Tag: max greenfield

Max Greenfield on his haunting ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ role and the end of ‘New Girl’

One of the great surprises of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is the completely transformative performance by New Girl’s Max Greenfield. The actor plays Ronnie, a junkie who befriends Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) and is unaware that his new acquaintance is a wanted serial killer.

In only a handful of scenes, Greenfield creates a full-bodied tragic character — even Ronnie’s walk feels specific and thoughtful. The actor previously worked with executive producer Ryan Murphy on American Horror Story: Hotel, which also found the actor exploring a much darker side than New Girl fans were used to seeing.

EW talked to Greenfield about reuniting with Murphy, crafting his Versacecharacter, and, naturally, Darren Criss’ pink Speedo.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Was this just the case of Ryan Murphy calling you up and asking you to do this role? How did this come about?
MAX GREENFIELD: Ryan and I keep in touch. He knew that I had finished New Girl, and he knew I was off. We ran into each other and he was like, “What are you doing?” and I was like, “I don’t know, man.” I think I had wrapped that week. He goes, “I wanna show you a couple of things.” And this happened to be one of the things he showed me. He sent me the first two scripts. I went off and looked at it, and I thought it was incredible. I didn’t know that I could do it. I’m certainly not the person that you think of when you would read this on paper. Like, “Oh, that’s a no-brainer!”

So I put myself on tape for it. I wanted to see if I could do it, and I got to a place where I felt like, “Oh, now I sorta love this guy!” I sent Ryan the tape and I said, “I don’t know if this is any good, but this is what it would look like.” Two and a half weeks later, I was in Miami.

Did you lose weight? You look much skinnier, or maybe that was just your psychical performance.
It was probably a little bit of both. The previous summer I had done The Glass Castle, which was a great experience. But I was supposed to have an arm-wrestling match with Woody Harrelson in the movie. The one note from the director was, “Hey, man, this is a big scene in the movie. I know you’re like a fit guy. Can you not work out as much?” I was like, “I will not touch another weight.” And I didn’t for like a long time, and I ended up losing a lot of size. On New Girl, I’m always like in cardigans, and I just don’t think it really played. But in this, mixed with the fact that I’m like, “Oh, in two weeks I’m going to be in Miami? I don’t have to eat I guess.” But I also think it was the physicality and the buzz cut and the whole thing.

What was it about Ronnie that you responded to?
What I really loved about him and what I found so heartbreaking about him … I knew he was based on a real guy, but I knew physically we didn’t resemble one another. What I found so heartbreaking about him, and as I started to research the period of the time, but I knew a little bit about — it’s funny when you research something as an actor, you might know about that period of time. But when you’re then asked to come at it from a place of, I’m going to have to play this person, really understanding what 1997 and that the period around that meant for somebody in the LGBT community who has HIV, and the idea that a year and a half earlier they had figured out the correct medication to give patients who had accepted over the past 15-plus years that they were going to die! They watched everybody else around them die — how on earth would it be any different? You hear people who are still living with HIV who lived through that time to this day talk about the fact that they still have difficulty wrapping their head around that tomorrow isn’t going to be my last day? Or this isn’t going to turn on me?

But what I also loved about Ronnie and what he represented is you can see through Ryan’s other work and Larry Kramer’s work, these people from the ACT UP movement who were like taking it head on. But you never saw the people who gave into it and didn’t fight and just thought, “This is my fate and this is what I deserve.” And I think Ronnie was one of those people, and it broke my heart. I thought, “I love this guy.”

Did you find any comparisons between Ronnie and Gabriel, the character you played on AHS: Hotel?
I think in the sense maybe that these are two guys who were lost. Totally lost.

How as it working with Darren?
It was really great. It was intense. As heartbreaking as Ronnie was, part of that heartbreak was his relationship with Andrew and the fact that he was enamored by this guy, and also sort of thinking he had made a friend. He was so alone and thought this was a guy who came to Miami for the same reasons he had. Watching him sort of try to keep up with Andrew and carry on a normal conversation with him like friends might do and listen to this guy who was so all over the place. The humor of that is not lost on me. I mean, there is an element of like, man, this is an odd couple!

What was it like when Darren emerged from the bathroom with duct tape on his face?
The nice thing of a scene like that is they’re not very hard to play! If you’re in character and the scene is “Be freaked out by the guy who walks out of the bathroom with his head wrapped in duct tape,” I’d love to say I’m an incredible actor, but at that point it’s not that hard.

