The second season of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story premieres Wednesday, January 17. Searching for a spoilery advanced preview? You came to the right place!
After the first season of American Crime Story took us on a wild ride as we watched the O.J. Simpson trial unfold, the series now shifts our attention to spree killer Andrew Cunanan and his crimes leading up to the murder of fashion icon Gianni Versace.
We have binged-watched the first eight episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story to bring you an advanced preview of what to expect! Avoiding all spoilers? Turn away now!
Episode 1, “The Man Who Would Be Vogue,” introduces Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez), his longtime partner Antonio (Ricky Martin), Gianni’s sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz), and serial killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). The episodes play in chronological order, beginning with only a few moments before Versace’s assassination and then taking viewers back in time.
While the real reason for Versace’s assassination remains unknown, American Crime Story goes on to speculate Cunanan’s motives and what leads him to murder Gianni. The final moments of “The Man Who Would Be Vogue” return audiences to the aftermath of Gianni Versace’s death, introducing his sister, Donatella.
“I’m not interested in his intentions. Find him. Catch him. But don’t talk to me about what might or might not be going through his mind.”
This is Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light), widow of the third victim in the string of murders that brought Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) to Miami, where he fulfilled the title of Ryan Murphy’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which debuts on FX on Wednesday. She doesn’t want explanations, or psychoanalysis; she just wants law-enforcement to get the man who killed her husband Lee (Mike Farrell).
The real-life Miglins have long maintained that Lee’s death was a random killing, and that he never knew Cunanan, so they — like the Versaces and the families of his other victims — will likely not be pleased with anything about this new American Crime Story season. And this fictionalized version of Marilyn Miglin will surely disapprove of the approach Murphy and company (primarily English writer Tom Rob Smith, adapting Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors) have taken, which is much less interested in the hunt for Cunanan than in trying to understand how he could so swiftly and brutally end so many lives.
Those expecting a spiritual sequel to The People v. O.J. Simpson — with its sprawling casting of characters, deft mix of tones (which allowed Courtney B. Vance’s fiery but real Johnnie Cochran to somehow co-exist with whatever John Travolta was doing as Robert Shapiro), and vivid recreations of famous events — will likely be disappointed by the long-delayed second season(*). So, for that matter, will people expecting the story to primarily focus on fashion designer Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez), his sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz), and his romantic partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), since the main character is Cunanan, with the Versaces popping up intermittently. (Critics were given eight of the nine episodes.)
(*) This was actually intended as the third ACS season, and is debuting on schedule. The problem is that a planned second season about Hurricane Katrina took so long to figure out that Versace got done first, and the Katrina story will either air later this year or sometime in 2019.
The approach is The Talented Mr. Ripley by way of Memento, starting off with the eponymous murder (and a flashback sequence about how killer and victim crossed paths years earlier in San Francisco), then moving relentlessly backwards, so that most episodes concludes right before the events of the previous one, retracing the trail of violence and lies that took Cunanan to Versace’s front gate.
It’s a narratively audacious move, but a frustrating one, too. First, it asks us to understand and care about most of Cunanan’s victims, like Navy vet Jeff Trail (Finn Witrock) or soft-spoken architect David Madson (Cody Fern) only after we’ve seen them brutally killed. Worse, it does the same with Cunanan himself, who remains — despite an excellent, career-redefining performance by Glee alum Criss — a maddening cipher: a sociopath and pathological liar who becomes whatever he thinks the occasion calls for, even in front of people who think they know who he really is. For a long time, it feels as if Murphy, Smith, and company don’t even know who Cunanan was. And though the eighth episode — set in Cunanan’s child and teen years, and featuring Jon Jon Briones (currently starring on Broadway in Miss Saigon) as Cunanan’s profoundly influential father Modesto — finally begins to unravel the mystery man at the center of this all, it feels too little, too late for a show that’s spent so much time in the company of a man who keeps playing one variation of the same note, again and again.
