Tag: march 2018

‘American Crime Story: Versace’ Had A Surprising ‘American Horror Story’ Vet Behind The Camera

There have been a lot of visually and emotionally beautiful episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, but few are more important than “Creator / Destroyer.” For hours and weeks now, the Ryan Murphyshow has explored the lives Andrew Cunanan has ruined, but in its final two episodes, the series has shifted its focus to finally land on the killer himself. At the center of this heartfelt and disturbing examination of a serial killer is Matt Bomer in his directorial debut.

Though Bomer is likely best known for portraying Neal Caffrey on White Collar, the Magic Mike and Chuck actor actually has a fairly long history working with Murphy. In 2014 he starred in HBO‘s The Normal Heart, a TV movie that followed a writer and activist as he sought to expose the truth about the emerging AIDs crisis. Bomer starred as Felix Turner, the love interest of Mark Ruffalo‘s Ned Weeks. However, his journey through Murphy’s many projects was far from over. Later that year Bomer starred as the prostitute Andy in American Horror Story: Freak Show, and the next year he made an extremely memorable appearance in American Horror Story: Hotel when he was raped to death by a demon with a drillbit dildo. Based on those appearances, you may assume that the Bomer-directed episode of American Crime Story would be just as flashy as those past roles. You would be wrong.

“Creator / Destroyer” is packed with disappointment, a theme the show has played with but has never really embraced until this point. The hour starts on a young Gianni Versace (Wolf Fleetwood-Ross) as he follows his seamstress mother around. During a particularly emotional moment, Gianni’s mother tells him that though she was told she could never pursue her dreams, things would be different for him. If he wants to learn how to sew, she will teach him.

The episode then jumps decades ahead into the future where it follows two other parents set on giving their child the world — Mary Ann (Joanna Adler) and Modesto (Jon Jon Briones) Cunanan. From Modesto commanding a young Andrew (Edouard Holdener) to say goodbye to his home to the tears our murderous protagonist sheds over getting into his dream school, the episode is immediately established to inspire failure. It lives up to those down-facing expectations time and time again. It’s not just Andrew (Darren Criss) who fails to live up to the pedestal of his parents’ expectations. At the end of the episode, Modesto is just as much of a failure in his son’s eyes.

These themes are wonderfully highlighted through Bomer’s direction. When the camera focuses on Mary Ann or Modesto’s tenser scenes, it’s more active, echoing their anxieties about barely achieving the aspirations they have for themselves. However, when the camera is on Andrew, its steady, sweeping angles are even more anxiety-inducing. When Modesto first shows his son the master bedroom that is destined to belong to him, there’s a sense of pride that’s not unlike when Mufasa first showed Simba everything that the light touches. However, we already know how this story ends. Everyone is going to be deeply disappointed.

That is nothing to say of the episode’s excellent use of color. In an interview with Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, the executive producers told Decider that using pinks was very important to the creative direction of the show. The warm color palette  was supposed to represent homosexuality and opulence while echoing the colors of Miami. In contrast, “Creator / Destroyer” dwells almost exclusively in radioactive greens and harsh, office-lit yellows. It’s a decidedly mundane and borderline gross-looking episode in an otherwise breathtakingly gorgeous show. And that’s the point.

For seven episodes now, The Assassination of Gianni Versace has hinted at this idea that Gianni Versace and Andrew Cunanan were never really so different. However, it’s “Creator / Destroyer” that quite literally spells out that relationship. Both men came from fairly humble beginnings. Both seemed to have loving parents who wanted what was best for them. Both were gay men during a time when that was still culturally taboo, and yet one man inspired joy, made art, and built an empire while the other took the lives of five innocent men. To fully understand the horrors of the Andrew Cunanan case, we have to eventually try to understand Andrew Cunanan. In Versace‘s second to last episode, Bomer has captured the frustration, disappointment, and shock attached to this historical figure in a way that’s emotional while capturing Murphy’s signature camp at just the right moments.

