Not all of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is set in Miami. The dramatization of fashion designer and South Beach fixture Versace’s death at the hands of serial killer Andrew Cunanan focuses primarily on Cunanan, tracing his cross-country murder spree and fall from grace in the summer of 1997. But the story, as told by executive producer Ryan Murphy and series writer Tom Rob Smith, begins and ends in Miami, which is by far the show’s most memorable location. Alternating between the lush, warm hues of Miami Beach and the blinding strobe and neon lights of the city’s gay clubs, The Assassination of Gianni Versace captures both the city’s timeless qualities and the hallmarks of an era long past. With Miami’s beauty providing a rich thematic contrast to the inner rot of Andrew Cunanan — a star-making performance by Glee actor Darren Criss — it’s a striking backdrop for an unforgettable television experience, as well as a tragic reminder of a harrowing moment in Miami’s history.
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American Crime Story: Versace Is Pure Miami, Whether You Like It or Not
Murphy understands that Miami is as gaudy, gay, and greedy as the characters he’s put onscreen. Yes, we certainly have more depth than that (as numerous films, from the Oscar-winning Moonlight to Borscht Corp’s award-winning shorts, have shown). But the surface-level charm is prevalent, often hiding that depth from outsiders. In Versace, Murphy leans deeply into the façade.
Still, Versace, like Miami, seems to promise more than surface-level charms. It’s not just the gorgeous visuals or Penélope Cruz playing Donatella Versace without attempting to hide her Spanish accent. It’s not just Édgar Ramírez working on beautiful Versace costumes for an opera or having his shirt logo sliced open on a hospital table in the most heavy-handed death scene ever. And it’s not just Ricky Martin as Antonio D’Amico wailing for an ambulance while holding his dying lover as though they were Michelangelo’s Pietà. Versace writer Tom Rob Smith has used Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U. S. History as a jumping-off point to create a portrait of this place that’s as loving and as critical as it should be.
The beauty of the pilot episode is in the details, its slow but smart establishing of the period we’re entering. This is the queer ‘90s: There’s sex, nightlife, and drugs. There’s also an AIDS epidemic that people still had no real clue how to deal with. It’s implied in scenes showing Versace pulling up his robe to reveal a lesion and taking medication that he was dealing with AIDS. That unease buzzes beneath scenes in which a police officer can barely communicate with D’Amico during questioning because he can’t grasp the concept of two men dating, much less two men in an open relationship. It’s in the word “faggot” written on a public beach bathroom wall.
With the episode “The Man Who Would Be Vogue,” American Crime Story delivers a promising premiere, one that announces an unashamed exploration of what it meant to be gay in the 1990s, even if it’s told partially through the lens of a sociopath who murdered at least five people during that period. We can only hope the rest of the series is as exciting as the first episode.
American Crime Story: Versace Is Pure Miami, Whether You Like It or Not
Six Miami Places You’ll See in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
1. Versace’s mansion. Because Florida legislators did away with film incentives in 2016, much of this season’s ACS was filmed in California. But there’s no way set designers could do justice to Versace’s Ocean Drive mansion with a replica, which is why exterior scenes were shot in South Beach. Versace fell in love with the jaw-dropping estate, also known as Villa Casa Casuarina, on a visit to Miami Beach in 1992 and purchased the property soon after. The luxurious home now operates as a hotel and restaurant.
2. News Café. Every morning, Versace strolled to News Café to grab a newspaper or magazine to read on the beach. Although regulars began to recognize him, staff from the time say he preferred to maintain a low profile. On July 15, 1997, the Italian designer was returning home from the restaurant when he was shot dead in front of his mansion.
3. The Miami Beach Police Department. Miami Beach Police suspected serial killer Andrew Cunanan almost immediately. They’d first heard of him a week before Versace’s murder when a federal agent called about rumors that Cunanan, who had already killed four people, was involved in a secret gay organization in South Florida. After Versace was shot in South Beach, police warned the public that Cunanan was armed and dangerous.
4. Twist. The FX series depicts Versace and his partner, model Antonio D’Amico, hanging out at Twist, a gay nightclub on Washington Avenue. Though there’s no indication from old news stories that Versace frequented the club, the FBI displayed wanted posters in the club’s bathrooms when Cunanan was on the loose. At one point, Twist claimed to have surveillance footage of Cunanan at the club two days before he killed Versace.
5. Normandy Plaza Hotel. As police furiously worked to retrace Cunanan’s steps, they learned he’d been staying at a $36-a-night hotel in Mid-Beach. Records showed the elusive killer had checked into the Normandy Plaza Hotel two months before targeting Versace. When police searched room 205, the only traces he’d left behind were a stack of fashion magazines and an electric hair trimmer.
6. The marina on the 5200 block of Collins Avenue. The manhunt for Cunanan finally ended July 23, 1997, when police surrounded a houseboat docked at 5250 Collins Ave. After a five-hour standoff, officers stormed the boat and found Cunanan dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“All across the nation, our citizens can stand down and breathe a sigh of relief,” Miami Beach Police Chief Richard Barreto said at the time. “The reign of terror brought upon us by Andrew Cunanan is over.”