At the same time, if you can view Cunanan not as the protagonist of Assassination, but its connective tissue, then it begins to feel more satisfying as a series of tragic vignettes about what it was like to be gay in America in the ’90s. Trail, for instance, deals with rampant homophobia among his fellow sailors, not to mention the corrosive impact of the new “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, while the Miglin marriage is presented as a business partnership (he’s in real estate, she’s a cosmetics magnate who regularly appears on Home Shopping Network) at least as much as it is a romantic relationship. Cunanan snuffed out lives and ruined others, but in the process gives the series reason to settle in with these people and tell their stories, with some powerhouse performances — in particular by Light, in what feels destined to be the first of many collaboration with Murphy, and by an unrecognizable Max Greenfield as a friend Cunanan makes shortly before the Versace killing — along the way. We see how much more dangerous it was to be gay back then, and yet how staying in the closet could be a life or death choice, and not always in an expected way. The series suggests Miglin’s path might never have crossed with Cunanan’s if Lee didn’t need to keep his sexuality a secret, and there are periodic suggestions that Cunanan’s spree could have been stopped much sooner if law-enforcement both cared more about his victims and saw this fugitive gay escort as more of an ongoing threat.
“They hate us, David,” Cunanan tells Madson to talk him out of calling the cops at one point. “They’ve always hated us. You’re a fag.”
The Versaces reappear whenever their story overlaps thematically with what’s happening with one of the victims — Gianni officially comes out of the closet in a magazine interview in the same episode where Trail gives a less glamorous interview about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — and Ramirez, Martin, and, especially, Cruz, are so outstanding that it’s easy to wish Assassination devoted more time to its title character.
Like most of Murphy’s productions, the season — directors include Murphy himself, Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Dan Minahan, Nelson Cragg, and Matt Bomer (who starred in Murphy’s HBO adaptation of The Normal Heart) — is a visual marvel, particularly whenever we get to spend time in Versace’s world and understand that the fanciness of the decor is less an indulgence than a philosophical imperative by a man who, as Donatella explains, “has a weakness for beauty; he forgives it anything.”
But Cunanan’s just not interesting enough to support so much screen time, especially because we don’t really get to understand what makes him tick until the story’s nearly over. And even then, it’s hard to find empathy, given what we know about all the horror he inflicted.
“I am not like most escorts,” he boasts to Lee Miglin. “I am not like most anybody. I could almost be a husband, or a partner. I could almost be. I really could. Almost.”
The anthology miniseries boom that Murphy created with American Horror Story means each season could almost be anything at all, and there are plenty of times where Assassination feels almost as great as the O.J. season. But because its central character is always only almost one thing or another, it’s only almost, and never quite there.
When the cast and crew of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” attempted to recreate the life and fashion sensibility of the murdered Italian designer, immersing themselves in his flamboyant aesthetic was key to telling the story well.
So they set out to showcase his dramatic world with both setting and costume: Producer Ryan Murphy obtained permission to film the series, which debuts Wednesday on FX, inside Versace’s former home, Casa Casuarina in Miami, where the rooms are decorated with bold tile, frescoes and seashells. And actor Edgar Ramirez, who plays the doomed designer, embraced Versace’s creative vantage point, which was heavily influenced by classical motifs.
“He had a poster of the Roman empire in his shop in Calabria, [Italy,]” Ramirez said at a recent panel discussion of the series. “When we think about the Roman Empire, we tend to think about washed-out statues . . . But the reality is that the Roman Empire was very colorful. The blues were very intense and the gold was intense.”
Recreating Versace’s outlandish designs for the series became a painstaking project for Emmy-winning costume designer Lou Eyrich, who not only tracked down genuine vintage pieces, but created looks for the show without any cooperation from Gianni’s sister (and current artistic director of the brand), Donatella Versace, or the Versace company itself — which has denounced the entire production as a “work of fiction.”
“Gianni Versace was fearless and bold in his use of color. He understood the female physique and how to make a woman feel and look sexy,” says Eyrich, who has also designed the costumes for “American Horror Story.”
