On July 15, 1997, fashion designer Gianni Versace was just coming back to his Miami home after a morning walk when he was shot to death on the street by Andrew Cunanan, a petty thief, con man, and, it turned out, a serial killer — Versace was only his biggest-name victim. This is the subject of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, the new miniseries that starts Wednesday night on FX. It’s another big-canvas, pop-culture epic overseen by producer-director-writer Ryan Murphy, and features an exceptional performance by one of the performers Murphy made into a star on Glee: Darren Criss, as a chilling Cunanan.
At the start, the production goes back and forth between the story of Versace (played with skill and a notable physical resemblance by Edgar Ramirez), seen initially at the height of his worldwide fashion fame, and Cunanan, angry and miserable, living an impoverished street life. It’s fun to see Penélope Cruz do such a good job of inhabiting the platinum-blond hair and pouty poker-face of Versace’s sister, Donatella, and Ricky Martin exudes a lot of smooth charm as Antonio D’Amico, Versace’s significant other. As a fashion heathen, I appreciated the way Murphy and novelist Tom Rob Smith (adapting Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors) vividly sketch the reasons Versace was considered such an innovative designer, and as the nine-part series proceeds, there are occasional jumps back in time for us to witness Versace’s youth and the hard work that went into building his empire.
The real focus of Assassination, however, is on the assassin. The majority of this season’s American Crime Story (following the Emmy-winning The People v. O.J. Simpson) is a deep exploration of Cunanan. A charming gay man who used his sexuality to both attract and exploit, the Cunanan as presented by Murphy and Smith is a tortured soul for whom we cannot ultimately feel much sympathy. For long stretches, Versace disappears from the production so that we can meet some of Cunanan’s other victims, such as Cody Fern’s fledgling architect David Madson, and Finn Wittrock’s poignant take on Navy veteran Jeff Trail; their stories are told with nearly the same degree of thoroughness as Versace’s.
Along the way, Murphy and company tell a cultural and political history of gay strife, from the AIDS epidemic to the fight for gay marriage to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The fractured narrative timeline — the story is told in reverse chronological order, jumping back and forth, here and there, across the trail of Cunanan’s various crimes — can sometimes seem gratuitously confusing, but once you get used to its rhythm, this American Crime Story has an irresistible pull.
Versace is filled with excellent smaller performances, such as New Girl’s Max Greenfield, so fine as a slimy South Beach hustler who briefly partners up with Cunanan, and M*A*S*H’s Mike Farrell, superb as Cunanan’s wealthy older victim Lee Miglin, portrayed here as man pathetically grateful for Andrew’s condescending attentions. With the Simpson miniseries and now Versace, it may be that Murphy has found his true métier: The true-crime genre anchors his sometimes wild flights of fancy to enough solid facts to give his lyricism weight — dramatic gravitas.
Tag: january 2018
@tomrobsmith: Beautiful LA sunrise welcomes #ACSVersace with a pink sky. Hope people enjoy the show — The Assassination of Gianni Versace on FX tonight at 10PM
‘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)
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.”
How Darren Criss Became Versace’s Killer (And Why He Keeps Playing Gay)
Darren Criss ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Interview on Live with Kelly and Ryan | Source
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’: Sex, Lies, Fashion and Homophobia
The summer of 1997: Fashion designer Gianni Versace wakes up in his Miami Beach mansion, wearing pajama bottoms decorated with his own logo. He slips into a hot-pink robe, then steps out onto the balcony to admire the morning sun over the ocean waves. He strolls through his gilded palace, greeting the servants who are already standing at attention in their places. Versace plucks a glass of orange juice from a silver tray as he lounges to have breakfast – alone – by his pool. Meanwhile, a psychopathic serial killer sits on the beach, with a handgun and a biography of Vogue founder Condé Nast. Within a few minutes, Versace will be dead.
