available to download, in shops from Thursday (March 29) and with a second special cover featuring Kylie Minogue – the Puerto Rican actor and pop icon admits the story of a globally-renowned star living his life secrecy hit seriously close to home.
Ricky, who ended years of speculation about his sexuality when he came out as gay in 2010, admits he recognised from personal experience the oppressive atmosphere of homophobia that bubbles not far beneath the surface of American Crime Story: Versace.
“The level of injustice that we as a community were dealing with back then was heavy. I played every role before I even started working on this project,” the 46-year-old ‘Livin’ Las Vida Loca’ singer says.
“I was a closeted gay man who was making my partners hide. I had relationships with other men who were in the closet and I had other relationships with men who were not in the closet but because of me went back into the closet.
"And so I’m re-living everything that I did.”
Martin, who is father to 9-year-old twins Matteo and Valentino and married his partner, Swedish artist Jwan Yosef, in a secret ceremony last year, goes on to reveal tat it wasn’t just his romantic relationships which suffered because of his struffle to accept his sexuality.
“I submitted myself to my career completely. I didn’t open doors to new relationships, and I’m not talking about romantic relationships, I’m talking about any relationship, because I didn’t want people to know me too much,” he explains.
“I wouldn’t even sit down and have a cool relationship with amazing producers or great film directors because I was afraid that if they spent more than two hours sitting with me they would know my nature.
"I wasted so much energy trying to manipulate my sexuality.”
Who are the main musical artists you listened to during your formative years? What music tastes have you developed most recently on the job?
[…] Now, I try to be aware of as wide a spectrum of music as possible. I work on many shows set in specific time periods, such as Pose, The Americans, and American Crime Story or that use music from all over the map like Claws, so I’m constantly going down rabbit holes of different times, locations, and genres. Everything from 1970’s Chilean music to late 1980’s house music or early 1980’s dark wave. The research is half the fun. Conversely, shows like Claws, 9-1-1, and the forthcoming series, Reverie on NBC use a good amount of contemporary music, so I’m always keeping my ear out for new music that fits the sound of those. More often than not, my music tastes wind up being shaped by whatever shows I’m listening for at the moment. I guess maybe I’m a “method" music supervisor?
American Crime Story: Versace focuses on the tragic assassination of the iconic Italian fashion designer, Gianni Versace. The show features a scintillating blend of ornate classical music, late 80’s/early 90’s nightclub favorites by Lisa Stansfield and La Bouche, and a dash of jazz. What was the inspiration behind these selections and was it intentional for the music to play such a dominant and telling role in the storytelling?
Ryan Murphy is a huge music fan so music is important to the storytelling in all of his shows. The overall sound of the show is truly his vision and from there, all of us – producers, editors, etc. – collaborate to serve that. In the case of Versace, there were two key tenets that guided the process.
First, on all of the period set shows, authenticity is extremely important. If a scene is set in Fall 1992, we take care not to use songs released after that point. For The People vs. O.J. Simpson, it was very focused on events within a few year span. This season, we are jumping around in time. We travel to 1987 and 1990, 1997 and 1992 (and some years in between). To some degree, we had to show that in the song selections.
Equally, if not more importantly, this season is much more of a “deep dive” into character than the O.J. season. Ryan, along with executive producer, Alexis Martin Woodall sought to approach the music through the lens of Andrew Cunanan, the killer, and his experience of life. Where would go and what music would he be exposed to? What would have been listening to as a child? We thought about what was playing in clubs at that time. We wanted to be accurate as to what was popular back then and put people in the shoes of a younger gay man in California. The fact that most of the songs are highly recognizable also provides a point of connection with the character – a position you may not want to find yourself in with a serial killer. The buoyant “Easy Lover” by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey plays as Andrew dances while a wealthy older man is in bed nearly suffocating.