Versace was also fond of using mixed media in his designs. For example, a Greek key pattern seen on the border of the iron gates to his villa appears in his clothing for men. “The more you look [at his creations], the more you see [those motifs],” says Eyrich.
Since his death at age 50 in 1997, many of Versace’s pieces have been scooped up and preserved by collectors. Eyrich had to scour the Internet to outfit not only Ramirez, but Penélope Cruz, who plays Donatella, and Ricky Martin, who plays Antonio D’Amico, Versace’s domestic partner of 15 years.
Many pricey items were out of reach for Eyrich and her team: At stores such as the Way We Wore in LA, the asking price for a Versace shirt from the era is a hefty $1,500, and an animal-and-baroque-print skirt suit goes for $4,500.
“We didn’t have the budget to get the pieces we really wanted. We ordered a lot online,” Eyrich says. “We were competing with a lot of serious collectors.”
Of all the actors in the show, Ramirez was the one Eyrich was able to provide with the most authentic duds. “Almost all of Edgar’s costumes were Versace,” she says. “We sourced the jeans, the shoes and the shirts [from vintage shops]— which I’m sure he loved.”
One exception is a shocking-pink bathrobe Versace wears to breakfast at his Miami villa on the morning he’s murdered by Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). Eyrich had this made to Murphy’s specifications — she says the producer requested something with some “float” in it, so she used an especially lightweight silk. “When Edgar walked, it billowed,” Eyrich says.
Eyrich relied on her “genius tailor” Joanne Mills to remake a dress Versace designed for his sister — a sexy, black leather number accentuated with a series of men’s leather belts linking the bodice to a choker.
“We got every photo we could of [the original] dress,” Eyrich says of the frock that Donatella wore to a party at the New York Public Library celebrating Vogue’s centennial in 1993. “We were very careful to show our utmost respect; I didn’t want to make it look like a made-for-TV movie [design]. I want to pay tribute but not ever minimize. Joanne recreated all the hardware — the belt buckle — and made the full-leather skirt.”
Eyrich and her team also created a whopping 17 looks for a pivotal scene at Versace’s final haute couture fashion show in Paris in 1997, which plays out, in flashback, in the second episode, which airs Jan. 24. Donatella argues with her brother about the direction of their company and needles him about not being able to keep up with younger designers John Galliano and Alexander McQueen.
“You were the future, once,” she says snidely. Ever defiant, Versace tells his younger sister that great design comes “from the heart.” He reduces her to tears of shame with a runway show that unveils one inspired creation after another: A sleek, white evening gown slit up the side, a glittering red minidress and the pièce de résistance — a metallic mesh mini “wedding dress” covered with crosses, worn with a silver-headband veil. The daring piece is for the “Versace bride,” Gianni declares, not a “virginal” one.
“He had this rock ’n’ roll approach to couture,” Ramirez has said. “At this level, in high fashion, he mixed sexuality and glamour, something that, until he came along, were on two different tracks.”
kristienmorato: I usually don’t rave about TV shows on social media, but I’m going to have to make an exception for #AmericanCrimeStory #Versace (out Jan. 17) It’s hands down one of the best shows I’ve seen in the past couple of years and @darrencriss is so frigging good and creepy in it! This picture was taken back in May last year when we visited the set in #Miami and were able to sit down with #DarrenCriss, #RickyMartin, #PenelopeCruz, #EdgarRamirez and #RyanMurphy inside the Versace mansion. They had just filmed the assassination scene the day before and they all told us that they were still pretty shaken up by it. After seeing the scene on TV I completely understand why! #sogood #FX
Clearly there is some miscommunication all around, so I’ll keep you updated if there’s any confirmation either way.
emilbeheshti: American Crime Story/Versace airs this Wednesday 1/17 on FX. I play an ER doctor trying to help save his life. I won’t spoil how it ends. Hope you watch the series. #americancrimestory #acsversace#versace #fx #americancrimestoryversace
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