This time two years ago, you probably only vaguely knew who actress Sarah Paulson was, if you knew her at all. So now, let’s go ahead and take a temperature check when it comes to your current familiarity with Darren Criss. Lemme guess…Glee, maybe? Well, we’re just days away from that changing significantly.
The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story was a career and life-changing role for Paulson. Portraying Marcia Clark put her on the map, on more screens, and on the minds of average television consumers. Before that, her consistent career included appearing in executive producer Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story and picking up critical kudos for her roles in Martha Marcy May Marlene, 12 Years Slave, andCarol (and not nearly enough attention for her excellence in Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, if we’re being honest). But after she transformed into the sympathetic, cigarette-smoking, permed prosecutor, the world finally understood the talent that this woman was sharing with the world. This resulted in Critics’ Choice, Golden Globe, Emmy and SAG statues and roles in this year’s likely Oscar-nominated The Postas well as the highly anticipated Ocean’s 8. She’s straight up unstoppable.
And yet, that Ryan Murphy magic is at it again for the 2018 installment of American Crime Story, and this time it’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace. While Edgar Ramirez is great as Versace and Penelope Cruz as Donatella will spur gifs wide across the internet, it’s Darren Criss who will send shivers up and down and back up your spine throughout the entire series. He’s creepy, he’s precise, and he’s absolutely impossible to take your eyes off of. As spree-killer Andrew Cunanan, he is giving a provocative performance that will have people talking and showering him with awards. Go ahead, just carve the Emmy for him now. It’s going to be hard for any other male actor to come close to what Criss is bringing this year.
Oh, and that’s not just because it’s fantastic. It’s also startling because we’ve never seen anything like this from him. What happened to that kid from Glee who sang his heart out on “Teenage Dream”? Criss brought his charm to the Kristen Wiig rom-com Girl Most Likely in 2012 but has never quite achieved the recognition he’s deserved for the acting, singing, and general musical theater skills he’s bringing to the game. All of that changes with The Assassination of Gianni Versace.
It’s unlikely you thought to yourself, “2018 is the year I want to be supremely creeped the eff out by Darren Criss,” but that wish is about to come true for you anyway. His performance in the FX drama will give you a delightful and exciting whiplash in the way it switches from frantic to controlled, emotional to subtle, and straight up scary to intriguing. Criss will be catapulted to a household name, and one that we’re kind of freaked out by, but mostly in a good way, right?
Criss has wisely braced himself for this moment. With a new EP released just a few weeks ago, and a schedule clear of any upcoming productions, he’ll be fielding offers left and right — for theater, tours, massive movies, more series TV. He’s already got a fanbase built in, not that they’re ready for what they’re about to see, but it will only expand from here. The key to it all is that he’s just gotta stay on that Paulson path: remain as affable as it gets in real life and on talk shows, remember to thank Ryan Murphy & co. in your awards acceptance speeches, and keep it about the work — and interesting work, at that. But now that we know what he’s capable of, it would be cool if he could just lean closer to the teenage dream than the nightmares he’s able to create.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story premieres Wednesday, January 17, 2018 on FX, and FX+ subscribers can watch the first episode beginning Friday, January 12, 2018.
The bottom line: Penelope Cruz and Edgar Ramirez take a backseat to Darren Criss in a juicy if uneven saga.
The scope of the “trial of the century” — its racial and economic implications and the fact that it featured one of the country’s most famous people and played out on national television — made the O.J. Simpson saga a logical choice as the backdrop for Ryan Murphy’s first American Crime Storyseason.