‘American Crime Story: Versace’ Had A Surprising ‘American Horror Story’ Vet Behind The Camera

American Crime Story: Versace Season 1 Episode 8 Review: Creator/Destroyer

Editor Rating: ★★★★☆

So the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

On American Crime Story: Versace Season 1 Episode 8 we meet Andrew’s father for the first time. And Modesto Cunanan is every bit the domineering, scam artist that his son would become.

As we near the end of this series, we finally get to see a young Andrew Cunanan. A child born into an extremely dysfunctional family.

Within the first few minutes of the episode, it’s abundantly clear where Andrew’s sense of entitlement came from. Who gives their 10 year old child the master bedroom? Who gives that same child a car after they get into a stuffy private school?

Modesto has an unhealthy obsession with his youngest son. We don’t see enough of the older Cunanan children to see why they were unable to take the top spot in their father’s heart, but we do see that Andrew is every bit the smart and cunning person we know him to be as an adult.

Teacher: Andrew if you could have one wish, just one wish, what would it be?
Andrew: To be special.

From a young age, Modesto starts grooming Andrew to believe that he is more important than everyone around him. He’s more important than his siblings. More important than his peers. Heck, he wants him to feel like he’s more important than his own mother.

It’s strongly hinted at that Modesto may be abusing Andrew both mentally and physically, adding another layer to the case study that is Andrew Cunanan. There was no one in those early days to protect him.

Modesto was an abusive, abrasive jerk and he was of the belief that he was owed something from this world. He came to America and wanted to work, but on his own terms. And he instilled those beliefs into his offspring.

Just like all the many ‘what ifs’ we’ve asked ourselves along the way, one has to wonder had Andrew not grown up in that household, what man he could have become? Free from a father who was almost co-dependent, would Andrew have been the same person?

This is of course something we will never know, but it’s interesting to think about. Every single thing that happens in Andrew’s life, leads him to the moment he shows up at Gianni’s doorstep to kill him.

By the time Andrew gets to high school, he acts a lot more like the Andrew we’ve come to know. He’s arrogant, talkative and bold. He’s the man that walks into a party demanding that all eyes be on him.

I kept wondering throughout the hour at what point would Modesto leave. We already know that Andrew is left to take care of his mother by himself, but it’s never clear what happens to his father, as he tells a different tale to everyone he meets.

Turns out Modesto stuck around until Andrew was in high shool and then at the first sign of trouble he fled. Abruptly and selfishly, Modesto was gone.

Don’t believe a word they say.

– Modesto [to Andrew]

Of all the events in his life, the trip to Manila may have been the moment that defined the path Andrew was destined to take. It was there that Andrew realized he did not want to be like his father.

His father was nothing. A shell of the man he once knew who had power and money and influence. He looked at this man living in the oppressive heat, with very little money to his name and saw someone who was no longer special.

It’s a tough realization to come to and yet as Andrew vows to never become someone like him, we all know what’s going to happen. Andrew is going to become a better liar than Modesto ever was. A better con artist. A better manipulator.

He will be the monster his father never believed he could be.

Okay guys, with only one episode to go, I need to know what you’re hoping to see on the finale and what you thought about ‘Creator/Destroyer’. Although this was another entry that was heavy on Andrew, we did get a brief scene of a young Versace in Italy.

There was a major contrast between Gianni’s relationship with his mother and the relationship between Andrew and his parents. I was hoping we’d see more Gianni as we’re so close to the end, but we did not. My hope for the finale is more Gianni and the Versace’s in general.

American Crime Story: Versace Season 1 Episode 8 Review: Creator/Destroyer

American Crime Story wants to know what makes a person into a killer

“Creator/Destroyer” B-

After the inertness of last week’s mostly-meandering “Ascent,” this week’s “Creator/Destroyer” is comparatively more interesting and has a clearer focus. And though Assassination is still into shoehorning in parallels between various characters, it works better here (and confined to the cold open) than it did with Donatella. A young Versace, in 1957 Italy, shows an interest in fashion design but is deemed a “pervert” by a teacher and a “pansy” by a classmate. At home, however, he finds encouragement from his mother to pursue his dreams which eventually led to, as we know, him becoming a success. A young Andrew, in 1980 California, is given special treatment (and a master bedroom!) by his father, and he’s explicitly told to always remember he is special because “when you feel special, success will follow.”

