Tag: january 2018

‘Glee’ was a departure for ‘Assassination’ star Darren Criss

dcriss-archive:

LOS ANGELES — The title of the new FX short-run series, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” suggests the production focuses on the noted designer who was gunned down in front of his Miami mansion. The death of Versace at the hands of Andrew Cunanan is one of the biggest moments in the nine-part series, but the heart of the project focuses more on Versace’s killer as played by Darren Criss (‘Glee").

Versace was one of at least five people Cunanan killed during a three-month period in the late ‘90s. He was a masterful liar who was able to charm or talk his way into events where he lived a life way above his means. Cunanan’s connection to Versace came through such maneuvering.

Despite the darkness of the “American Crime Story” character, Criss made sure he didn’t let the work haunt him after he left the set.

“I know a lot of people who jump into these kinds of things and it really consumes their whole lives. I think what saved me is that Andrew compartmentalized so many things in his life: emotions, people, experiences. And he could disassociate, and likewise, I could sort of disassociate,” Criss says. “As an actor, it’s your job to find as many common denominators between you and the person you are playing, however close or far or good or bad.

“So even though I found a lot of similarities … the differences are few in number but high in content. So I think it was those differences that made it OK for me to step away from it because I’d been doing things that were so far from myself at home – I mean, excuse me – on set.”

Criss explains part of his job is to have empathy even for the worst of people and for the worst things you’ve done. The trick for Criss finding empathy with Cunanan was despite the role being based on a real person, the actor didn’t look at playing the part any differently than taking on a fictional character. There never was going to be a way he could relate to someone who murdered multiple people, but by reducing Cunanan down to what he calls “primary colors,” Criss could find some relatable aspects. Those elements include both he and Cunanan going to Catholic school, knowing what it feels like to want something that you don’t have and the desire to stand out. Criss fully understands Cunanan’s desire to not be ordinary.

Criss could also relate to Cunanan on an acting level.

“We are both performers,” Criss says. “I do it professionally and he did it personally. I was always curious why I never saw him involved in drama at school. My two-penny analysis is that he wasn’t a hard worker.

“Part of his sociopathic pathology was that he wanted greater things than he had but didn’t want to work for that. He wanted fame and fortune and recognition but wasn’t willing to put in the actual labor. He was a successful actor in his everyday life convincing everyone he was different people.”

Playing the serial killer would seem to be a big change for Criss, especially to those who watched him on “Glee” or for his work in the comic book TV series “Supergirl” and “The Flash.” He’s also part of the indie pop band Computer Games with his brother Chuck Criss.

But, he stresses the “American Crime Story” is closer to the kind of work he has done in his career, and it was “Glee” that was the big departure.

Despite what many may think, Criss doesn’t spend his days singing and dancing. Ryan Murphy, the man behind “Glee,” helped create that thinking when he cast Criss. He’s now also responsible for giving Criss the opportunity to show his wide range of acting skills, as Murphy is an executive producer on “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.”

“I’m always looking for interesting material. I’m looking for things with clay that I can get my hands on and really do something different and big. … I don’t have a choice. I’m not Penelope Cruz. I can’t just be, like, ‘Here’s what I want to do.’ I have to wait for these kinds of opportunities,” Criss says. “And this certainly is a once in a lifetime opportunity that happened to be within the hands of the person that I had been creating other things with and who had been such a champion for me on ‘Glee.’

“So I really hit the jackpot. I wish I could say it was calculated. This was something that I was clamoring for, but I definitely lucked out. I think a lot of actors have to wait a lifetime for something like this, and it came a lot quicker than I had anticipated. So thank you Ryan Murphy.”

The FX production is based on Maureen Orth’s book “Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U. S. History.” Edgar Ramirez, Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin also star in the series that is a follow-up to “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” that received 22 Emmy nominations and won in nine categories.

‘Glee’ was a departure for ‘Assassination’ star Darren Criss

Faggots, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Versace

I still wince when I hear it: “faggot.” It’s as thick as the tongues of the boys who spit it at my feet, and as weighty as the swinging fists that sometimes follow. It’s as sylphlike as a queen in sequins, and as slippery as a wet cock. It’s what he says when he hates you, or hates himself, or when you ask for it very late one night, after the lights go down. It teases, then barbs, embraces, then wounds. It might come from friends, enemies, lovers, strangers. It might be whispered, it might be yelled. It’s the most fraught word in my vocabulary, the twisted viscera of shame and pride made into a term that possesses no one meaning: It’s a slur, a seduction, a laugh line, a life raft; an acknowledgement, a dismissal, a provocation, a shield.