In a cameo, Aimee Mann performs “Drive” by The Cars. It was for a moment where David Madson, who we know gets murdered shortly thereafter, decides not to escape in order to comfort a crying Andrew. Even the songs in the clubs like “Be My Lover” by La Bouche or “A Little Bit of Ecstasy” by Jocelyn Enriquez were selected with Andrew’s psyche in mind. Every moment of, “Oh, I love that song!” is immediately followed by, “Oh man, am I relating to this guy?” That’s one of the main questions the show asks: What role did we as a society play in allowing this bright young man with so much potential to murder an icon?
From the start of your career in music supervision until now, what has been your most challenging and game-changing experience working on a film or television show?
[… ]The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story was also a game changer for me. The season was starting as PJ was transitioning into Warner Bros. Records and right off the bat, there were on camera performances. The Aimee Mann appearance mentioned earlier in episode four. Then there was an on-camera polka band in episode five and of course, tons of needle drops in all the episodes. In an apprenticeship industry, there really comes a time to spread your wings. I remember P.J. telling me, “This is what needs to happen. This is your time to level up.” He was 100% right.
ACSFX: Twenty years later, the story still resonates. Our cast and crew discuss what they learned from the incredible and tragic events of #ACSVersace.
Serial killer Andrew Cunanan met his grizzly end in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story finale Wednesday night, but it was more of a fizzle than a bang for star Darren Criss’s final scene.
Eight days after Cunanan murdered famed fashion designer Gianni Versace—and two months after Cunanan murdered his fourth victim— police finally cornered the killer on a Miami houseboat. Rather than face capture, Cunanan puts the gun that killed Versace in his mouth and pulls the trigger.
The episode imagines Cunanan’s final days hiding out on that houseboat, while also bringing back many of the series’ guest stars: Judith Light as widow Marilyn Miglin, Annaleigh Ashford as Cunanan’s childhood friend Elizabeth, Max Greenfield as Cunanan’s HIV-positive friend Ronnie, and Jon Jon Briones and Joanna P. Adler as Cunanan’s father and mother.
Series writer Tom Rob Smith (who also created the British drama London Spy) adapted this real-life event, and the rest of the series, from journalist Maureen Orth’s 1999 book, Vulgar Favors. He spoke to Newsweek about working on the series and what liberties he took in interpreting Cunanan.
What do hope fans take away from the finale of The Assassination of Gianni Versace?
It works as a retrospective on loss. That’s one of the things I’m most proud of about this series. Marilyn Miglin, brilliantly played by Judith Light, says in the finale, “I’m so proud of Lee.” There’s that sense that all of these victims—not just Versace—were great. A crime story is about a sense of loss, about people being ripped from the world, about that hole they leave behind. That line, and this finale, crystalized that sense of sadness and loss beautifully.
It was almost moving to have Andrew reface so many of these people he hurt before his suicide. But it was hard to tell if he was feeling regret or just fear for his own life.
It’s been presented that Andrew is relishing in his notoriety thus far. But for someone who had all his potential, intelligence and impressive education, isn’t it also possible that he felt a deep sense of disgust at what he had done? This is not someone who spent his life being horrible to people, he was always trying to charm and impress them—he paid for dinners and tried to win people over. In those final days on that houseboat, there was a sense of great shame, I think. That’s our interpretation.
When you say that, is that what you imagine the actual, real Cunanan felt at that moment? Or do you see the show’s Cunanan as just a character, inspired but separate from the real killler?
In the end, I think you have to accept that it’s an interpretation. But you’re drawing on what there is. People have said, “Oh no, he committed suicide because he was trying to outwit the police.” I’m like, “He shot himself in his boxer shorts on a bed.” I don’t know how anyone would think that was a grand ending. The houseboat was in a state of horrendous decay—that space was a manifestation of what his life had become. He did die the day after Versace’s funeral, so he almost certainly watched Versace’s funeral on TV. I think he would have looked at that and seen a man who is adored, who has the most extraordinary funerals in Milan, while Andrew is in this hellish, sweaty physical decay, despised by the world.