These similarities between younger Andrew and Versace—knowing they stand out, having interests that outside the norm of “typical” boyhoods (and being made fun of for it), the parental emphasis on encouragement and success, etc.—are displayed so we can take note of how the two diverged into entirely different paths (and ask why; Assassination has a lot to say about parents!): of how one became a murderer and the other his unfortunate victim. So, yes, some of this is certainly retreading well-worn territory (the season’s biggest problem) but it generally works this time, as “Creator/Destroyer” almost functions as a origin story, pulling us into the depths of Andrew’s adolescence. It’s the episode that paints the most sympathetic portrait of Andrew, but the reverse timeline engineering of the series has—fortunately—ensured that we can’t commit to the sympathy.

What’s also pretty compelling about “Creator/Destroyer” is its depiction of an immigrant’s story—parts of which may feel a little familiar to other children of immigrants, as it did to me—through Andrew’s father, Modesto “Pete” Cunanan. Modesto has that specific patriotism of someone who was born elsewhere (Philippines) and came here with the explicit purpose to make money, make a better life, support his family without stress, and provide his children (or, really, just Andrew) with the sort of life he never had for himself growing up. He served in the Navy, dealing with paltry paychecks just so he could be in the United States. He’s obsessed with success and with looking the part—an obsession that that is partly born from needing to assimilate with the privileged white men he’s surrounded by. There’s a neat juxtaposition of him and Andrew, first side-by-side putting on their suits in a giant mirror and then interviewing: Modesto for a fancy job at Merrill Lynch, Andrew for a spot at the prestigious Bishop school. Both are men who are aiming for much higher than what they have, and both are men who are willing to take the easier, cheating route to get there—which is why it’s no surprise when we learn that Modesto is wanted for embezzlement.

The Assassination Of Gianni Versace hasn’t been shy about its assertion that Andrew wasn’t simply born a murderer—he wasn’t some childhood animal killer who just snapped one day, which is the narrative that is often told around serial/spree killers (though a few experts have said he likely suffered from an antisocial personality disorder)—but that he was sort of created, molded, and shaped into one due to a combination of his upbringing, his family, homophobia (both internalized and otherwise), class, lack of opportunities, desperation, and so on. “Creator/Destroyer” hones in on this view as it relates to his adolescence and family, largely through the lens of Modesto. Modesto pulls the old pretending-I-didn’t-get-the-job sitcom routine but becomes actually pissed off when his wife, Mary Anne, believes it—even basically threatening her with going back to the mental hospital.

Modesto sets up the family as adversaries: Modesto and Andrew vs. Mary Anne (and Andrew’s siblings, who rarely appear); the soon-to-be-successful dreamers vs. the stale realists; the “special” Cunanans vs. the ordinary ones. (And, as we’ve learned through Andrew, there’s not much worse than being ordinary.) Modesto not only uses Mary Anne’s mental illness (depression, and maybe specifically postpartum after Andrew was born) against her by bringing it up as a means to shut her up or scare her into complying, but he also uses it as a way to bring Andrew closer to his side, effectively widening the gap between Andrew and his mother. After Modesto buys a car for Andrew (before he can even drive, and ignoring his older siblings), he basically warns Andrew about his own mother, saying she has “weak mind,” and that Modesto is tasked with making sure Andrew doesn’t end up the same way. He speaks about Mary Anne’s time in the hospital as a time when Modesto was both Andrew’s mother and father, as if wanting to make sure Andrew knows which one to take sides with. Modesto is also, unsurprisingly, abusive to his wife on more than one occasion, and in front of Andrew, which puts Andrew’s later sudden abuse to his mother in a different context: It’s what he saw growing up.