It’s also the central linguistic motif of the astonishing new season of American Crime Story, The Assassination of Gianni Versace—as forthright as its sense of color, its extravagant appetites, its Catholicism, its camp. On the morning of his 1997 murder, the Italian fashion designer (Edgar Ramirez) strolls through his Miami Beach palace in a flowing, fluorescent robe, the camera retreating skyward as he breakfasts by the pool; the corresponding image of his killer, Andrew Cunanan (the magnetic, frightening Darren Criss), peers in on the con man as he tosses off his matching pink cap and vomits into a toilet, then pauses for a glimpse of the message etched into the bathroom stall: a rough drawing of two dicks, with the caption “Filthy faggots.” From here, the series unspools in reverse, tracing the lives of its two main characters back to their childhoods, and among its constants is that unutterable word, that unforgivable commonplace, that useful descriptor, that reclamation. The “crime” in this season of American Crime Story is the assassination of Gianni Versace, certainly, but it’s also, doubtless, homophobia itself, socialized and self-inflicted, individual and internecine: At the heart of the anthology’s magnificent second act is a potent, political, possibly even dangerous reconsideration of what it means to be called a faggot, and then what it means to become one.

In one flashback in the season premiere, directed by Ryan Murphy and written by Tom Rob Smith (London Spy), Cunanan regales his friend Elizabeth Cote (Annaleigh Ashford) with the embroidered details of an encounter with Versace at a San Francisco nightclub, and the scene cycles through the complications of the term with remarkable alacrity. “I know the score,” Cunanan snipes, puffing himself up. “He’s a lecherous fag on the prowl”:

“Hey, faggot is not a nice word,” Cote scolds.

“Not nice when it’s said by the wrong person,” he counters. “But what are we supposed to call them? Homosexuals? Sounds so scientific. Anyway, I don’t have a problem with it. It doesn’t bother me. At all.”

We hear, see, feel the word “faggot” more in the eight episodes of Versace made available to critics than in all the other TV I’ve watched in my career, but the decision is most notable for the lengths to which the series goes to suggest faggot’s full complement of possibilities; in the space of a minute, in Cote’s pristine kitchen, it’s cast as an aspersion, called out as such, repurposed, weaponized—that insidious “them”—and finally brushed off, though of course the “problem,” for Andrew, the “bother,” is not that Versace’s a faggot. It’s that Cunanan’s a faggot himself.

Or is he? Versace, thrillingly thorny, refuses to settle on a single definition, application, approach to the word; at minimum, it so closely mimics my own tangled feelings about it, and its cultural signifiers, that I was at first hesitant about my high opinion. Cunanan puts on and peels off identities as easily as he does his Farley Granger-esque suit, which, depending on the moment, reads as both a metaphor for the gay experience and proof of his sociopathic delusions: In the almost poetic monologue that caps the second episode, he says — referring at once to his pile of prior lies and the occupations of other men he’s met in his life — “I’m a banker. I’m a stockbroker. I’m a shareholder. I’m a paperback writer. I’m a cop. I’m a naval officer. Sometimes I’m a spy. I build movie sets in Mexico and skyscrapers in Chicago. I sell propane in Minneapolis, import pineapples from the Philippines. You know, I’m the person least likely to be forgotten.” In its attempt to understand Cunanan and his crimes, Versace comes perilously close, in stretches, to mistaking personal for cultural pathologies, though to my mind it’s this willingness to court such slippages that renders it so compelling. It confronts us—scratch that, it confronted me—with a startling implication: That in the suburban upbringing, the shame, the dissembling, the desperate desire not to be a faggot, I might resemble the murderer more than I do the object of his obsession.

Were this the whole of it, Versace might be written off as salacious, exploitative, even objectionable. But in its treatment of Versace—in particular, his relationship with his longtime partner, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), and his frequent battles with his businesslike sister, Donatella (Penelope Cruz)—and his historical context—most prominently, the longue durée of the AIDS crisis and the early days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell—the series finds ballast, frequent, poignant reminders that the self-policing we perform to evade that label, “faggot,” is the product of a society that polices us if we don’t. Literally, in the case of Versace: It’s fitting that the series, based on Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, should focus such sustained attention on the last part of her subtitle, with homophobic or at least ignorant officers and FBI agents allowing Cunanan to slip through their grasp. In the aftermath of the murder, for instance, the detective questioning D’Amico—still dressed in his blood-stained tennis whites—leers at the notion that he and Versace had sex, alone and together, with other men, almost willfully misunderstanding another term: “partner.”

“These other men, did they consider themselves to be Versace’s ‘partner,’ too?” the investigator asks.

“No,” D’Amico says, frustrated and wounded.

“You see why I’m confused? What’s the difference?”

“Fifteen years. I lived with Gianni for 15 years. That is the difference.”

Mispronouncing the designer’s name, writing him off as “the jeans guy,” or mixing him up with Liberace; refusing to scour gay bars, failing to circulate flyers, or, with regard to another murder, misapprehending rather run-of-the-mill porn and sex toys as “extreme stuff,” the authorities’ prejudices, tacit and explicit, constitute a crime of their own: Were those tasked with capturing Cunanan not so afraid of us faggots, Versace suggests, the designer might not have been murdered that long-ago morning, snuffed out in his artistic prime.