Lots of killers go to trial—they quite enjoy it, in their own way, they enjoy putting the victim’s families through the trial, as part of their sickness. Very few of them commit suicide. So I think, whatever Andrew might have told himself, there must have been some deep sense of shame that he didn’t want to face in a courtroom. He didn’t want to have his crimes read out to him.
What details did you add to his final hours for the show, to help support that interpretation of Andrew?
Obviously, we don’t know what he watched. We just know what was on and we know that there was a TV [in the houseboat]. We do know that the Versace magazines were there, and we know that there was nothing left to eat in that houseboat. We know that he had absolutely no money. He had no way of getting any food and he was trapped. There’s that sense of the world bearing down on him. His dad claimed that he called him.
Really?
Yes, his dad claimed to Maureen Orth in Vulgar Favors that he called him—the exact claim is that Andrew called him to talk about the film rights. Of course, his dad could be lying. We certainly don’t know that Andrew asked his dad to come get him. But I didn’t make up the name of the movie title, A Name to Remembered By. The dad really did say that. But [Andrew] shooting the TV set isn’t true. We put that in because we wanted to get across that the sixth person that Andrew would have gone for next [to kill] would have been his dad.
Modesto Cunanan is a fascinating character, both in the show and real life. Did you guys ever find out what happened to the real person?
We don’t know, and actually we really tried to find that out. We don’t think he’s in America; we think he might not be alive anymore. It’s very hard to find someone. But I know that Fox did do research on that and didn’t come back with anything.
What we know about the real man is that that he gave Andrew the master bedroom, and that he then came in to use the closet. So he set up an excuse to go into there. To my mind, that was immediately a red flag. We also know from Maureen’s research that Andrew’s lie in Episode 1—“Oh my dad used to drive around with a chauffeur, and he was having an affair with the chauffeur”—that’s a real lie from Andrew. I always think that lies are very revealing. I remember first reading that and thinking, “That’s a strange lie.” That’s one of those interesting things about going backwards— you get that lie in Episode 1, and you think it’s just Andrew being crazy. When you get to Episode 8, you’re like, “Wait a minute. What was behind that lie?”
The show makes very explicit—especially in the finale—that one of the reasons the FBI took so long to catch Cunanan was a lack of connections in the gay community and a disregard for gay lives. That felt like a statement on the homophobia of the authorities in the ‘90s.
There’s a couple of things I’d say. This is not a story where it’s about the homophobic cop that doesn’t catch anyone. I think the most homophobic person in this story is Andrew Cunanan himself. He is just this horrific homophobic bully to Lee Miglin. He’s using everything he understands about shame and disgrace against his victims. And with David, he’s trying to trap him into to staying with him by saying, “The police will never believe you, they hate you.”
Many things he says have truth in them, and in Miami it was a fiasco. I don’t know why they didn’t put the flyers up, I don’t what was going on there. Other cities they were better—I think they were better in New York and San Francisco, and I think the various gay communities there were better connected to the police. But catching people is tricky, and people make mistakes without have a racist, sexist or homophobic agenda behind it. People just screw up.
But when an officer refuses to go into a gay club to put a flyer up, that is a real issue. And when Andrew was just walking around Miami—the diner where he ate was just directly opposite the police station. I do think you can say that Versace should not have died.
Given the title of the series, I think some fans were surprised that the show ended up being more Andrew Cunanan’s story than Versace’s.
I was sent Maureen’s book two years ago, and I was always adapting this book. The Versace story is not a crime story—his life story is a success story. And in Maureen’s book, [Versace’s] only really in the story at the end. One of the things we talked about is that we really want to bring him to the fore, because he’s such an interesting counterpoint to Andrew. I don’t think you can just say Andrew was a product of society. Andrew was his own creation. He was beaten by things other people overcame. Andrew was lazy, vain and entitled. Yes, he did encounter enormous prejudice, but so did Versace, and Versace overcame those things. So when you look at it that way, it became a very interesting counterpoint. That was the genesis of the story. But I can understand why people thought it was going to be a biopic.