Turns out, Modesto does desperately need someone on his side because it isn’t long after the FBI show up on his front door, forcing Modesto to flee all the way back to the Philippines, leaving his family with nothing—no money, no security, not even the house. “Don’t believe a word they say,” he tells Andrew who takes it to heart enough to also leave the country and track him down. The scene in Manila is the most tense as the two essentially confront each other. It turns out the two were stuck in a cycle that Andrew didn’t know about: Modesto lied and cheated to get money for the family, Andrew bragged about Modesto’s success and needed the money to keep up appearances, Modesto fulfilled Andrew’s demand for money and appearances by lying and cheating, and Andrew would brag and, well, you get it. Andrew’s concerns seem to mostly be about how he’s going to keep on being Andrew—“If you’re a lie, then I’m a lie, and I can’t be a lie. I can’t”—which Modesto quickly seizes, retorting “You’re not upset that I stole. You’re upset because I stopped.”

The conversation quickly grows more contentious, with Modesto calling Andrew a “sissy kid with a sissy mind,” literally spitting on him, and smacking his son. It’s this violence—and Modesto explicitly saying “I’m ashamed of you”—that seems to flick a switch in Andrew, who grabs a knife (almost instinctively) but ends up only cutting into his own palm. It’s interesting to note the difference in how Andrew deals with these insults throughout the episode, depending on where they’re coming from: when a classmate calls him a “fag,” Andrew runs with it (“If being a fag means being different, then sign me up!”) and turns it into an opportunity to demand attention; when his father calls him a “sissy,” Andrew turns cold, quiet, and eyes violence.

The end of “Creator/Destroyer,” which is tasked with setting us up for the final episode, finds Andrew with his tail between his legs and applying for a job at the pharmacy. When he’s asked about his father by a fellow Filipino, Andrew lies to make Modesto seem better than he is—and we know that he hasn’t stopped lying since—which is a little neat. But “Creator/Destroyer” also leaves us in a weird spot: Where does the show go for the season finale? I’m assuming/hoping it’ll jump forward again, bringing us to Andrew’s end, but it seems like one hell of a leap.

Stray observations

  • Hey, it’s Magic Mike’s Matt Bomer’s directorial debut! Pretty solid job, if nothing too special, but he’ll likely expand his on-screen relationship with Ryan Murphy’s shows to behind-the-scenes as well.
  • Variety has an interview with Bomer about the experience that’s a neat read. I didn’t check it out until way after I finished writing this but this point has stuck with me since: “I wanted that to give you the sense that if Andrew could’ve just killed his dad, he wouldn’t have killed anybody else. That was a big part of the dynamic I was trying to create in the story.”
  • Also in this episode: Andrew meeting Lizzie for the first time, learning the name DiSilvia which he’ll later adopt for his own, and that admittedly-fantastic red jumpsuit.
  • That was a pretty drastic jump from
  • Some key songs: “Hazy Shade Of Winter” by The Bangles, “Touch Me (I Want Your Body” by Samantha Fox, and, of course, “Whip It” by Devo.

American Crime Story wants to know what makes a person into a killer

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 8 Recap: A Father’s Faults

All season long, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story has filled in blanks. Why did Andrew Cunanan (played by Darren Criss) become a spree killer? Why did he kill Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez)? Why did he kill David Madson (Cody Fern)? Creator Ryan Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith have used a blend of what we know and some fiction to weave a compelling narrative — one that gave us a much more challenging series than we first expected.

But The Assassination of Gianni Versace hasn’t contented itself with examining Cunanan as a killer; it’s also fascinated by Andrew the gay man, and all that led to how he became himself. Wednesday’s penultimate episode of the season took that train of thought to its organic conclusion, introducing us to Andrew’s father, Modesto Cunanan (Jon Jon Briones).

Modesto, like his son, is an impressively persuasive fabulist. He talks his way into a high-powered job on a lack of experience and a lot of charm. He moves his family into a neighborhood and home beyond their means, convinced he can build them the American Dream he (an immigrant from the Philippines) so desperately craves.

For a while, it works, just like we’ve seen Andrew’s plans briefly succeed. But soon enough, Modesto is committing major fraud crimes just to keep his American Dream afloat. When it all comes crashing down on him, instead of owning his errors, he flees, leaving his wife and children to deal with the consequences of his actions.

Briones is nothing short of fantastic as Modesto, winning the audience over just as much as he does the people he meets in the show. He’s so damn determined and positive, you can’t help but put faith in his mission. It helps that he’s crazy about Andrew, supporting him and making him feel loved.