In this, I might add, Versace ultimately, brilliantly cleaves open the difference among the uses of “faggot,” which is the courage Cunanan yearned to possess, and so fatally lacked. There’s so much to be said about the insidious “them” in his earlier statement, but its jet-black core is its contrast with Versace’s candy-colored couture, or indeed the quieter heroics of two of Cunanan’s lesser-known victims, David Madson (Cody Fern) and Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), coming out or criticizing DADT at a moment in which such acts were potent, and political, and even possibly dangerous. As it happens, Versace also underscores the crimes we don’t see, the lives lost, or led less than fully, because part of the violence of being called a faggot is that it keeps us—scratch that, kept me—from becoming one.

I must confess that I remain hesitant to use it, that it’s easier to write than to speak aloud, but in learning to love American Crime Story’s second season, I remembered that I’ve spent the better part of the last decade learning to love that part of myself—that I continue to come out, day after day, as I prepare to enter my 31st year, and that much of this work is embracing the appreciation for cultural signifiers I’d been taught to tamp down, ignore, denigrate, resist. Versace isn’t the perfect rendering of this subject, but it doesn’t need to be. It is, rather, a bold, ambitious, riveting wrestling match between cultural shame and communal pride, in which glittering wedding gowns and glossy magazines, club hits and tank tops, are emblems for which we choose the meaning, just as we might choose to adopt as our own that unutterable word, that unforgivable commonplace, that useful descriptor—that reclamation. As the designer says of the “Versace bride,” preparing for a fashion show, “She won’t be dainty. She won’t be timid. She will be proud and strong.” I realize now, upon finishing what may be Murphy’s riskiest and most radiant gambit to date, that as I grow older, and more comfortable in my own skin, I’m not only able to hear the sentiment, but also to identify with it. I am not dainty, nor timid, but proud and strong: I am a faggot, through and through.

Faggots, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Versace

The ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Features Authentic Vintage Versace

“I had the utmost respect and dedication to making sure we showed anything Versace in the best light,” says costume designer Lou Eyrich.

Much like how Ryan Murphy’s “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” was a exploration of racism, sexism and the 24-hour news cycle, the followup “Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” series is another timely social commentary deep dive set in the ‘90s. The second (or technically third) anthology installment explores how homophobia and society’s attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community ultimately led to the legendary fashion designer’s tragic murder on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion on July 15, 1997.

With Gianni Versace (played by Edgar Ramirez) and his sister and current Vice President of the fashion house, Donatella (Penelope Cruz) being the anchor of the show, fashion — bold, iconic, famously flashy fashion — plays an integral part in the series. But, in anticipation of the January 17 premiere on FX, the Versace family condemned the series as an unauthorized “work of fiction” and attacked the book it’s based on, “Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History” by Maureen Orth, as a “distorted and bogus version” of the designer’s story.

The Executive Producer tried to assuage the family at a Variety panel, per Business of Fashion, saying that the series will “treat [Donatella] and her family with respect and kindness.” Costume designer and longtime Murphy collaborator Lou Eyrich also took special care to honor the family and the brand through the wardrobe.

“We didn’t get to work with the House of Versace at all,” she says, over the phone from Los Angeles, before the family issued statements. “I happen to be a lover of Versace, so I had the utmost respect and dedication to making sure we showed anything Versace in the best light.”

Eyrich personally remembers the media coverage surrounding Gianni’s tragic murder and ensuing manhunt for serial killer Andrew Cunanan at the time. To precisely research, she found a wealth of footage on YouTube, like “Dateline” and “48 Hours” segments, as well as old copies of magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair, which featured stories about the murder. “Of course, I studied his last couple of runway collections from ’96 and ’97,” she adds.

Eyrich was also able to include authentic vintage ’90s Versace pieces, especially for Cruz as Donatella, which were intensively sourced online from high-end resellers and shopped in-store at The Way We Wore in Los Angeles and the famed C Madeleine’s boutique in North Miami Beach. “They had a lot of the original Versace stuff; we were able to get the super high-waisted equestrian leggings, the boots with the Medusa heads on them, a lot of good jewelry and purses and leather coats,” the three-time Emmy winner for her work on “American Horror Story” says. “We got a lot there.”

When Cruz first appears on the show, she wears a vintage Versace-esque, but not Versace-label leather jacket and trousers set, but her belt, boots and bag are authentic pieces from the fashion house (above). The non-linear timeline of the series also jumps back to the early ’90s, allowing for moments of exposition that include notable milestones for the House of Versace — and requiring even more authentic vintage finds.