The real Versace family publicly condemned the show and the book as “a work of fiction.” Have you heard anything else from them since it’s been airing?
No, only the initial statement, which is the same statement they brought out at the publication of the book. One of the advantages of not doing a Versace-intensive biopic is that you can concentrate on what was amazing about that family. You don’t really need to get into the other gossipy stuff about relationships or drugs. None of that is relevant to this story. It’s just about saying what was amazing about Donatella and her relationship with Gianni because that’s what we’re counterpointing against Andrew.
In the end, it’s just a story about two families. You’re comparing them. That’s what I really love about Episode 8. I don’t know anything about how [the real Versace family] feels, but the show is really a celebration of Gianni Versace as an artist.
“This is what crime is,” said Tom Rob Smith, the writer behind “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” the second season of FX’s anthology true-crime drama “American Crime Story.” “Crime is people being ripped from the world.” He was talking just hours ahead of the mournful finale of a challenging season that told the story of Andrew Cunanan, a serial killer who in 1997 murdered the fashion designer Gianni Versace in Miami Beach. By the end of his nightmare journey, Mr. Cunanan had ripped away six men’s lives, including his own.
Across nine episodes, that journey took viewers along a counterintuitive path, beginning with Versace’s death and working mostly backward in time, through the murders of four other men and deep into the killer’s troubled childhood in San Diego. It was exceedingly painful to watch at times, but to Mr. Smith, the pain was the point. “I know there are gaps in the story where we’ve had to imagine what happened,” he said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “But I think we’re actually very close to the fundamental truth: Andrew destroyed a great many lives.”
Following are edited and spoiler-filled excerpts from that conversation, in which Mr. Smith talked about his work on the difficult and disturbing series, as well as the opportunity it gave him to explore what made those lives worth living and their loss so tragic.
I’ve seen critics talk about how hard it is to tune into a story this painful, week in and week out. Since this was your first true-crime project, was that obstacle to audience identification and enjoyment something you wrestled with?
One of the reasons we take the story backward is because we want to make the victims the heart of the piece, and they’re amazing people. Andrew was targeting people who had things that he did not, whether that be love, financial success, or moral success. I feel very privileged to have read about Versace. I think he’s underwritten about, underexplored, a remarkable figure.
The same with Donatella [Donatella Versace, Gianni’s sister and business partner]. They were an incredible couple. Lee Miglin is an extraordinary figure. The greatness that he achieves is from tenacity: As the youngest kid of seven or eight, he arrived in Chicago knowing no one, and he worked his way up. He was the American dream. David [David Madson, a Minneapolis-based architect] was this incredible young man, full of love and looking for love. And Jeff [Jeff Trail, a gay former naval officer] struggling with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell … I felt very lucky to tell their stories. I found them very moving and very celebratory.
Andrew, on the other hand, who is the central character …
It’s true that when you get to their deaths, Andrew is this despicable figure. But if you go further back, it’s hard not to find things about young Andrew that are impressive. He was out to people when he was — how old was he, 17? He was this Oscar Wilde-like wit who would, when confronted by homophobic bullies in school, look at them and bounce it straight back at them. I mean, I could never have done that in school. I just didn’t have it. There was an act of bravery in that. And he was a good friend to many people. He would pay for things. He would be there when they needed him.
There’s that loss of potential. You feel that on the victims’ side — these people were ripped from the world and they were achieving so much — and you feel it also with Andrew. Why couldn’t he have converted his intellect and his consideration for other people into something great? What happened there?
You don’t want to reduce an actual human being to an avatar of impersonal forces at work in the world, but Andrew is in one sense the weaponization of all the obstacles that have been placed in all those people’s way by homophobia. Even at Versace’s funeral, the priest performing the ceremony refuses to take his partner’s hand in comfort.