The anthology’s second installment, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, has to work a little harder to make what is certainly a portrait of the bedsore-ridden underbelly of the American Dream feel like a match. Adapted from Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors by London Spy creator Tom Rob Smith, The Assassination of Gianni Versace juggles three storylines and an innovative crimes-in-reverse structure in a way that yields a disturbing character study and an assortment of strong performances. Still, through eight of the nine episodes, it isn’t quite as convincing or thematically unified as The People v. O. J. Simpson.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace begins in Miami in July 1997 with a contrast. Italian fashion icon Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) lives in a beachfront villa oozing opulence from its palatial bathrooms to its gaping closets to the man-servants practically lining the hallways and the poolside terraces. Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) reads books about this world, but in reality he’s falling apart physically and mentally. Before the Murphy-directed premiere is 10 minutes old, he has sought both symbolic rebirth in the ocean and notoriety by approaching Versace at his front gate and shooting him dead.
In the immediate aftermath of that tragedy, the pilot follows Cunanan as he flees the authorities, Versace’s longtime partner Antonio (Ricky Martin) as he grieves and Versace’s sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz) as she arrives and tries to hold the empire together. Subsequent episodes work backward, somewhat Memento-style, following Cunanan back through each step of his multi-state killing spree, sometimes paralleling his journey with key steps in Gianni’s career and the building of his own brand and his own outsider identity.
A third thread, one insufficiently developed or explored, involves the failure of local, state and federal law enforcement to stop Cunanan, a debacle the series wants to connect to institutional homophobia, with limited success. This is the part of the story that feels most like the process-oriented People v. O.J. Simpson and the part that most viewers probably won’t even notice. The series does well with “What a difference 20 years makes” glimpses at how being gay, and openly gay, impacted the way people lived their lives in 1997. But there’s a leap to how that led to different treatment under the law that I believe completely in theory, but not at all in how it’s executed here. It’s also going to be tough to make audiences invest in procedural storylines led by Will Chase, Dascha Polanco and Jay Ferguson when there are movie stars playing famous people nearby.
Battling and largely overcoming a series of increasingly youthful hairpieces, Ramirez nails Versace’s soft-spoken genius and he has good chemistry with a surprisingly sturdy, emotional Martin. My wariness that Cruz was perhaps overdoing Dontella’s accent and mumble lasted until I watched one YouTube clip and suddenly I was astounded by how well she’s evoking the real woman’s transfixing oddness. The thing to know about these big name characters and performances is that they’re decidedly supporting roles. Multiple episodes include either no Versace or a couple brief flashbacks, but if you’re FX you can’t push The Assassination of Gianni Versace by boasting that Aussie actor Codie Fern, solidly playing Cunanan victim David Madson, has more dialogue than Ramirez or that M*A*S*H veteran Mike Farrell, as Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin, is nearly as important as Cruz.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace is mostly Andrew Cunanan’s story and that’s unsettling, because the archetype of the duplicitous, code-switching gay killer has long been one of Hollywood’s most negative depictions — and Smith’s reverse chronological structure means that Cunanan is introduced as a murderer before the series gradually backtracks into matters of motivation, and we generally only get to know his victims as humans in the episodes after we saw them become corpses. It’s a challenge of dramatic irony, seeing if you can make viewers find a path to empathizing with a man previously depicted as a remorseless killer or to challenge us to feel grief for dispatched strangers and then tell us why their death was a loss. It mirrors coverage of the story, in which the celebrity casualty at the end of the spree turned Cunan’s other victims, and his own story, into footnotes beneath the Versace headline.
While the Simpson season had the advantage of story with all of the built-in beats of a twisty trial and character details wrought from countless first-hand accounts, Smith has both less plot and fewer resources to work with. The structure is a reasonably effective cover for the linear variety, inserting practical mysteries — How did he meet that person? Where did he get that car? — and turning characters into riddles to be solved. With only an outsider’s perspective on Cunanan, though, the arc he chooses is both plausible and very conventional. Expectations and sense-of-self warped by a disturbing childhood — Jon Jon Briones is dynamite as Cunan’s father in a late episode — Andrew bucks his limited upward mobility through reinvention and through the construction of an American Dream facade until the lies and manipulation become self-deception. Criss plays it to the hilt, leaving constant questions as to how much control Andrew even has, but his whole arc has the feel of familiar fiction and not granular fact. Especially in the middle hours, in which Andrew is still only part-analyzed and the Versace story is an afterthought, it feels like you’re watching a padded adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley and a thin reading of a real person.