“We had a scene set in the early 1990s that was supposed to show the audacity and sex appeal of the Versace brand. We studied the imagery of the famous [Fall ’92] Miss S&M collection and were drooling over all the leather, fringe and Western detailing,” co-designer Allyson Leach tells Fashionista over email. “At the last minute, we found the ultimate black leather western shirt for Penelope, complete with fringe, gold collar tips andthe original Versace label at New/Found vintage in LA. We paired it with a pair of custom gold studded jeans that we had recreated based on the same collection. Penelope, Lou and I were all dying over that look.” (Below.)

However, some “Versace” looks needed to be meticulously custom-built, like Cruz’s hot pink and signature gold safety-pin detailed gown (above) and he white lace-up bustier dress (below)— but not too exactly copied for legal reasons. “If it was real Versace, obviously [the piece] could say ‘Versace’ and have the Medusa,” Eyrich says. “But if we were making anything, we were careful not to replicate their logo.”

Fashion nerds will likely lose their minds over a near-exact reproduction of Gianni’s last Versace haute couture show for Fall 1997, which in real life was held at the Ritz Paris, but, on the series, Miami. The louche metallic mini-dress and menswear-inspired aesthetic, the styling (the wide black headbands!) and the model casting — a fake Naomi Campbell as the bride and a faux Erin O’Connor — are spot-on, but the re-created runway looks intentionally are not.

“We did our best to replicate it without exactly copying, of course, but we just wanted to make sure it was represented in a couture way to honor Versace,” says Eyrich, about the hand-sewn and custom built pieces for the show. The scene hits especially hard following Donatella’s heartfelt tribute to her late brother in September with the Versace Spring 2018 runway show, complete with the ’97-referential slinky gold gowns — worn by the real Campbell and the original supermodels.

While the Versaces and Gianni’s longtime boyfriend Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) are represented through high fashion, Cunanan (played by “Glee”’s Darren Criss like you’ve never seen before) and his backstory are deftly communicated through wardrobe — but in a much different way. Not much documentation of Cunanan existed prior to his violent killing spree, so Eyrich worked with the knowledge that the he was skilled at changing his appearance depending on his con or situation.

In the first episode alone, Cunanan exhibits a chameleon-like range of personas, changing from a preppy corduroy jacket and cravat with khakis to a leather bomber jacket and loud printed shirt when he reportedly, per Orth’s book, first encounters Gianni at a San Francisco nightclub to denim cut-offs and a ratty muscle shirt when he’s openly on the run in Miami.

“He was all about status, but he personally didn’t have any status, so he was always dressing and acting the part,” explains Eyrich. “But as his life started falling apart, we started showing that through his clothes.” As he continues his killing spree across the country, the costumes reflect Cunanan’s desperation and decline. “He was either [wearing] what was in his backpack or what he could steal or get at some thrift store. And things weren’t fitting him very well. His appearance really went downhill.”

The sun, palm tree and saturated color-drenched backdrop of ’90s Miami is also evocative of the era and the intensity of the story. Eyrich wanted to “show that vibrant beat of Miami” through bright “Miami Vice”-reminiscent hues and beachwear. Cunanan essentially roamed the South Beach boardwalks and sweaty nightclubs for two months — despite being on the FBI’s Most Wanted list — which required outfitting supporting players, like a near-unrecognizable (even to his kids) Max Greenfield as addict Ronnie in thoughtfully selected acid washed denim cut-offs, plus lots of extras in skimpy swimwear on the beach.

“That’s all Ryan,” says Eyrich. “The older men in their hot pink Speedos, that was his personal request.” For the party scenes, she especially relied on a crew member who came to set with first-hand knowledge. “Luckily one of our fabulous costumers, who grew up there, had a ton of actual photos from when he worked for MTV — these stunning photos of nightclubs — and we were able to lift that research,” she adds.

The ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Features Authentic Vintage Versace