Yeah. All of that is real. We’ve got the footage of the priest pulling his hand away from Antonio. That’s not an inference — we can see it. That priest knew he was on camera, knew he was in front of thousands of people, knew he was at the funeral for this man, and still couldn’t control his hatred. He still felt no needto control it. Versace was so successful he managed to overcome that, which was what was so extraordinary about him. But the whole point of Andrew’s personality was that he wanted to impress people, and he’s born into one of the most marginalized groups in society. That paradox — How can you impress someone when they find you disgusting intrinsically before you even open your mouth? — that’s the conundrum of Andrew.
I think it’s tricky. The most homophobic person in this story is Andrew, by far. When he becomes this killer, he becomes a horrific homophobic bully. It’s like he’s soaked up everything and unleashes it on Lee and Versace. He’s like, “I’m going to shame you. You’ve achieved success and I’m going to rip it down, both through physical destruction, but also through the act of scrutiny and having the world look down upon you.”
Even when he was younger and acting as a welcoming figure in the gay community, he was pushing his racial identity as an Asian American to the side. That’s a stark contrast.
You know, he kind of did both. He wanted to change his name from Cunanan to DeSilva so he could say he’s Portuguese rather than from the Philippines. Then he was saying he was Israeli. So yeah, he would push the racial thing to one side. But the sexual thing is interesting, if you look at the way his life tracks. He can’t deal with anyone who might be critical. If he met someone who was homophobic and he wanted to be friends, he would say that he was straight, or that he had a wife and a daughter. He would play the audience. Eventually he went into an audience of these older men that he didn’t have to play to, because he was instantly impressive. He was younger and witty and clever and appreciated. Once he lost that audience, he hit rock bottom.
There’s this moment we never managed to get into the show which I’ve always thought captured something about Andrew. He was at a party when his descent was really accelerating, and no one was paying attention to him; in fact, someone had already reprimanded him for being really annoying. He just went over to this table and set fire to a napkin. He needed people to run over and notice him.
To get to the core of a person as protean as Andrew, I suppose you have to identify the desire that makes him shape-shift in the first place.
On his own, he was very sad and very alone. There were often moments when he said that. If you caught him when he wasn’t high and he wasn’t pretending, he said: “I’m alone and I’m depressed. I haven’t achieved anything and I’m miserable.” He wasn’t stupid. He could see himself in those moments.
But he could, for example, pretend to be a millionaire while going to a restaurant and pay $500 for a meal. Even if he only had $500 left, for those three hours, everyone at that table would think he was wealthy and successful. Those restaurants became a kind of theater where he could pretend to be a person that he wasn’t. He lived for those moments. When he stopped having those moments, that’s when he killed people.
FX’s “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” was a long and grueling shoot that stretched from May to January, hopscotched the country from Miami to Minnesota to Chicago to San Francisco, and was lensed virtually all on location. The houseboat where Versace killer Andrew Cunanan was trapped as he met his end was rebuilt from scratch on Miami’s Collins Avenue by the production team, based on crime scene photographs and other footage from the era of the 1997 slaying of the famed fashion designer.
But all of the time, energy and money devoted to “Versace” paid off for uber-executive producer Ryan Murphy, once he saw how star Darren Criss, writer/exec producer Tom Rob Smith, and director/exec producer Dan Minahan pulled off the final hour of the nine-episode series.
“It was that moment when you’re shooting the series that you’re waiting for. We knew the stuff Darren was going to have to do would be very, very emotional and upsetting, when he was finally caged and trapped,” Murphy told Variety. “It was hard for him. Darren had nobody to react to other than himself for most of the episode. He really arced the character so well and stripped it down to the bare essence at the end. It was very emotional and difficult material. Darren gave the performance of the year.”
Murphy said he’s gratified to see Criss receive generally strong reviews for the extremely demanding role that he hopes will open more more doors for the former “Glee” player.
“When you get stereotyped as a writer or an actor it’s hard to break out of that lane and show people you’re capable of so much more,” said Murphy. “I’m excited for him about what opens up for him.”