Then you see Modesto verbally abuse his wife, and ignore his other kids to fully pin his hopes on Andrew. You see him take the cowardly way out after he’s discovered. And you see him later in life, when Andrew goes to meet him in the Philippines as a teenager, expressing no remorse but plenty of anger. It’s in that moment that you can feel the Andrew Cunanan we know now being formed. His father, perhaps the only man who truly expressed love for Andrew, can’t take responsibility for his crimes, and instead rages out at his son for daring to question him.

Maybe there was no saving Andrew Cunanan, no decision in his life that could have stopped what was coming. Maybe this is all a fable American Crime Story is telling us to feel like our lives are more in our control than they actually are. But in that moment, it feels like Modesto could have stopped what came after by teaching his son a lesson: that pathological lying and deceiving people have consequences. But he didn’t.

There’s a terror in the relatability of Andrew Cunanan’s story. A complicated relationship with his father. A need to feel validated by the world. A thirst for the fabulous things in life. An insecurity with the things we actually have. A desperation to be loved for how we look to the world because we’re too ashamed of who we are. Murphy and Smith’s greatest trick with this season was making a spree killer’s story strike so close to home for gay men.

I’ve not seen the finale of this miniseries — it was the only episode not furnished for critics ahead of the season premiere — but I find myself both eager and nervous to find out how this story ends. Not because I don’t know what happens; the hunt for Cunanan will end, as will Cunanan’s life. There’s no surprise in the straightforward narrative of it, which is perhaps why Murphy and Smith presented Cunanan’s life in reverse, to give viewers the feeling of unwrapping a package versus taking a road trip to an obvious destination.

Despite that lack of suspense, I want to know how this story, in this particular presentation, comes to a close. I want to see the full realization of The Assassination of Gianni Versace’s thesis. I want to feel some measure of closure with Cunanan, to walk away from this miniseries enlightened not just about his motives, but about how he became the man he was.

Judging from everything we’ve seen thus far, the finale should be a devastating experience. But hopefully, it will also be an enlightening one.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 8 Recap: A Father’s Faults

On ‘American Crime Story’ Andrew’s Filipino Father Gets the American Dream By Any Means Necessary

What makes the Assassination of Gianni Versace a distinctly American story? That’s been the question at the heart of this season’s deep dive into not just the designer’s death at the steps of his South Beach home, but at the life of his killer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). Moving ever backwards in time to fill up his entire biography, this week’s episode gives us an origin story of sorts for who Cunanan is and how his ideas about desire, power, and the American Dream were shaped by the man who raised him. Moreover, by beginning this episode with brief moments of Gianni’s own childhood in Italy, where he first learned his trade at his mother’s hands, the show yet again stresses what Cunanan claims to believe: that there’s little difference between he and Versace. But where the Italian designer’s empire is truly an example of the American Dream, with his humble origins eventually leading him to become a world-renowned designer with an ostentatious estate in Miami, the young Filipino-American’s life reflects instead the underbelly of such American ideals.

“Ask yourself,” Modesto Cunanan, Andrew’s father, tells those interviewing him at Merrill-Lynch, “How many of those Ivy League guys lining up to work here started from nothing?” His pitch to his would-be employers is focused on his own vision of what the United States had offered him. “My life is a tale told in dollars” that brought him from a small home in the Philippines to a suburban house here in America, “the greatest country in the world!” An ambitious man who values those dollars and wants his youngest son (though curiously, not his other children) to have the best of the best, Modesto turns out to be more of a Wolf of Wall Street-type guy – it seems Andrew’s penchant for lying and for valuing status (if not hard work) very much runs in the family.

Complicating all this is the picture-perfect immigrant tale that Modesto always boasted about and which Andrew (as he does towards the end of the episode) weaponizes to his advantage whenever needed. To come into this country as a foreigner often requires the need to overemphasize one’s own Americanness. For Modesto, that didn’t just mean buying a big house and a great car but changing his name (he went by “Pete”) in order to take the focus away from what made him different in the eyes of those who had power, those who had money, those who had privilege. Having moved in to their new house, for example, he goes ahead and plants an American flag in their front yard.

