The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story
The second installment of Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology series is a visceral, compelling, and disturbing look at the murder of the titular designer — and the man who killed him, Andrew Cunanan, played by a gripping Darren Criss. (FX, Wednesdays, 10 p.m.)
PASADENA, Calif. – When Maureen Orth was approached by a producer to option her book, “Vulgar Favors,” for a television series, her lawyer wasn’t exactly encouraging.
“He said ‘you know, Maureen, this isn’t worth the paperwork,’ ” Orth recalled in an interview here. “ ‘These things never happen.’ ”
So she hired an agent to do the paperwork.
The result is the nine-episode FX miniseries, “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” which premieres at 10 p.m. Wednesday and stars Darren Criss (“Glee”) as serial killer Andrew Cunanan, Edgar Ramirez as the fashion icon, Penelope Cruz as his sister and Ricky Martin as his partner.
A consultant on the series, Orth has no complaints about the stylish FX production, led by producer-director Ryan Murphy (“Glee,” “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson.”)
“These people are just top notch,” said Orth. “I am in the Class A League here.”
Orth, who dedicated her 1999 book to her late husband, South Buffalo legend Tim Russert, their son Luke and her mother, addressed how it became a series almost 20 years later.
The book, whose title was taken from a Richard Strauss opera, began as a Vanity Fair article that Orth was writing about Cunanan before Versace became his fifth victim in the middle of 1997.
“I saw a picture in the Sunday New York Daily News of a good looking kid in a tuxedo and it said ‘serial killer suspect,’ ” recalled Orth. “And I said, woo, that doesn’t sound like the usual serial killer. I had never done a murder story or a crime story before so I thought I would try my hand in that.”
She spent two months in San Diego, Minneapolis and Chicago researching the four murders Cunanan committed before murdering Versace.
“At the time I was doing the article he had not yet killed Versace,” said Orth. “He was on the lam.”
She believes Cunanan, who knew she was doing the story for his favorite magazine, once called her Washington, D.C. home.
“The very first thing in the book is a phone call that Tim picked up unfortunately and not me,” recalled Orth. “It might have been Cunanan. It was some guy asking, ‘Is Maureen Orth there? Is Maureen Orth there?’ And it was 1 o’clock in the morning and Tim of course, said, ‘I think it is that guy,’ and instead of handing me the phone, asked him ‘Who are you?’ And click.”
While Vanity Fair was fact-checking Orth’s article, Versace was killed in Miami.
“I think Tim was the first person to call and say somebody shot Versace,” said Orth. “Somebody said, ‘Do you think this might be your guy?”
Orth said the police wouldn’t release the shooter’s name because they were trying to put together a lineup.
“That was the beginning of all these miscalculations that gave him time to escape,” said Orth.
Her editor determined Orth would do the story if it was Cunanan and another reporter would do it if it wasn’t. She got confirmation that it was Cunanan at a movie premiere.
“I had to crawl past John F. Kennedy Jr and his wife and make a pay phone call and ask ‘Is it Cunanan?’ ” she remembered. “I was the only one in the world that knew he actually met Versace because one of his roommates told me. I said to Tim, ‘Ohmygod he knows Versace.’ They met at the San Francisco Opera.”
“At the time it happened, I probably knew more about Cunanan than anybody else in the world,” she said.
Cunanan’s background makes the story more compelling. His IQ was 147 and he graduated from a good school.
“His first victim was his best friend, the second victim was the guy he was in love with and the third victim was the older man in Chicago and supposedly married and very Catholic,” she said. “I believe he came to represent all the older men he had had in his life – he was an escort and companion for. The fourth murder was a murder of convenience because he needed the car.”
Orth said his stolen getaway car was in a public Miami garage for four of the five weeks he was on the lam and he was living in a flea bag hotel, hustling at night and going to gay discos.
“He always had this obsession about Versace,” said Orth. “Because like Versace, Andrew was always gay and out his whole life.”
“He was a narcissist, a con artist and liar and he felt extremely entitled. He didn’t want to work for a living. And Versace seemed to have everything that he himself felt he deserved. Fame, recognition … I think Versace embodied everything Cunanan wanted to be. However, he wasn’t willing to work for it.”
Orth understands critics’ question whether this series will prove as popular viewing as the first “American Crime” story about the O.J. Simpson murder case, which she wrote in her book hurt future law enforcement investigations.
“They are completely different,” Orth said. “O.J. was far more known to American people than Versace was. It is really comparing apples and oranges. There are equally compelling characters in this tale with very complex lives. This one has a lot of glitz and glamor in it.”
She said hopes American viewers get a few things out of the series.
“It shows the pain of being in the closest that was so often prevalent 20 years ago,” said Orth. “That is no longer the case as much. The lying and the sadness that was pervasive. Cunanan was able to exploit that and get away with things.”
“It teaches you the lessons of doing things for fame and money and material things are not what counts in life obviously.”
She dismissed some criticism here that the series makes Cunanan likable because she feels being erudite, well-read and having good taste made him that way.