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Makes a Killer the Star

In 1997, Andrew Cunanan, a 27-year-old gay man, shot and killed the designer Gianni Versace in front of his South Beach mansion, at the end of a murder spree that had already left four men dead. Upon executing the famous Versace, a self-made, openly gay Italian who had launched a global fashion house, Cunanan became infamous, a tabloid sensation intimately connected to both glamorous and seedy circles of gay life in 1990s America. But as notorious as Cunanan became, his fame was not particularly lasting. His is not a household name, so much as a Googleable one—or at least that was the case before the arrival of FX’s fascinating, creepy The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which would more aptly be titled The Murders of Andrew Cunanan. Versace is just the name on the label.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace follows the stellar The People v. O.J. Simpson, but it does not share that series’ mood. The People v. O.J. was more fun than is strictly appropriate for a story about the brutal murder of two innocent people, but this inappropriateness—the wad of bubblegum in the blood splatter—made it just campy enough to reflect the larger-than-life, wilder-than-fiction aspect of the actual O.J. spectacle. The series was superficially coy about O.J.’s guilt, a reflection of a larger cultural consensus that the racial politics of the case are too fraught to adjudicate. The murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were the catalysts, but not the focus of the series, an American saga crammed with big personalities, bad perms, bigoted cops, corrupt policing, domestic abuse, football, money, power, sex, and race.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace, by comparison, is sickening and sweaty, a grisly story that does not allow audiences to look away from the murders, because the murders are its very subject, as is the murderer. Cunanan (Darren Criss), not Versace (Édgar Ramírez), is the protagonist. Written almost entirely by Tom Robb Smith and based on Vulgar Favors, Maureen Orth’s nonfiction account of Cunanan’s crimes, The Assassination of Gianni Versace shares a producing team with The People v. O.J. Simpson, but Ryan Murphy’s touch is much more apparent: Entire episodes play out like a restrained installment of his American Horror Story. The series unfolds in reverse chronological order, beginning in 1997 in South Beach on the morning of Versace’s murder, and then making its way backward, episode by episode, through Cunanan’s life, the four other murders, and all the way to his uniquely troubled childhood, when he was taught that it doesn’t matter who you are so long as what you have appears expensive enough, a perverse version of the American Dream.

As played by Criss, who previously appeared in Murphy’s Glee, Cunanan is creepily mesmerizing, a manic, chilling pathological liar. He’s charming, smart, spoiled, volatile, and has a gaping void where a self should be. Criss’ performance is so good that it upends The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Where Cuba Gooding Jr.’s lackluster performance pushed O.J. to the margins of his own story, Criss, aided by scripts, pushes everyone else aside. Versace and his family, his boyfriend, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), and his sister, Donatella (Penélope Cruz), have substantial parts only in the first two episodes, before becoming supporting characters. They do not appear in the third or fourth episodes at all, and are used sparingly in the rest of the series, too noble and decent to as larkishly entertaining as, say, John Travolta’s Robert Shapiro.

Homophobia infects every aspect of the story, as intrinsic to it as racism and sexism were to The People v. O.J. Simpson. (Racism is also a part of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Cunanan’s father was Filipino, and Cunanan spent much of his life posing as Andrew DeSilva, passing himself off as entirely Italian.) Two decades ago, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was the law of the land, AIDS deaths had recently peaked, and the closet was deeper, darker, and far more densely populated. The show takes place almost entirely in a gay world, one that is self-protectively isolated from the mainstream and uniquely vulnerable to its own members. (A vast FBI manhunt, for example, failed to find Cunanan because the bureau had so little familiarity with gay life in Miami.) Soon after Versace’s death, the police interrogate D’Amico about their sex life, convinced this “deviance” must be involved in the murder. Cunanan’s four gay victims face the bigotry of strangers, their families, their colleagues, and the armed services before they are killed by Cunanan, a gay man who is shielded from law enforcement by the very community he is victimizing.

True crime tends to do a disservice to the victims, who are not as freakishly singular as their killers, and that is the case even in Assassination, when one of the victims is a famous man whose name is in the title. Versace is held up as Cunanan’s virtuous mirror image, an agent of life and love, while Cunanan is only an agent of death and destruction. Superficially the two are similar—bright, energetic, engaging—but Versace has values, he embraced hard work and family, he survived AIDS and bigotry, he wears his heart and soul, almost literally, on a sleeve. Cunanan is only ever a hollow pretender. Ramírez is extremely warm and appealing in the role, but it is hard to play a saint. Cunanan’s other victims are more intriguing and heart-wrenching because they are permitted their flaws. There is the closeted, older Chicago businessman Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell); a former naval officer and Cunanan’s onetime best friend Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock, far better here than he has ever been in American Horror Story); and the sweet architect David Madson (Cody Fern).

In fiction, serial killers are usually presented to audiences in the context of crime solving, which gives our interest in them a wholesome cover: Law enforcement wants to know everything about psychopaths because it wants to stop them. We, sitting at home, have no such excuse, but we can hide out in these altruistic motives. But there is little to no law enforcement in Assassination, and we are left only with our fascination, which feels as sordid and voyeuristic as it does warranted. How did Andrew Cunanan become Andrew Cunanan? Insofar as it can, the series tries to answer this question, but there will always be something unsatisfactory in doing so: There is no serial killer math. Some mysterious factors are always part of the equation. As the show works its way backward through time, it inevitably feels like it is building toward an ur-trauma that set Cunanan on his monstrous path—even as we have already watched dozens of moments when he could have veered off it

The Assassination of Gianni Versace does not justify Cunanan—he is, always, self-pitying and lazy, unwilling to choose a better course—but it does more than simply try to comprehend him. Occasionally it has compassion for him. Cunanan once shoved his mother so hard he dislocated her shoulder, and in Orth’s book the circumstances seem starkly brutal: In the show, it seems more understandable. There’s a scene, midway through the season, after Cunanan has committed his first murder, but when he is holding his shell-shocked second victim nearly hostage, when he breaks down into sobs while listening to a singer in a bar (Aimee Mann, making a cameo). Criss, is brilliant, fully self-pitying, the loneliest, saddest psycho in America. In this moment, Cunanan is not a stranger to recognizable human feelings: He wants to be loved, he wants a do-over, he wants not to have ruined his life—which is not the same as feeling remorse. The moment is an icky proffer, much like the show itself: It’s provocative, uncomfortable, morally complex. It’s good, but it doesn’t feel good.