Even when the portrait of Andrew isn’t enlightening or you aren’t sure you want this guy justified at all, The Assassination of Gianni Versace offers frequent pleasures. Production designer Judy Becker relishes the gold-leafed opulence of Versace’s world, but she’s just as enamored with the lurid stucco of a Miami flophouse or the cold sterility of a Minneapolis loft. And although Murphy isn’t on quite the same “Everybody’s a star” casting power trip as he was on OJ, he still gets great drop-in work from a career-redefining Farrell, the reliably superb Judith Light and, perhaps best of all, Max Greenfield, almost unrecognizably twitchy and emaciated as the Ratso Rizzo to Cunanan’s Joe Buck in the season’s second episode.
Although I had my doubts when I started, The Assassination of Gianni Versace shows why Murphy and company thought this was a story worth telling in this anthology. The tragic meeting of Gianni Versace, embodiment of the American Dream, and Andrew Cunanan, protean warper of the American Dream, holds up thematically if not always in the telling of the tale.
‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ (FX, Jan. 17 at 10 p.m.)
The one-sentence pitch: “Like it’s titled, it’s about the murder of Gianni Versace, but what the show is really about is what leads up to that murder,” says ACS executive producer Brad Simpson. “And most people who know about Versace know he was murdered by Andrew Cunanan, but they probably don’t know that he was the final victim in a killing spree.”
What to expect: “This season is a very different flavor. It’s a different mood, it’s a different type of crime, and a different type of storytelling,” Simpson says of the new season, which unfolds Cunanan’s crime in a nonlinear fashion, beginning with Versace’s murder and revealing Cunanan’s other victims in reverse chronological order. “We felt like it was important to not have the audience spend eight episodes waiting for that murder to happen, so we get right to the most famous murder. Then … we’ve all seen stories of the evolution of a killer, where you follow someone as they commit their first murder, climaxing with something bigger. We thought it was more interesting to do it in reverse, tell you the whole story in reverse, go victim by victim into the past and really try to understand not just who these other victims were but also why [Cunanan] ended up on this path.”
Glee-ful cast: Penelope Cruz as Donatella Versace, Edgar Ramirez as Gianni, Ricky Martin as Versace’s boyfriend Antonio, as well as memorable performances from Judith Light, Finn Wittrock, Dascha Polanco, Mike Farrell, Max Greenfield, and newcomer Cody Fern pepper the season, but it’s singer and Glee alum Darren Criss, as Cunanan, who is most mesmerizing as the undeniably charming, and disturbed, serial killer. “Versace and Andrew Cunanan were both born into circumstances in which they were gay men with ambition, with taste, and who people genuinely liked,” Simpson says. “Andrew was very well-liked until a certain age. … We wanted to explore what sets one off on the path to becoming this great creator, and what sets the other on the path to being this destroyer.” — KP
Every time a television show is done filming there are set pieces leftover that are still in good condition. Fox Studios has an entire team dedicated to making sure these pieces have the opportunity at a second home. American Crime Story: Versace wrapped this season and much of the show’s set decor was donated to Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles ReStores. This donation was made in December and over the holidays many friendly volunteers assisted with packing up these items at Fox Studio’s Warehouse.
Lisa Day, Director of Sustainability at Fox Studios, said, “After American Crime Story: Versace wrapped this season, our team had to find a new home for many of the gently used set pieces. Fox is dedicated to keeping as many reusable items out of the landfill as possible, so we decided to donate much of it to Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles ReStores. It’s reassuring to know these set pieces will be given a second life and support a great cause!”
Thank you to Lisa Day and Fox Studios for this incredible donation which will help us to build homes, community and hope.
Habitat for Humanity ReStores are nonprofit home improvement stores and donation centers that sell new and gently used furniture, appliances, home accessories, building materials and more to the public at a fraction of the retail price. For more information visit: habitatla.org/restore.
ACS news 