You also have to spend a fair amount of time staring at Darren in a pink Speedo; was that an odd day at work?
That is so par for the course on a Ryan show. Honestly, it couldn’t be less weird.

I guess you did previously yank Naomi Campbell through a bed on Hotel.
[The beach scene] was honestly one of the more casual days I’ve ever had on a Ryan set [laughs].

Why do you and Ryan work so well together?
Um, it’s not me. There’s a couple factors: I really love Ryan. I love what he does. He has set the bar so high for performances on his projects that if you don’t come prepared and ready to go, I don’t know why you’re there. That to me is all I wanna do.

Then, there’s the fun idea, which is like to surprise or excite Ryan, which is really hard to do.

The third thing, and this really is why it works out so well, is because the people that work for Ryan, his department heads, these people are so astronomically good at their job. If you utilize them as an actor under the umbrella of what Ryan has given us all for who this character is, the next thing you know you have the right clothes on, you have the earring, your hands are dirty, your head is shaved, you have the right mustache. Everything is just right, and you then don’t have to work that hard. To me I think the reason why I’ve been really happy and satisfied and why I think they’ve been successful collaborations is because of the people he surrounds himself with. They’re so good.

Now that New Girl is ending, would you want to be on a Ryan Murphy series?
Look, Ryan is one of those people if I saw his number pop up on my phone, I’d say, “I’ll be at Fox in five minutes.”

What can you say about the finale of New Girl?
What I love about the season and the way we wrap it up is I equate it to like a rock musician who plays a rock concert and goes, “You know what, you guys? Tonight I’m playing the hits! We’re just gonna play all the songs you love.” I love that they did that. I love what Liz [Meriwether] and the rest of the writers did. I think it’s a real love letter to the fans. It’s all of the greatest hits from seven seasons.

Max Greenfield on his haunting ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ role and the end of ‘New Girl’

Inside Max Greenfield’s Dramatic American Crime Story Turn

Max Greenfield made his The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story debut in a blink and you’ll miss it scene in the premiere, but come episode two, airing Wednesday, Jan. 24 on FX, viewers will learn a lot more about Greenfield’s character Ronnie.

Ronnie, a real person featured in Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors, the show’s source material, is an HIV-positive man Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) meets in Miami after he has already killed four people. Ronnie’s a very different character than viewers are used to seeing the Emmy-nominated New Girl star in, from type of person right down to looks.

Greenfield said he’s on board with the dramatic transformations.

“I quite love it. What’s wonderful about working with [Ryan Murphy] is all of his department heads are incredible. You have wardrobe, hair and makeup and it sort of seems like we all work together under Ryan’s direction and by the time we end up on set, the acting part is the only thing left to do, and so much easier because we’ve created this external character in such a specific way. You’re like, ‘Oh, I know this guy,’” Greenfield said with a laugh. “It feels very collaborative that way, and to me it’s my favorite way to work.”

What kind of research did you do to get into character for Ronnie?
One of the wonderful things about Ryan is he’ll talk to you about a character and he speaks about characters in such depth, that when you go to do your own sort of work on it you have so much important information to go on, and you know sort of exactly where you then want to go. I think for Ronnie, my focus was the time period, which was 1997. It was a year or two years out from when they had figured out what the correct medication was for patients with HIV, and it left this group of people who were now living with HIV, where they had once thought—and accepted—that they were going to die. And having that feeling be so fresh for so many of these people who are now living with this disease—trying to listen to the people who experienced that was really what I tried to focus on.

Had you read Maureen Orth’s book or did you after you got the part?
I read it later.

I assume that could cloud any kind of character stuff you were doing.
Yeah, I mean I knew I was playing a real person. I knew that physically we don’t really resemble one another, I just thought that what I had read on the page in terms of the scripts, was so—what I felt like was meaningful, was all really there. And I wanted Ronnie’s story to really add to the overall themes of the show, rather than try to focus on playing a real person.

Did this role require you to go to dark places? You were saying this was a time before there was this treatment. Did playing Ronnie affect you in anyway?
I mean, it certainly was a learning experience. [Pauses.] Yeah, there was such a sadness to this guy. You listen to people who still to this day are living with HIV, who had it at the time, and 20 years later some of them still talk about this idea that it’s still hard for them when they wake up to think that they’re not dying, that they might have another day. They lost so, so many people, and why are they still here? You know what I mean? It was a gut-wrenching, overwhelming time.