The murder was a crime that shocked the world – a haute couture icon gunned down at the gates of his own mansion. In other words, a crime perfectly designed for Ryan Murphy’s pulp imagination. He brings the case to life as the second installment of his American Crime Storyanthology series, after making a huge splash with The People vs. O.J. Simpson. The Assassination of Gianni Versace has all his favorite obsessions – sex, money, celebrity, glitz, the elusive boundaries of gay identity. The designer was such a central figure in American culture in 1997, namechecked by Biggie in the summer’s ubiquitous hit “Hypnotize.” By the end of that summer, both the hip-hop legend and the fashion maven were handgun-murder victims, and Puff Daddy was onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards with Sting, urging the crowd to raise their hands for Biggie, Tupac … and Gianni Versace.
The People vs. O.J. Simpson was an L.A. story, and the Hollywood setting was part of why it worked so well, plugging veterans from John Travolta to David Schwimmer to Sterling K. Brown into the action – truly a story where Los Angeles plays itself. But Assassination begins with the crime, then moves backward through the career of his killer Andrew Cunanan, a con man and grifter who was already on the FBI’s Most Wanted list after murdering four other men around the country that year. The story, scripted by Tom Rob Smith (London Spy), leaves the Versace-murder narrative on the backburner for much of the series, going into the backstory of how a closeted gay kid turned himself into a homicidal monster.
Darren Criss, leaving Glee far behind, is oily and terrifying as Cunanan, with desperate need in his eyes. It’s there in the way he primps for his first date with Versace back in 1990, after the designer invites him to the opera; he tries on somebody else’s expensive suits while the radio plays Lisa Stansfield’s “Been Around The World.” (By 1997, that was more famous as a Biggie/Puffy song.) He’s a social climber who sees Versace as his big score, even as he scoffs at the duds: “They say Armani designs clothes for wives. I think Versace designs clothes for sluts.”
Edgar Ramírez is charismatic yet warmly empathetic as Versace – as in his astounding performance as a Seventies terrorist in Carlos, the Venezuelan actor plays a man obsessed with his vision, determined to serve it at any cost. Ricky Martin, in a performance way beyond what most people would expect from him, is Versace’s bereaved boyfriend Antonio D’Amico. Together they became a quintessential jet-set couple known around the globe, moving in rarefied circles. At Versace’s funeral, Princess Diana sat next to Elton John; just a few weeks later, the Goodbye Yellow Brick Roadhitmaker was singing “Candle in the Wind” at her funeral.
Penélope Cruz is simply fearsome as the designer’s sister Donatella, who is no longer content to be a muse; she wants her own stake in running the business. She’s icy and imperious in her contempt for his boyfriend. “My brother has a weakness for beauty,” Donatella sniffs. “He forgives it anything. But I am not my brother.” She is such a flamboyant character, it’s difficult to play her without parody – as in Maya Rudolph’s great Saturday Night Live caricature, a diva constantly shrieking, “Cue the rampage music!” But Cruz’s Donatella is no caricature; she’s ruthless in her resolve to keep the House of Versace alive as an aesthetic. As the lady says, “My brother is still alive as long as Versace is still alive. I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice.”
A tragic theme that runs through the story is the way gay culture was changing at warp speed through the Nineties. It seemed like a much more liberated time than the Eighties, yet Assassinationdepicts how oppressive the closet still was in 1997. It was the year Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian on her sitcom, after dropping hints she was “left-handed” or “Lebanese.” Will & Grace was still a year away; the idea of gay marriage seemed like an impossible dream. The cops in charge of the Versace case are baffled at the unthinkable notion of a gay couple sharing a domestic partnership – the officer who interrogates the boyfriend asks, “What was your involvement with Mr. Versace?” The FBI agents are blinded by homophobia as they snicker over the pronunciation of Versace’s name. (“The singer?” “That’s Liberace – this is the jeans guy.”)