That such thirst for fitting in and making a fortune would also be laced with a dose of toxic masculinity (“You were always weak,” he tells Andrew, outright calling him a sissy boy) as well as perverted sexual proclivities (it’s clear why Modesto gives Andrew the master bedroom and enjoys reading him bedtime stories there) just shows how much went into shaping this shape-shifting serial killer.

“I stole so I could be a father, so I could be an American,” he tells his son in an intense conversation late in the episode when all his lies have been found out and the Cunanans have been left with nothing. “You can’t go to America and start with nothing; that’s the lie. So I stole.” What’s more tragic, both for Andrew and for those who would become his later victims, is that despite raging that he wants to be nothing like his father, that he can’t stand to live in a world of lies, the once disaffected young man makes his way in the world precisely by craving that which his father always told him was rightfully his and trying to achieve it with the very kind of lies that had turned the older Cunanan into a fraud. It’s the kind of tale that, as Ryan Murphy’s title suggests, could only happen in America.

On ‘American Crime Story’ Andrew’s Filipino Father Gets the American Dream By Any Means Necessary

“ACS: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace” Episode 8 Recap: “Creator/Destroyer”

The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is up to its old tricks. Last week, I fell right into the trap of thinking the killer’s mother, Mary Ann Cunanan (Joanna Adler) was a completely awful wretch, and now this week I feel terrible for her and the cards life dealt her. Stop making me sympathize with creeps, FX! I don’t want to feel!

If you told me Modesto had a coke addiction, I would 1000% believe it because every word that leaves his mouth has the distinct bravado and aggression of someone who’s high. I feared him as soon as he appeared, and even before he grabs his wife by the neck, you can sense he’s been abusive by how skittish and careful she is around him. Modesto also brings up Mary Ann’s mental health four times when she’s being perfectly normal, which is textbook gaslighting or manipulating somebody into questioning their own sanity. It’s popular amongst predators like Modesto.

Something rubbed me the wrong way in the last episode when Cunanan says, “older men have always liked me,” while breaking eye contact a little sadly. And unfortunately, I think it could be in reference to his father abusing him. There are a million little things that are wrong throughout the first scene with the Cunanan family. Why do they call Andrew a prince; why does he still have a teddy bear; why would he get to ride shotgun; and then later, why would his dad kiss his feet? It’s interesting how long I held out hope that Andrew’s father was not sexually abusive, which I think is both a testament to denial and how dark this subject matter truly is.

This was almost like a teaching tool for priming or grooming for abuse, except for the fact that Modesto probably didn’t need to win his son’s trust because he was already his son. Plus, the gifts he gave Andrew were so over the top and flamboyant. Seeing his dad buy him a car years before he could drive makes the things Andrew does later, like buying lobster and insane hotel suites, make a sick kind of sense. I know Cunanan must have been terrified for most of his childhood because the threat of violence seemed omnipresent, but I did also feel like something hardened in him when he rolled up the window on his mom by his own choice.

She’s a good friend and person, and it’s interesting to know that her first impression of the youngest Cunanan was him at his most vulnerable and in need of a friend. Her character gets more filled in, but it felt so rushed! She’s a married, “real grown up” and is yet another case of Cunanan meeting someone when they were feeling a little bored or down (and then probably leveraging it later.)

Cunanan’s father is such a pure, selfish evil. We know he sold nonexistent stocks to a 92-year-old woman, and the fact that he had that much cash ready and a go bag makes me think his crimes must have been serious and plentiful. I was shocked his dad was actually there when he went to find him, but I was not surprised there was no money. I think he stole to get by, and I actually was impressed with how much sympathy I could muster for him after he said, “You can’t go to America and start from nothing, that’s the lie.”