Murphy also hailed Minahan and Smith for taking the extra step of intense rehearsals for the climactic scenes of Cunanan alone as a squatter in a houseboat as the FBI’s manhunt closed in on him. “Versace’s” narrative unfolded as a backward chronology from the moment of Cunanan’s July 1997 murder of Versace on the steps of his Miami mansion. Smith immersed himself in research to write all episodes of the series in that challenging format — an accomplishment that drew a thumbs up via Twitter earlier this week from none other than Stephen King.
The final hour of the series, “Alone,” depicted the moment of reckoning for the deranged protagonist as well as some closure for other characters, including Donatella Versace (Penelope Cruz), Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light), Cunanan’s hustler friend Donnie (Max Greenfield), and Versace’s lover Antonio (Ricky Martin). Murphy said those sequences were designed as “arias” to give the supporting characters a final bow in the spotlight.
“Max Greenfield came back with this thesis statement about homophobia, Judith Light gave us this insane operatic monologue,” Murphy said. “We spent time with the victims, the people who lost things because of Cunanan’s murders.”
“Versace” did not land with the same pop culture punch as the inaugural “American Crime Story” series, 2016’s “The People V. O.J. Simpson.” To date the series has averaged about 3 million total viewers in Nielsen’s live-plus-7 ratings, compared to about 7.7 million for “People V. O.J. Simpson.”
Murphy said he knew that the “Versace” would draw a more modest crowd given the subject matter and the fact that the Simpson saga was so much more well known by the general public. But the larger message of “Versace’s” effort to demonstrate the homophobia and discrimination that hampered the police investigation of Cunanan’s killings has touched a nerve, based on the reactions Murphy has received.
“I can always tell if something is working or landing by how many people stop me on the street to tell me they’re binge-watching it and loving it,” he said. “I’m so proud about the message of the show. It meant a lot to people.”
The conclusion of “Versace” comes on the same night that another new Murphy production wraps its freshman year. Fox’s “9-1-1,” a fast-paced procedural about first-responders and dispatchers, couldn’t be more different than “Versace.” Murphy admits he was reluctant to do a traditional network TV procedural, but prodding from Fox Television Group chairman Dana Walden made Murphy’s team pull together a strong cast — anchored by Angela Bassett, Connie Britton, and Peter Krause — and deliver “9-1-1” for debut sooner than they expected in January.
“Dana was really adamant in saying ‘You have another procedural in you’ and that Jan. 3 was the time to premiere it,” Murphy said. “And she was right. Dana is the reason why this has all worked.”
“9-1-1” has inched up steadily in viewership, winning its Wednesday 9 p.m. time slot for most of its run with an average of 10 million viewers. Murphy said there’s already discussions of potential spinoffs — every major city has a first-responder hub, after all — but nothing formally set in stone. In the near term, the focus is on expanding the show in season two with “more people in the call center and more stars,” he said.
With “9-1-1,” Murphy has launched a hit for Fox in his waning months as a producer on the lot before he segues to a mammoth Netflix overall deal on July 1. Murphy hasn’t had time to hatch any brand-new ideas for his new network home — he’ll have his hands full during the next year delivering the four new shows — two for Netflix — that he already has in the pipeline in his soon-to-expire 20th Century Fox TV deal.
At present Murphy is in New York shooting the 1980s-set drama “Pose” for FX. In July he’s slated to begin work on the political satire “The Politician” and the eighth season of FX’s “American Horror Story.” When those shows wind down in January, he’ll reunite with Sarah Paulson on Netflix’s “Ratched,” the origin story of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s” Nurse Ratched.
So while he won’t be actively developing new projects for at least a few months, Murphy won’t exactly be idle.
“There’s going to be a lot of extensive legwork and a lot of traveling for these shows. They all shoot in different cities,” Murphy said. “For the first time in a long time, I can tell you I feel pretty content. For now, I’m good.”
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.”
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