Throughout the series, and apparently in life, Cunanan said that he just wanted to be remembered. (Further evidence that the truth is blunter than fiction, Cunanan was selected “Most likely to be remembered” in his high school year book. His quote in the same yearbook was “Après moi, le déluge.”) There is something deeply unsettling and ethically knotty that, with this deeply unsettling, ethically knotty show, he is getting more of what he wished for.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Makes a Killer the Star

Storming the Beach at Normandy: Andrew Cunanan’s Miami Murder Tour

1057 Washington Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Okay, technically this is the address of the two-story, seven-bar complex Twist, the last of Cunanan’s haunts from South Beach’s gay bar glory days. But it opens its doors at 1pm and in a ven diagram, it’s really the only spot left where local drag queen Elaine Lancaster, Gianni Versace and Cunanan would overlap. In fact, Orth details a night out in which Cunanan danced a very handsy hustle with a hairdresser from West Palm Beach. When the hairdresser asked Cunanan what he did for a living, he blithely replied, “I’m a serial killer.”

Lancaster, who famously plays herself in Golan’s “The Versace Murder” and also a couple of episodes of FX’s “American Crime Story,” is billed in the Golan film on IMDB as Decollette Hercules. “It was another drag queen,” Lancaster explains, “but she was illegal so she didn’t want to go on camera and get deported. And, of course, you know me, I have never shied away from a camera or attention. So I said, “I’ll do it!” She describes the “American Crime Story” project as much more real.

An early visit when the Versace mansion still under construction is what convinced Lancaster to move to Miami and she recalls that in the FX production “everything was Versace: the china, the fabrics, the towels and they shot in the mansion so it was very authentic.” But Lancaster was able to see that authenticity when the mansion was still being built.

“I looked around,” she remembers of her construction site tour, “and I thought this is a palace. How beautiful. And I wanted to be part of it. I was young and impressionable.” She admits she doesn’t go out much anymore and thinks of the murder as the day the music died. “People stopped coming,” Lancaster says simply, “the Miami Beach Police and the FBI could have done more, and if the victims weren’t a bunch of gay men, they might have. Who knows?”

Storming the Beach at Normandy: Andrew Cunanan’s Miami Murder Tour

‘The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Isn’t What You Think It Is

The promotional campaign for American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which premieres Wednesday, January 17th on FX, is all gowns and glamour: The camera lingers over a head of Medusa, the designer’s internationally recognized logo. We see flashbulbs, red carpets, bold prints, glasses of champagne. Outside Versace’s South Beach mansion, we slowly push in on a static tableau of his partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) in blood-spattered tennis whites, standing in formation with the black-clad household staff, like they belong to some kind of Justice League of Beautiful, Minimalist Grief. In a tastefully spare chapel, Donatella (Penelope Cruz) walks towards Versace’s casket as white doves loosed from some nearby John Woo movie flap across the screen in slow motion, ever-so-gently ruffling her veil — without disrupting its clean lines, of course.

It’s all very sumptuous, and gorgeous, and tinged with camp — and misleading as hell.

The story American Crime Story seeks to tell in its second season is at once grittier and more abstract than the one promised in the ads. Grittier, in that it concerns itself with the grisly particulars of Andrew Cunanan’s cross-country murder spree that culminated in Versace’s slaying. More abstract, because the real-life Cunanan was both sociopath and cipher, making the task of turning him into a remotely compelling character prohibitively difficult. In its attempt to do so, The Assassination of Gianni Versace can’t rely on an exhaustively documented public record of legal maneuverings, as did American Crime Story’s premiere season, The People vs. O.J. Simpson.

Instead, it blithely fabricates, spinning crucial passages of dialogue, climactic scenes, even entire episodes from whole cloth: Again and again, we watch two or more real-life figures who are now dead exchange information, share secrets, or confess their feelings for one another.

Of course, the “true” in the “true crime” genre always rests on conjecture, and the demands of a solid narrative arc. That was certainly the case with American Crime Story’s first season, which was largely based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book, The Run of His Life: The People vs. O.J. Simpson. The new season is based on a 2000 book by Maureen Orth called Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History — but it feels fundamentally different, and far more invasive, than the O.J. season. You likely won’t get through all nine episodes (the first eight of which have been offered to critics) without chafing against the liberties the series so eagerly takes — for me, it was a long car ride in episode four, involving tense discussions between Cunanan (Darren Criss) and a former lover (Cody Fern) that clanged the loudest alarm bells.