“I found that specious,” she said. “He was an incredibly charming personality. He wasn’t just simply a calculating evil personality, and that’s why he was able to gain the confidence of really lovely, sort of salt-of-the-earth, Midwestern guys and the people that he hung out with… So he had quite an interesting personality that was apart from the deep evil that lurked underneath.”
She praised Criss’ performance.
“I think Darren did a beautiful job of being both creepy and charismatic at the same time,” said Orth. “That’s the tragedy. Cunanan had all these gifts that if he chose to employ them for the good he could have been a big success. But he wasn’t willing to.”
In other words, Criss’ performance is worth the paperwork all by itself.
When will The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story be released?
The Assassination of Gianni Versace is the second instalment of Ryan Murphy’s examination of infamous murder cases that rocked the world.
The second season of the anthology series is officially released on FX in the US on Wednesday, January 17.
It will then air shortly after on BBC Two for UK viewers. An exact date has not yet been set for the BBC Two release but it has been confirmed that it will be early 2018. The show will then stream on Netflix after its initial premiere.
The first season, The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, was released on BBC Two on February 15, 2016 after the initial US release of February 2.
So it’s likely UK fans won’t have to wait too long to enjoy what is set to be one of the biggest shows of 2018.
On July 15, 1997, the designer Gianni Versace was gunned down on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion, leaving the fashion world to mourn one of its most luminous stars. Eight days later his murderer, Andrew Cunanan, turned his gun on himself.
Starting Wednesday, Jan. 17, on FX, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” will speculate on what motivated the monstrously bright and pathological Cunanan, a social-climbing gay gigolo, to kill at least five men, including Versace. It’s the anthology’s second installment, after 2016’s Emmy-sweeping “The People v. O.J. Simpson.”
The Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramírez portrays a benevolent Versace; Penélope Cruz sweeps in as his sister and muse, Donatella, showing scant mercy to his grieving partner, played by Ricky Martin. And Darren Criss (“Glee”) coolly seethes — until he viciously erupts — as Cunanan. The nine episodes, volleying between the dazzling, sexed-up opulence of Versace’s existence and the grimy despair of Cunanan’s, are adapted from Maureen Orth’s 1999 book, “Vulgar Favors,” which examines the role that homophobia may have played in the hunt for the serial killer. KATHRYN SHATTUCK
PASADENA, Calif. — Édgar Ramírez didn’t leap at the chance to play Gianni Versace in a TV show about the fashion designer’s 1997 murder, and American Crime Story executive producer Ryan Murphy was fine with that.
“I loved being in a room with an actor who says, ‘That’s interesting. Come back to me with another script,’ ” Murphy said of Ramírez’s initial response to The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, a nine-episode edition of the anthology series that premieres at 10 p.m. Wednesday on FX.
“And I said, ‘What?’ ” said Murphy, whose credits include Glee, American Horror Story, and The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. He’s used to hearing his first choices say yes on the spot.
But, like Murphy, the Venezuelan actor (Hands of Stone, Bright) is a former journalist, and questions come naturally. “I guess I can’t really escape” from that, Ramírez said after an FX session on the show during the Television Critics Association’s winter meetings.
Recalled Murphy: “I think the moment that I got Édgar to say yes was when he said, ‘Why do you want to tell the story?’ Which people very rarely ask me. And I said, ‘I really understand these characters and, like Versace, I really understand what it’s like to be hunted.’ And I think that unlocked something for Édgar, and he knew that as a director that I understood the pain that he was going to have to go through.”
“I do a lot of research. I think that in the end I’m also attracted to characters that are biographical because I’m just obsessed with history,” Ramírez said. “It’s like a meta-inspiration of history, to become the subject.”
Before he could play Versace — a role that required him to gain weight and don prosthetics to make him look older and more like his subject — Ramírez said he wanted to understand the times the designer lived in.
“So that’s why the first thing that I did was try to understand, to create a process, through what was going on in the ’70s, the ’80s, and the ’90s. So basically Versace, he captured the sexuality and the run-down element of the ’70s. He combined and married it to the opulence and exuberance of the ’80s. And then everyone went crazy in the ’90s,” he said.
And in asking to see more of Tom Rob Smith’s scripts, inspired by Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors, “I wanted to understand what the trajectory of the character was going to be,” Ramírez said.
“It’s very dangerous when you approach biographical characters that have a huge impact in history, in real-life history. Because we tend to think that based on the impact that those characters had in real life, that it would immediately translate into an interesting character. And that’s not always the case. A character needs to be … dimensional, needs to be complex, and not only based on the present. So for me it was important to understand that Gianni, in the story, was going to be a force, a force that would affect people,” he said.
That’s certainly the way Murphy saw Versace, the fifth, final, and undeniably most famous victim of spree killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss, Glee). This is a true-crime story, told mostly in flashbacks, one in which Cunanan gets considerably more airtime than Versace.