Had you followed Andrew’s case in real life when it was happening? Do you remember the story?
No, I was 17 when it happened. I was a senior in high school, I didn’t live in Miami. I remember hearing about it, and had no clue that there were multiple murders, that there was a whole backstory to it, but yeah, I didn’t know anything more than the headlines.

What do you make about the Versace family going back and forth with FX and Random House about the authenticity of the show?
I have not followed it. You know, look, it’s a really sensitive subject. It’s an odd thing. I found that doing press for this show has been very different from most of the press I’ve ever done for anything because there are real victims of this story, and the way that Ryan has chosen to show it—there aren’t a lot of fun elements to this. This is a very harsh look for many different perspectives on homophobia and issues that make a lot of people really uncomfortable. I think the hope is that you can watch it, it’s in your face, it is, I think, extraordinarily thought-provoking and I think—I hope—that it brings up a discussion that makes some these issues less uncomfortable for people and opens up a dialogue. But it is hard to talk about it…You get asked, like, ‘Did you wish that you had any scenes with Penélope Cruz?’ And you’re like, ‘No!’ I’m doing my job,’ and I was just, like, trying to honor this story and honor the way Ryan wanted to tell it.

Inside Max Greenfield’s Dramatic American Crime Story Turn

Max Greenfield Talks Shocking Versace Transformation, Shares the Real Perk of Working With Ryan Murphy

Although last week’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story premiere offered only a fleeting glimpse of Max Greenfield‘s recurring junkie Ronnie, we saw enough of him to know that the New Girl vet went all in for his role as Andrew Cunanan’s (Darren Criss) wiry, HIV-positive Miami pal. The Emmy-nominated actor’s airtime increases tenfold in tonight’s second episode (10/9c, FX), which finds Cunanan bonding with Ronnie on the eve of Versace’s murder.

Below, Greenfield discusses how he prepared for the physically transformative role, reveals the real perk of being a member of the Ryan Murphy Repertory Company, and explains why the end of New Girl hit him like a ton of bricks.

TVLINE | How much weight did you lose?
Of course that’s your first question. [Laughs] Honestly, I wasn’t actively trying to lose weight.

TVLINE | Oh, come on…
I really wasn’t! I happened to be pretty lean already when Ryan offered the role to me. Also, I didn’t have a tremendous amount of time to physically prep. But I wasn’t like, “You know what I’m going to do to prepare for this one? Eat a lot of pizza!”

TVLINE | So what did you do. Because you did something. You’re emaciated. I saw bones protruding through your skin.
I suppose I tried to [lose] a little bit [of weight]. But it wasn’t a focus of mine. I knew he’d have a mustache. I had a beard at the time, so I created this sort of cockeyed mustache, because everything about this guy is a little bit sad. Even his mustache is a little bit sad. The real focus for me was [emotional]. It was more about the period of time that this represented. It was 1997, a year-and-a-half out from when they figured out the correct medication for patients with HIV. Ronnie was one of these people who had accepted his own death [from AIDS]. And then all of a sudden they found this medication… It was such a fresh time for those people. To know that you were going to die at any moment, and then to suddenly have to wrap your head around the idea that that’s now not going to happen. I can only imagine what an overwhelmingly confusing feeling that must’ve been for so many people.

TVLINE | Is the real Ronnie still alive?
I don’t know. I know he’s a real person. But what was on the page was so important to me that I really wanted to do my best to honor Ryan’s vision in the story as opposed to trying to play a real person.

TVLINE | What do you think Ronnie makes of Andrew?
Andrew shows him friendship and is nice to him. And I don’t think anyone has done that to Ronnie in a very long time. And he’s willing to look past a lot of warning signs before he finally realizes, “I think there’s something really off here.”

TVLINE | This is the second time Ryan Murphy has cast you as a drug addict. What do you make of that?
[Laughs] That is the beauty of Ryan, and why I love him so much. He can look at an actor and see them in ways they can’t even see themselves. And he pushes them to really go there. I can’t think of more rewarding experiences that I’ve had than working with him both times. If you’re not coming [to one of his productions] with all that you have, I don’t know why you bother showing up at all. Having worked with Sarah Paulson on American Horror Story: Hotel and seeing the lengths she goes to when shooting a scene, you go, “Oh, so that’s what this is going to be like.” [Laughs]

TVLINE | I’m guessing things like craft services are next-level on his shows. Is it hard to then to move on to another production and be greeted by, say, a bowl of Cheerios and a week-old box of Entenmann’s?
[Laughs] Can you imagine an all-Entenmann’s craft service? That’s what heaven looks like. When you get to heaven, God points you to the all-Entenmann’s craft service and says, “You can eat all you want and you don’t gain any weight.” The real perk of working for Ryan is this: His crew — from hair to makeup to wardrobe to the camera department, props, sound, across the board — is so good. One of the reasons the performances on his shows are so [strong] is because these people make us look very, very talented.