I was still shook that his dad spit in his face, and I lost all sympathy for the washed up criminal when he started calling his son a sissy. Modesto says crying is weak, and that his son is being just like his mom, which solidifies any doubt I had that the mom wasn’t probably actually mentally ill aside from experiencing postpartum depression. This episode ends up feeling kind of confusing because Andrew says he won’t become his father, but we kind of know he does. A moment stuck with me in this episode when Andrew puts his hands over his mom’s mouth with a little too much natural, controlled rage. It seems like the first reason the two of them have had to fight, but it feels like he’d just seen force used so casually in that house so many times that he didn’t think twice.

“ACS: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace” Episode 8 Recap: “Creator/Destroyer”


https://acsversace-news.tumblr.com/post/171887134299/audio_player_iframe/acsversace-news/tumblr_p5m6tgmq1y1wcyxsb?audio_file=https%3A%2F%2Fia601500.us.archive.org%2F26%2Fitems%2Fasdfaw3rqa%2F_Creator_Destroyer_%2520with%2520Matt%2520Bomer.mp3

“Creator/Destroyer” with Matt Bomer

Joanna Robinson and Richard Lawson discuss “Creator/Destroyer,” the penultimate episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, including additional bonus segments with lead actor Darren Criss. This week’s featured interview is director and frequent Ryan Murphy collaborator Matt Bomer who discusses stepping behind the camera for his directorial debut.

ACS: Versace’s Darren Criss on Playing a Serial Killer and Passing As White

dcriss-archive:

“Yo, man, Darren,” Darren Criss says by way of introduction at the Television Critics Association tour in Pasadena, where he was doing press for his show, American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, back in January. Despite the title, Criss is the real lead of the FX crime anthology as Andrew Cunanan, the serial killer who murdered at least five people, ending with the famed Italian designer in 1997. It’s a drastic role reversal for Criss, who was best known as the shiny, bright-eyed crooner of the Warblers in Ryan Murphy’s high-school-musical show Glee, and it’s a challenge he relishes. We spoke about how playing Cunanan challenges the limits of empathy, creating false guises, and whether he identifies as Asian-American.

Andrew Cunanan must be a fascinating character to play because he was a changeling. He always wanted to create different personas, different backstories. Is that something that resonated with you as an actor?

Well, first of all, we all do it to different extremes. He’s at the extremist end of that spectrum, but we all curate our lives within the realms of acceptable protocol. You’re a different person to your parents than you are to your lover, to your teachers, to your authorities, to your colleagues. His was much more heightened and followed more sociopathic tendencies because he could. It was possible. You couldn’t get away with that now. Social media and everything, Andrew Silva in one place, Andrew Cunanan in another. You’d be called out relatively quickly. Another thing I think is important to remember, and this is coming as a cis straight guy talking about this, but what’s so interesting about his multiple identities is that it was sort of inadvertently encouraged by the gay community which has traditionally dealt with multiple identities.

Or secret lives.

Secret identities, secret lives. But that’s part of the journey of a young gay man or a gay woman, and how you can reidentify yourself through your life. That’s a big part of how to relate to each other and how to support each other. And so, when you have that also being a part of his world, where suddenly, he can be this person or that person, and another person and another person, and they understand why and they say, “Oh, you know, that’s Andrew.” He would play up his sexuality when convenient or downplay it when it was dangerous, which was something a lot of people around him could relate to., and wouldn’t call him out on because this is something they’re also dealing with. We’re getting to a different point here. You were talking about relating to this as an actor.

As an actor, I compartmentalize things. I can put this person in this box, and that one, and it doesn’t affect my life. And in a way that’s sort of sociopathic behavior. People go, “Does it come home with you?” And I go, “No, of course not.” If it did, I wouldn’t be an actor. I can check out. It’s not part of me. It’s somewhere else. And then you go, “Geez, what else does Darren do this for?” But it’s true. And that’s something Andrew could do.

What else does Darren do that for?

I don’t know! Probably suppressing other things I don’t want to think or talk about. Who knows, it’s something we all do. But I’m in the business of empathy. That is my job. I’m in the business of finding as many common denominators with myself to another person, which is probably the biggest difference between me and Andrew. Whereas I try and be like other people and see the best in people, Andrew was other people, because he hated himself and didn’t want to be who he was. So, even though we were putting on the same masks, we had very different reasons for doing it.

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