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Wherever he goes right now, Darren Criss is stopped on the street by people who want to talk about the man he’s playing on TV. Some encountered the real-life version and have stories to share. Others want to chat about friends who met him; one says he was even mistaken for him. All of this would be quite charming if the character in question wasn’t a serial killer.

In 1997, a young man called Andrew Cunanan shot and killed the Italian designer Gianni Versace on the steps of his Miami mansion. A week later, he turned the gun on himself. It was the end of a five-person killing spree that terrified America, and is now – 20 years after the fact – the basis for the second instalment of Ryan Murphy’s Emmy-winning American Crime Story. 

Although The Assassination Of Gianni Versace features a fictional Versace (Edgar Ramírez) and Donatella (Penélope Cruz), the drama really zeroes in on former Gleestar Darren Criss as Cunanan, working backwards through the weeks leading up to the murder and peeling away the layers of his shape-shifting personality.

At various points (according to the hundreds of people who met him), Cunanan was an obsessive boyfriend, a pathological liar, a party animal, a wannabe celebrity and an unfeeling killer – a slippery mix that Criss masters with considerable skill.

‘The story is less about exposing what happened so much as trying to explain how emotionally one person can get from point A to point B,’ says Criss, who personally doesn’t buy the idea of Cunanan as a born monster.

FULL ARTICLE | MARIECLAIRE

‘We’re not trying to commodify pain’ The Assassination Of Gianni Versace star Darren Criss on his dark new role