TVLINE | You wrapped New Girl a few weeks ago. Were you more or less emotional during the final days of shooting than you anticipated?
I was way more emotional. I underestimated the impact of leaving that show and the character. There was a real mourning period afterwards.

TVLINE | Were you satisfied by the ending?
Yes. I think what the writers did was a lot of fun. It was like a musician at a concert going, “You know what? Tonight we’re just going to play the hits.” That’s what these last eight episodes felt like.

TVLINE | What do you see as your next career act?
I wish I knew. [Laughs] I want to find a really good piece of material and hope that the people who’ve written it want me to be in it. And if Ryan, [comes calling] I’ll do whatever he wants me to do.

Max Greenfield Talks Shocking Versace Transformation, Shares the Real Perk of Working With Ryan Murphy

Holy Schmidt! Max Greenfield Is Nearly Unrecognizable In ‘The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’

Never underestimate the power of a mustache. While they’re often used as a joke when it comes to disguises, some of them truly do get the job done. Especially the one Max Greenfield grew for his role as Ronnie in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.

In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him moment, he appeared for a few brief seconds in the first episode of the series when the police busted into his hotel room on a search for Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). But the second episode gives us so much more of Ronnie, and if you don’t recognize him at first, you aren’t alone. You’d think that after six whole seasons of New Girl, we would all be able to spot the man we now affectionately know as Schmidt, but with his hair trimmed up top and grown in over his upper lip, this is a whole new man we’re dealing with.

Greenfield sinks into the character, in his walk and his posture, and his cutoff jean shorts and half-unbuttoned shirt (what would Schmidt think?!), as he puffs on cigarettes and reluctantly strikes up a friendship with Cunanan. It took me two whole scenes of dialogue before I realized who I was watching. He keeps Ronnie casual, ambivalent, and a little chatty at times but nice enough, throughout an episode that not only sets the scene of Miami in the ’90s, but establishes the structure of the storytelling and episodes to come.

Not that this is the first time Greenfield has stepped away from the clean-cut, nice guy roles we so often see him in to work with Ryan Murphy: he also made our eyes widen in 2015’s American Horror Story: Hotel, with a bit of an appearance transformation there as well. And while the hair and the mustache and the clothes all add to the compelling character he brings to the screen for Versace, not everyone is a big fan. As he explained to Ellen earlier this month, his daughter was “just furious” about the mustache. With New Girl‘s seventh and final season airing this spring, it will be interesting to see if Greenfield reteams with Murphy for future projects, and if so, his daughter, and audiences, should plan to brace themselves.

Holy Schmidt! Max Greenfield Is Nearly Unrecognizable In ‘The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’

A Closer Look at Two Key Relationships That Influence FX’s ‘Versace’

Wednesday’s second episode of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, “Manhunt,” tells the story of the hunt for Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). But it also shines a light on the loving relationship between the fashion designer (Edgar Ramirez) and his sister, Donatella Versace (Penelope Cruz), the one between Versace and his partner, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) and the final friendship Cunanan formed before Versace’s murder, with an HIV-positive Miami junkie named Ronnie (Max Greenfield of New Girl fame).

While many of the people Cunanan was close with in the final months of his life wound up victims of his killing spree, Ronnie had a different relationship with the serial killer.

“Andrew is a friend to him — or at least he really wants him to be,” Greenfield tells The Hollywood Reporter of his character. “It starts to dawn on him that something is off, and he really doesn’t want to believe it because he values the friendship more than what he feels like this might end up being.”

Although the Versace family has continued to deny that Versace was diagnosed with HIV before his death, the Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology (and Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors, on which it is based) posits that he was — and contrasts Versace’s illness with Ronnie’s positive status. Greenfield said that meeting Ronnie, who had also recovered from his sickest days, helps bring context to the new lease on life many HIV-positive people faced at the time.

“Two years before, they had just come up with the medication that treated HIV, and you had these people who had accepted their own fate and had all of a sudden been given this new lease on life,” Greenfield said. “I’m sure a lot of them were lost, and had lost so many people, and didn’t understand why they, all of a sudden, were spared.”