But it was the designer whose death earned the appellation “assassination,” Murphy said, after I questioned its use in a story about a man who’d killed others, including two once-close friends. (Among his victims was South Jersey cemetery caretaker William Reese, who was killed in Pennsville, where Cunanan stole his truck.)
“It was a political murder. It absolutely was,” Murphy said. “This was a person who targeted people specifically to shame them and to out them [like Cunanan himself, all but one of his victims — Reese — is depicted as gay] and to have a form of payback for a life that he felt he could not live. … There were obviously five victims, but I feel like this case is famous, the most famous, because of the Versace case.”
Ramírez was already friends with Ricky Martin when Martin was cast to play Versace’s longtime lover, Antonio D’Amico. Penelope Cruz portrays Versace’s sister Donatella.
Versace may have been Cunanan’s most famous victim, but Orth had been on the case for two months before the designer was killed.
“It was a Vanity Fair article. We were through the final fact-checking stages, we were ready to go to the printers, and all of a sudden the announcement comes” that Versace had been killed and that “this kid” was a suspect, Orth said.
“So that’s when the whole story blew up again. It was two stages for me. And so then I had to fly down to Miami and try to stay ahead of the story once Versace was killed,” she said.
For Ramírez, Versace’s importance lies not in his death, but his life.
“We live in a culture that was partially created and shaped by Versace. He was the first one to combine fashion and celebrity. I wouldn’t be invited to the front row of a runway [show] if it wasn’t for the culture that Versace created,” said the actor, who’s attended shows for Moncler, Armani, and others.
“I like fashion. I’m not ignorant of fashion. My grandmother was a tailor,” he said. “And Versace was not only a designer. He created the things.”
Craftsmanship interests Ramírez, who likened the physical transformation the role required to making broth: “Is this too salty? Is this too dull?”
His accent, too, involved calibration.
“We decided not to speak Italian in the film because then it would force all the family conversations to be in Italian. So Penelope [Cruz] and I, we speak Italian — but … still, she’s Spanish, I’m Venezuelan,” he said. “We wanted to give the sense of the Italian into it. And basically what we tried to do was speak with each other and speak how they [Gianni and Donatella] spoke English,” while at the same time being understood.
“It’s English with an Italian accent, that’s what I tried. And I have enough Italian friends to be coached and inspired by.”
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. 10 p.m. Wednesday, FX.
Ricky Martin, the Grammy-winning “Livin’ la Vida Loca” singer, 46, plays Antonio D’Amico, the lover of international fashion designer Gianni Versace(Edgar Ramírez) in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, premiering January 17. The second installment of FX’s American Crime Story will focus on the shocking 1997 murder of the Italian designer and the search for his killer (Darren Criss).
Why tell this story now?
We’re going to learn a lot about Versace’s creative process, his relationship with his sister Donatella [Penélope Cruz] and his relationship with Antonio, who he was with for 15 years.
What did the real-life Antonio share with you?
He was an open book, but he was a little bit afraid of what was going to come out. I said, “Antonio, I want you to know that I’m doing this part because I can’t stand injustice. We’re going to focus on the love that you and Gianni had for each other.”
How aware of Versace’s murder were you at the time?
I was living in Miami at the time. Miami took a hit after this unfortunate event; I think Miami hasn’t been able to recover still. I was in Europe touring when I heard about it and it was the saddest thing. It was a very intense summer; first it was Versace, then it was Lady Diana.
You did some work in fashion. Did you ever meet Versace?
I never met him personally, but I remember being scared of how it happened. I remember thinking that the LGBT community could all be victims of someone like Andrew Cunanan. I would say fear is the emotion that comes to me when I revisit those days. Andrew Cunanan was in Miami Beach, not hiding from anybody. He was on the list of most wanted men by the FBI. So the question isn’t how did it happen, no. The question is why did it happen? Why did we allow this man to even get near such a powerful fashion icon?
What was it like to actually film at Versace’s home in Miami?
Oh, my God, it was a luxury for us to be able to shoot in the actual house where everything happened. We shot the scene where Antonio finds his body in front of the house early that morning and, of course, the setting helps you so much.
I never went to the house when he was alive. I was invited to many events and parties while I was living in Miami, but for some reason I was never able to go. Years go by and then I walk into this house for the first time to shoot the scenes and I say, “See, this is exactly why I was not supposed to come to this house before,” and I used it. It was amazing that we could do it. Then, obviously, we went back to L.A. and the magic of Hollywood, where you can build amazing sets.
It sounds as if this project became personal for you.
When you jump into such a big production, you have to commit yourself. The only thing you must allow for in your schedule is anything that has to do with Gianni Versace and this story. So, yes, I was a bit obsessed with it.
You have to get emotionally invested in order for the audience to find truth in the story that you’re telling. Surrounded by amazing actors like Penelope Cruz, Edgar Ramirez and Darren Criss, I felt like one of the luckiest men to be able to create such a beautiful dynamic between my fellow actors on set. I think that also reads on camera.
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