Although the Versace family has already denounced the series, this new American Crime Story presents the designer as a genuinely heroic figure: a visible gay man in the Nineties, living outside the closet in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier. Part of the emotional power of Assassination is that the designer, in his own way, was helping the world make the transition into a different place – a transition he tragically didn’t live long enough to see.
‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’: Sex, Lies, Fashion and Homophobia
‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Review: A Disturbing and Confusing Horror Story
It’s fitting that the second season of FX’s American Crime Story is centered around the murder of Gianni Versace, because the series feels like style over substance. It’s like a high-end dress you’d see on a runway in Milan, something that looks ornate and artistic, but which is wholly impractical to wear.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (a cumbersome title) is surprisingly not focused on the fashion designer, played by Edgar Ramirez, who was shot in front of his Miami mansion in 1997. Instead, the focus is entirely on the assassin, Andrew Cunanan (Glee’s Darren Criss), a pathological liar, con artist and sociopath who went on a murder spree that culminated with Versace.
The show is essentially told in the style of the film Memento, a series of flashbacks that will slowly reveal the motivations and origins of Cunanan’s spree and his killing of Versace. The stylistic choice is one that will largely determine how much you enjoy the series.
For me (and I presume many others), Versace’s death and the four people Cunanan killed prior to him is not as well-known as the O.J. Simpson trial. It was a big story, but not one that captured America’s collective attentions for months and months. As a result, using a complicated storytelling structure makes American Crime Story difficult to invest in. Characters are introduced at the end of their stories, and then subsequent episodes offer insights into who they were and what led to their circumstances.
But the style and structure are merely a distraction from what, at its heart, is a terrifying and fascinating portrait of a serial killer. Cunanan, as a character, is disturbing and Criss’ performance has an eerie lack of emotion that suits the show. The limited series travels down Cunanan’s psychological rabbit hole, and contrasting him with Gianni Versace only helps to illustrate how deranged Cunanan is.
The cast also includes Penelope Cruz as Gianni’s sister, Donatella, and singer Ricky Martin as Gianni’s long-time partner and lover. But the show largely wastes both of them, giving them almost nothing to do and having them both disappear for several episodes at a time. Othfer major characters, friends of Cunanan played by Cody Fern and Finn Wittrock, don’t show up until the fourth episode, but become very important.
The series works best as a psychological drama, revealing piece-by-piece how and why Cunanan assassinated Versace and four other people. The flaws, however, lie in the fundamental structure of the season itself and perhaps in the violence. While the first season of American Crime Story was more of a sociological look at race and the judicial system, this season actually shows the demented and depraved violence, occasionally feeling more like a season of American Horror Story.
There are intriguing elements to American Crime Story’s sophomore season, especially how it uses the misconceptions and shame of homosexuality in the ‘90s that led to some police mistakes and may provide some insight into how Cunanan was able to elude capture for so long. But overall, the show feels unfocused, with its overly complex structure and lack of a consistent supporting cast.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace has main character confusion
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is a riveting experiment that falsifies its results. The show — which succeeds Ryan Murphy’s exceptional The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story — ostensibly addresses the assassination of its subject, the Italian designer (played by the excellent Edgar Ramirez) shot to death on the steps of his Miami villa. It is, alas, misleadingly named. The show’s focus quickly turns to Versace’s serial killer, Andrew Cunanan, a shape-shifting con artist played with sinister elan by Darren Criss, and his various victims.
That slippage is deliberate: Like Murphy’s other projects — O.J. Simpson, Feud — the series uses a specific case to build out a larger social history. Where The People vs. O.J. illuminated the fraught context in which the trial took place, where Feud mined a scandalous rivalry for a bigger story about ambient misogyny, Versace attempts a fascinating anthropology of ‘90s-era homosexuality and attendant homophobia, the social ramifications of which allowed a serial killer to keep killing. It’s an ambitious undertaking that aggressively short-changes its nominal celebrity. The results — some of which are quite moving — are fascinating but mixed.