The series jumps back and forth in time to depict Versace in the throes of his alleged illness, which caused him to lean heavily on his sister and on D’Amico. Ramirez told THR that though he and Cruz are Latinx and the Versaces are Italian, their cultures have two very important factors in common: their deep Catholic roots, and the fact that they’re comfortable with expressing emotion.

“That was something that was key to Gianni’s relationships in general, especially within his family, and that’s something that, based on all the accounts that I had access to — people who were close to him would tell me — he was very respectful; he was a generous guy; but passionate, and in touch with his emotions. So was Donatella, and so was the relationship. Penelope and I, we connected to that. We understood that well. Gianni used to say that the beautiful thing about working with family is that you would fight in the morning and then you would have dinner at night as if nothing had happened.”

As for Versace’s relationship with D’Amico, “they were very much in love … and we really wanted to pay tribute to what we think was a beautiful love story,” Ramirez said. “They were very close and they were real partners, not only in love but also in business and in creativity and in the enjoyment of life, and that was very important to them.”

But the relationship between Donatella and D’Amico was not nearly as close — their battle for Versace’s estate played out in newspapers and courts in the years following the designer’s death, and plays out on screen in Wednesday’s episode.

“You have to think of Gianni as an emperor, like the sun of a universe that would swirl an orbit around him,” he said. “So, of course when he was gone in such a horrible way and drastic way, no one was prepared for that and that whole universe collapsed. Without the sun, everyone spun out of control.”

A Closer Look at Two Key Relationships That Influence FX’s ‘Versace’

Max Greenfield talks new ‘American Crime Story’

If there’s anything Ryan Murphy knows how to do, it is how to capture a specific time. In “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” he focuses on the Italian designer’s murder in 1997 and the years leading up to it. Murphy takes the sensational ripped-from-the-headlines crime, like he did with “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” and broadens it to explore the prejudices surrounding the LGBTQ community and the emotional underpinnings of the AIDS crisis.

“New Girl” actor Max Greenfield plays Ronnie, a man who represents the fear many in the community lived with during the period, if not because of the virus, then of the lives they had to hide in plain sight. Ronnie is unknowingly tangled into the series of events when he meets killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) and forms a brief kinship.

amNewYork spoke with Greenfield about slipping into Ryan Murphy’s world for season two of “American Crime Story.”

You previously worked with Ryan Murphy on “American Horror Story.” What was it like to be directed by him again?

Ryan knows what he wants and is specific in the sense that he’ll give you a lot of room to explore and play with it. He’s very honest if you’re doing something he doesn’t like and you sort of have to be OK with that. You’re constantly making adjustments off notes, so I don’t think I’ve enjoyed working with someone as much as I’ve enjoyed working with Ryan, ever.

So you were given freedom to create texture for Ronnie, even though he’s not a fictional character?

Yeah, totally. In the period of time it was two years after they figured out the correct medication to treat HIV, so you have all these people who were affected by this disease, many of whom had accepted their own fate, and had for quite some time and were waiting to die. And then there was this treatment, and you saw patients that were extraordinarily sick better within 30 days.

Ronnie was one of those characters who had sort of given up on life and was then given a new lease. It was a complicated time for a lot of people. I know, specifically, that’s what I tried to focus on. So when he meets Andrew there’s a friendship. For somebody who is so completely on their own in Miami, living minute by minute, still confused and bewildered by everything that has happened over the past 15 years, to find any sort of friendship, was so important for him. He didn’t want to believe Andrew could’ve done something very harmful.

For the generation that’s coming up now, that period seems unfathomable. How did you tackle playing that specific window of time?

I did a lot of research. I do have some recollection, but certainly not to the degree that was necessary to understand it. I’m not sure I do now. You talk to people who were around during that time, specifically those in the LGBT community. The documentary “How to Survive a Plague” really tackles it well. Imagining these very human feelings is so overwhelming.

Gianni Versace is a brand to a lot of people. This story humanizes the designer. With that in mind, were you surprised by how this story unfolds?

Yeah, I didn’t know much about it. I was 17 years old at the time, so it was a headline for me. “Oh my Gosh, Gianni Versace was murdered? I can’t believe that!” And then you go to school the next day. I didn’t know Andrew’s back story and that this was one of five murders [he committed] or how deep it went.

What was the most gratifying thing about playing this character?

It was being a part of this story and the creation of Ryan’s world. Some of the things that this series talks about are really important issues. It’s hard for people to digest but I think it’s an important series. He’s not afraid to speak up and create content that addresses issues that people find uncomfortable.

Max Greenfield talks new ‘American Crime Story’