Six Miami Places You’ll See in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
American Crime Story’s Versace Doesn’t Actually Have Much Versace — and That’s Great
In the first scene of FX’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the title character (Edgar Ramirez) wakes up, glides through his gilded mansion, accepts a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice that he sips by the courtyard pool, and heads out to buy a stack of magazines from a nearby newsstand. This is the ’90s Miami of The Birdcage, a haven for gay men, awash in creams and peachy-pinks. The second installment of the true-crime anthology series that Ryan Murphy began with The People vs. O.J. Simpson, Versace tells another blood-soaked story about the crazy-making quest for wealth and fame — or at least the appearance of it.
At the outset, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which premieres Jan. 17, feels like a straightforward continuation of The People vs. O.J. Simpson, which also takes place in the mid-to-late 1990s. Both examine the then-novel concept of death as a 24-hour-news-cycle spectacle: When Versace is gunned down in front of his home, a crowd forms outside, and a tourist who earlier sought the man’s autograph now sneaks under police tape to dip a Versace ad torn from a magazine in the designer’s blood. But it’s fitting that the show opens on the last morning of Gianni Versace’s life, on July 15, 1997. By the second episode, Versace himself fades from focus, replaced by 27-year-old serial killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) — a nothing, a nobody, until he made a name for himself by murdering his idol.
Criss’ portrayal of Cunanan, a gay man whose outward confidence and taste for the finer things belies a deep well of insecurity, is the highlight of the show. This is a guy who can make eating a bowl of Fruit Loops look menacing. The gripping performance is enhanced by the show’s narrative structure, a risky gambit that pays off: The season moves backward in time, each episode taking place just before the events of the previous week’s. Versace is a puzzle the viewer puts together as it goes on, and with this approach the story seems to ripen with every episode as we move deeper and more intimately into Cunanan’s past.
We also learn about his other, less glamorous victims, almost all of them gay men who entered into relationships with Cunanan. (The series is based on the 1999 book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U. S. History by Vanity Fair’s Maureen Orth.) Writer Tom Rob Smith, himself openly gay, draws out the way Cunanan exploits the stigma of being gay in the 1990s both to lure his prey and to cover up his crimes. He is devious in his manipulations. Against his victims, Cunanan wields a possessive logic: the world doesn’t want or accept you, but I do. Against law enforcement, he cannily exploits the systemic straightness of police, leaving behind evidence of the victims’ sexual proclivities that makes it easier for the cops to, if not dismiss the crimes, treat them with a smirk and a sideways glance: Oh, it’s a gay thing. “They hate us, David. They’ve always hated us,” Cunanan tells an ex-boyfriend. “You’re a fag.”
Versace is not camp; it’s a respectful and often deeply moving depiction of the struggle for acceptance, both from the wider world and from oneself. Despite the boldfaced names touted in FX’s ads, the story of Gianni Versace, his sister, Donatella (Penelope Cruz), and his lover of 15 years, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), merely frames Cunanan’s escapades. Thematically, the parallel story lines of Versace and his killer work in tandem: In one episode, we witness Cunanan construct a sellable version of himself as Gianni helps Donatella design her first dress; in another, Gianni contemplates a public coming-out while the alternate story follows a gay character in the Navy during the era of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
The Versace family has already released a statement declaring the show’s depiction of the late designer’s professional and domestic struggles a fantasy. But the Versaces are the embroidery here, not the tapestry. Like Orange Is the New Black’s Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) — the nice white lady who’s sent to the big, bad prison — the Versace angle is a Trojan horse, a mass-marketable hook for a series that’s actually most interested in stories about less flashy, more marginal characters. This is far less a show about a fabulous atelier than it is about a handful of gay men you’ve probably never heard of.
Sure, it’s a bait-and-switch. But maybe that’s what we need at a moment when a powerful speech at an awards ceremony is all it takes for the media to breathlessly anticipate Oprah 2020. As much as I loved O.J., which rightfully won the Emmy for Outstanding Limited Series last year, I have serious reservations about the prospect of our popular culture being clogged with stories about celebrities from 20 years ago (next up on the Murphy/FX docket is Feud: Charles and Diana).
The casting of the long-closeted Martin as Versace’s partner is a nod to the fact that we have finally reached a point when an openly gay man can create a show for a major cable channel that’s this, well, gay. With so few straight characters, Versace can move beyond the anxiety of representation — no one gay man stands in for the whole. There’s no hint of a character or story line that feels wedged in for the sake of the platonic straight male viewer. Cruz is wonderful as the fledgling version of the Donatella we know and love — and also, it has to be said, almost distractingly beautiful — but she remains fully clothed throughout.
Again, it’s Criss who is the main draw. Despite a bit of midseason sag in the plot, he holds the viewer tight in his grip. Cunanan exerts control over his victims calmly, which is so much scarier than bluster, like your mom going really quiet when you know you’re in trouble. He’s got a Trumpian swag, an unearned confidence in his ability to sell himself to anyone. Yet Criss never lets us forget his desperation and shame, the self-loathing just beneath the surface of the collegiate bravado. You can just make out the panic behind his eyes. “You can’t go to America and start from nothing,” Cunanan’s father, an immigrant from the Philippines, tells him in a flashback episode. “That’s the lie.”
The character calls to mind two creepy-brother portrayals in films of the past year: Caleb Landry Jones in Get Out and Billy Magnussen in Ingrid Goes West. Like this pair of privileged yet sinister bros, Cunanan as depicted in Versace is a country-club psycho — an embodiment of the moral rot at the core of the pristine image of the American dream.
American Crime Story’s Versace Doesn’t Actually Have Much Versace — and That’s Great
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