The trouble is that some of the show’s most interesting moves don’t track. Versace is so formally adventurous that it sometimes loses control of its own effects. The season lurches backwards in fits and starts, rewinding from Versace’s assassination to Cunanan’s encounters with his other four (known) victims. Sometimes the story moves forward, sometimes backwards. It works for awhile: I was rapt until I realized I’d lost track — things I’d assumed came after happened before, and vice-versa, and it wasn’t clear why the facts were presented in that particular order because they weren’t just failing to build; they seemed to collapse.
Take Cunanan. This should be one of television’s great villains, and he almost is (thanks to Criss’ cunning, smart-muppet charm). But he’d be a marvelous character if he made any real sense. The difficulty is that the real Andrew Cunanan shot himself a few days after killing Versace and left no note; his motivations are a mystery, and he remains a cipher. Murphy, who usually has too much source material, in this case has too little. The show can’t quite decide how to deal with this. It vacillates between truthful ambiguity and irresponsibly doubling down on rumor. (There’s no proof, for instance, that Cunanan and Versace ever met prior to the shooting, but in Versace they certainly did. Cunanan’s reasons for murdering a Chicago tycoon were unknown; it was rumored at the time that his son was an associate of Cunanan’s. The story was retracted and became a kind of example of reckless journalism. In lieu of exploring the work of those ugly rumors and others, like the theory that Cunanan had AIDS and was killing the men who gave it to him, Versace doubles down: Cunanan definitely had a sexual relationship with the tycoon, it says! And, as if to amplify the thing further, upgrades a famous ham sandwich left at a crime scene into an even more sinister ham).
This divided approach to filling in the historical record produces a character who doesn’t quite rhyme with himself. What does it mean that Cunanan, a self-aggrandizing liar whose dishonesty (it’s repeatedly suggested) is calibrated to compensate for the fact that he wasn’t loved, turns out to have been loved? And not just loved, but obsessed over and badly spoiled? Scandal and murder shows are always most interesting when they take up the question of how we told the story as it was happening, and that twist — if it qualifies as one — could be an opportunity to send up ’90s pop psychology. The show could have spun that earlier theory of Cunanan as society’s too-charitable reading of a monster, or pilloried its easy assumptions about the home lives that “produce” gay men. But instead of corralling that range of possibilities into a consistent account of Cunanan, or some interesting point about how foolishly we theorize serial killers (or homosexuality), the show goes limp. Oddly inert, it just sort of lets every version of Cunanan exist. Sometimes he’s awkward, stilted, and so obvious that his stories fool no one. Other times he’s gifted and manipulative. A brilliant and glamorous shapeshifter. A sad con man.
The pilot is stunning, both in its own right and for how well it captures this slight incoherence. It begins with camerawork that’s pleasingly lush and limited in its omniscience. Directed by Murphy, the opening sequence is every bit as excessive and ornate as its putative subject’s Greek-inspired designs. It looms through and over Versace’s gorgeous villa and whizzes in and out and around, sometimes rising up to look down at the magnificent architectural symmetry of the environment Versace created for himself, and his own elegant asymmetry within it. It’s dazzling, and the contrast between Versace’s gilded aesthetic and his antagonist couldn’t be clearer: We first encounter Cunanan looking grubby and nervous. His backpack is sad. He screams into the ocean. He runs to a filthy toilet and vomits.
But that spectacular aesthetic contrast between Versace and his killer really only serves that specific moment; it sputters out. As we get to know him better, it seems less and less likely that Cunanan would be that hysterically nervous; he’s shown killing other times with total sangfroid.
The vertiginous effect of Versace’s erratic chronology is compounded by the series’ equally experimental approach to point of view. Versace starts off as a kind of equal participant in the story of his demise, with Ricky Martin playing Antonio D’Amico, his lover of 15 years. (This is brilliant casting, and the story of Martin’s own celebrity journey out of the closet — which in some ways parallels Versace’s — elevates this subplot into really exceptional metacommentary. I wish he’d been given more to do.) The show treats Versace, his vision, his artistry, and his company with great tenderness. Penelope Cruz does a creditable Donatella. But a few episodes in, it’s not only abandoned Versace’s point of view — and Donatella’s, and Antonio’s — it’s followed an entirely different character into the afterlife.