Disparate Threads

But while the Cunanan murder-spree story predominates, other themes and storylines do recur, though they get far less screentime. Your enjoyment of The Assassination of Gianni Versace will depend on your personal investment in each.

If you come for the Versace stuff shown in the ad campaign — the mansion, the fashion, Penelope Cruz’s thick-as-burrata accent as the imperious Donatella, the over-the-top camp of it all — know that the series parcels that stuff out sparingly. Sure, you’ll get the (incredibly well-cast) Edgar Ramirez as Versace, purring sexily about what his clothes mean, and Cruz cutting Ricky Martin’s Antonio down to size. (Cruz is particularly fun, here — watch the way she sweeps into a room, instantly notices a small tchotchke that a detective had ever-so-slightly re-positioned, and wordlessly nudges it back to starting position.) In episode three, you get Judith Light playing the kind of steely matron that Hollywood casting agents probably call “the Judith Light part” by now. Even the great Terry Sweeney, who brought Nancy Reagan to such fiercely vivid life during his tenure as an SNL castmember, shows up. So yes, the campy stuff is present, clearly, but not nearly to the degree that many will expect.

If you’re looking for the series to wrestle with cultural issues, like the O.J. season did with race in America, there’s some of that here, too: The story of Andrew Cunanan’s life plays out against a backdrop of the struggle for gay rights. Detectives express incomprehension and outright disgust at various victims’ homosexuality. An entire episode revolves around the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Cunanan hides his sexuality from his family and friends. The fact that same-sex marriage isn’t yet a possibility plays a role in two of Cunanan’s five murders, according to the series. (See above, in re: liberties taken.)

But if you’re interested in the tick-tock of it all — the logistics of the cross-country hunt for Cunanan — you’ll likely come away disappointed. The series spends some time with the various detectives tracking Cunanan’s movements, but not enough for us to get a clear sense of how close they get, or do not get, to catching him.

And if you’re hoping to gain some insight into who Andrew Cunanan was, and why he did what he did — well, that’s certainly what the series spends most of its time on, and what it wants you to come away with.

… Eventually.

The structure of the series works against it, in that respect: The first episode depicts Versace’s murder, and subsequent episodes work back in time, more or less linearly, tracing the course of his murder spree, and focusing, in the eighth episode, on Cunanan’s early life.

As a result, the Cunanan we’re introduced to in early episodes just isn’t particularly interesting. Darren Criss does what he can, but the script forces him to give us little more than a smooth, unctuous, one-note narcissist. Cunanan lies to everyone, himself included, so when — very gradually, six or seven episodes in — we finally get to see something other than the facade he presents to the world, we’d be forgiven for wondering if it’s just another mask.

There are no easy answers, no clear reasons, for Cunanan’s actions, but that doesn’t keep The Assassination of Gianni Versace from reaching for them. Again and again, characters tell Cunanan that he wants fame without working for it, that he’s brilliant but lazy. The world is full of such people, but only Cunanan took the bizarre actions he did. When we meet his father in the eighth episode — also, according to the series, an abusive dissembler — it presents us with a collection of what it thinks are revelations, keys that will unlock the secret of Andrew Cunanan. But they’re so pat and familiar that, even if accurate — a not inconsiderable if — they can’t help but read as conventional biopic fare.

It was always going to be difficult for American Crime Story to top its stellar and much-lauded first season, and it’s to be commended for attempting to striking out in a fresh direction. As was true in the first season, the cast is unimpeachable — Criss, Ramirez, Cruz, Fern and Finn Wittrock are standouts. But the decision to lean into the drama of docudrama means imposing an overdetermined shape onto the very real lives Cunanan shattered in a way that feels cynical and glib. So you may come away knowing how and why Darren Criss’ Andrew Cunanan did what he did — but you’ll be no closer to understanding the real Cunanan, or his senseless, violent fate.

‘The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Isn’t What You Think It Is

Versace, killer connection gets spotlight in ‘Assassination’

Grade: C+

Beauty is a beast on the new season of “American Crime Story.”

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” captures the final moments of the beloved, internationally known fashion designer (Edgar Ramirez, “Zero Dark Thirty”) at the hands of spree killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss, “Glee”) on July 15, 1997.

It then backtracks in increasingly large arcs of time to show how the two might have crossed paths and what led to that deadly encounter.

Executive producer and director Ryan Murphy relies on “Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History,” a book Versace’s family condemns, to spin his story.

The show captures Versace’s sumptuous lifestyle — his Miami Beach home is a gorgeous villa, impeccably decorated, with servants who wait at attention — as well as Versace’s enormous heart, kindness and passion for his work.

Cunanan, on the other hand, was at best a sociopath, who skated on his good looks and his uncanny ability to tell people what they wanted to hear.