These are puzzling choices, but Versace makes up for an overall lack of discipline with real virtuosity at the level of the individual scene, and great performances to boot. Cody Fern and Finn Wittrock are terrific as David Madson and Jeff Trail, a couple of Cunanan’s victims whose stories are so engaging they end up irrevocably distorting the show’s frame. Judith Light’s Marilyn Miglin is a triumph, and I can’t say enough about Ramirez’ Versace. Criss lends a very oddly-written character so much malice, bravado, and pathos that you wink easily at the discrepancies. Only when they stack up do you start to mind.
Ultimately, I think Versace suffers a little from the fact that its real protagonist isn’t famous. Infamy isn’t quite the same thing, and fame, not its opposite, is really what anchors these double-edged Murphy projects: O.J. Simpson’s status as an American hero authorized his function as symbol as well as character in The People vs. O.J. Simpson, just as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s fame elevated them so that — in Feud — their story accrued larger, more resonant layers. That Versace isn’t quite as interested in the celebrity at its ostensible center means the story toggles between the awful, violent specificity of its murderer’s pathology and the homophobic history it’s trying to wrap that story in. It’s a fascinating effort, even if it doesn’t quite live up (or down) to its name.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace has main character confusion
Six Miami Places You’ll See in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
1. Versace’s mansion. Because Florida legislators did away with film incentives in 2016, much of this season’s ACS was filmed in California. But there’s no way set designers could do justice to Versace’s Ocean Drive mansion with a replica, which is why exterior scenes were shot in South Beach. Versace fell in love with the jaw-dropping estate, also known as Villa Casa Casuarina, on a visit to Miami Beach in 1992 and purchased the property soon after. The luxurious home now operates as a hotel and restaurant.
2. News Café. Every morning, Versace strolled to News Café to grab a newspaper or magazine to read on the beach. Although regulars began to recognize him, staff from the time say he preferred to maintain a low profile. On July 15, 1997, the Italian designer was returning home from the restaurant when he was shot dead in front of his mansion.
3. The Miami Beach Police Department. Miami Beach Police suspected serial killer Andrew Cunanan almost immediately. They’d first heard of him a week before Versace’s murder when a federal agent called about rumors that Cunanan, who had already killed four people, was involved in a secret gay organization in South Florida. After Versace was shot in South Beach, police warned the public that Cunanan was armed and dangerous.
4. Twist. The FX series depicts Versace and his partner, model Antonio D’Amico, hanging out at Twist, a gay nightclub on Washington Avenue. Though there’s no indication from old news stories that Versace frequented the club, the FBI displayed wanted posters in the club’s bathrooms when Cunanan was on the loose. At one point, Twist claimed to have surveillance footage of Cunanan at the club two days before he killed Versace.
5. Normandy Plaza Hotel. As police furiously worked to retrace Cunanan’s steps, they learned he’d been staying at a $36-a-night hotel in Mid-Beach. Records showed the elusive killer had checked into the Normandy Plaza Hotel two months before targeting Versace. When police searched room 205, the only traces he’d left behind were a stack of fashion magazines and an electric hair trimmer.
6. The marina on the 5200 block of Collins Avenue. The manhunt for Cunanan finally ended July 23, 1997, when police surrounded a houseboat docked at 5250 Collins Ave. After a five-hour standoff, officers stormed the boat and found Cunanan dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“All across the nation, our citizens can stand down and breathe a sigh of relief,” Miami Beach Police Chief Richard Barreto said at the time. “The reign of terror brought upon us by Andrew Cunanan is over.”
Six Miami Places You’ll See in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
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