“What does it matter what I say?” Andrew says.

So long as people adore him, any lie is acceptable.

The initial episodes state that Versace was HIV positive, something his family denies, and suggest that Cunanan might have been in the throes of full-blown AIDS — giving a possible motive for the murder.

Yet Cunanan’s autopsy proved he was HIV negative. Also, as much as they are presented here, for reasons that become obvious, Cunanan’s recollections of striking up a friendship with Versace years earlier are not to be trusted.

More accurate to the time — police confusion as to how to deal with Versace’s grieving boyfriend of 15 years, Antonio D’Amico (singer Ricky Martin).

“I was his partner, not his pimp,” Antonio bristles under police cross-examination.

“This is new to me,” a detective says lamely, of interviewing an openly gay man about the love of his life.

Ramirez does an outstanding job capturing a gentle man and his passion for his work. Penelope Cruz (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) co-stars as his doting sister Donatella, who has absolutely no use for Antonio. (That animosity is well documented.) Criss’ portrayal is brittle and needy (and not such a far stretch from the character he played on Murphy’s “Glee”).

As to why Cunanan went on his killing spree, eliminating ex-lovers, acquaintances and strangers alike, no one is sure why.

“I’m the person least likely to be forgotten,” he says next week, trying to impress yet another stranger.

That might be the closest “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” gets to truth.

Versace, killer connection gets spotlight in ‘Assassination’

Review: Truth and lies are the focus of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

Maybe Jack Nicholson was wrong. We can handle the truth.

The #MeToo movement is giving a microphone to once unheard voices. Political lies are constantly challenged. At the Golden Globes, Oprah’s rousing speech asserted “the most powerful tool is speaking your truth.”

But Ryan Murphy’s second installment of American Crime Story shows the dangerous difference between the absolute truth and “your truth.”

Gianni Versace’s 1997 murder didn’t culturally resonate like the O.J. Simpson case, the subject of the show’s first installment. Ultimately, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story doesn’t have as much story to tell. Instead, it’s portrait of a killer during 1990s homophobia, told through a modern lens.

The FX series is based on Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors, which focused not only on the Italian fashion designer’s murder on the steps of his Miami Beach home but also the FBI’s botched investigation of Andrew Cunanan, a gay serial killer. It isn’t an authorized biography of either party. In fact, the Versace family has widely denounced the show and book.

Penelope Cruz, who plays Versace’s sister and muse, Donatella, and Ricky Martin as his partner, Antonio D’Amico, both give award-worthy performances. And Edgar Ramírez brings a warm, poetic soul to Versace. It’s really a shame that they’re all sidelined by Darren Criss’s phenomenal character development as Cunanan.

The 27-year-old killed four other men before aiming the gun at his most famous target and then himself. At first, his motivations are unclear, the victims somewhat unknown. Here the show takes a page out of Murphy’s American Horror Story. The gruesome murders — seductively scored and shot — are senseless.

Eight of the nine episodes provided to critics unfold the story in reverse, beginning with Versace’s murder and ending with Cunanan’s childhood. Additional flashbacks further confuse the timeline, especially when you’re not binging in one sitting. However, it’s an effective way to shift focus onto the victims and ultimately Cunanan’s destructive descent.

Criss is fully committed to this role and proves he’s graduated from his Glee years, showing off Cunanan’s strutting confidence and loathsome eyes. He’s a con-man swiftly moving from calm to manic. Slowly, Cunanan’s carefully cultivated persona is exposed.

“Every time I feel like I’m getting close to you, you say you’re someone else,” pleads Cunanan’s college friend in the first episode.

Cunanan first kills his friend Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), a retired Naval officer living in Minneapolis with Cunanan’s obsession and next victim, David Madson (Cody Fern). As the two gay men try to live openly, providing insight into gay identity, Cunanan basks in his own alternate reality. He’s gay; he’s straight. He comes from a wealthy New York family. He’s working for Versace, designing costumes for operas. He manipulates every situation, believing he’s giving others the reality they want.

In contrast, the series weaves in Versace’s past, despite the two leads sharing little screen time. After surviving a health scare, he chose to publicly come out in 1995, despite Donatella’s reservations that it could ruin the family company. Versace had passion, talent and fame; but he also had support from the people he surrounded himself with.

Fearing loneliness and abandonment, and yearning for love and adoration, Cunanan ended the lives of the people closest to him and someone who got in the way. And one life he could never have.

The show urges reflecting on sincerity and how everyone occasionally warps reality. Homophobia still exists; #fakenews is constantly thrown around in haste. Speaking any truth can have good or ill intentions, for oneself or for others. Ultimately, the perils of truth affect both sides.

The docudrama is based on a real 20-year-old crime, and it might not be entirely accurate. As Cunanan liked to bend pieces of the truth to entertain and impress his audience, Versace does the same.

Review: Truth and lies are the focus of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’