‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ writer on interpreting the real Andrew Cunanan for the finale

Serial killer Andrew Cunanan met his grizzly end in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story finale Wednesday night, but it was more of a fizzle than a bang for star Darren Criss’s final scene.

Eight days after Cunanan murdered famed fashion designer Gianni Versace—and two months after Cunanan murdered his fourth victim— police finally cornered the killer on a Miami houseboat. Rather than face capture, Cunanan puts the gun that killed Versace in his mouth and pulls the trigger.

The episode imagines Cunanan’s final days hiding out on that houseboat, while also bringing back many of the series’ guest stars: Judith Light as widow Marilyn Miglin, Annaleigh Ashford as Cunanan’s childhood friend Elizabeth, Max Greenfield as Cunanan’s HIV-positive friend Ronnie, and Jon Jon Briones and Joanna P. Adler as Cunanan’s father and mother.

Series writer Tom Rob Smith (who also created the British drama London Spy) adapted this real-life event, and the rest of the series, from journalist Maureen Orth’s 1999 book, Vulgar Favors. He spoke to Newsweek about working on the series and what liberties he took in interpreting Cunanan.

What do hope fans take away from the finale of The Assassination of Gianni Versace?

It works as a retrospective on loss. That’s one of the things I’m most proud of about this series. Marilyn Miglin, brilliantly played by Judith Light, says in the finale, “I’m so proud of Lee.” There’s that sense that all of these victims—not just Versace—were great. A crime story is about a sense of loss, about people being ripped from the world, about that hole they leave behind. That line, and this finale, crystalized that sense of sadness and loss beautifully.

It was almost moving to have Andrew reface so many of these people he hurt before his suicide. But it was hard to tell if he was feeling regret or just fear for his own life.

It’s been presented that Andrew is relishing in his notoriety thus far. But for someone who had all his potential, intelligence and impressive education, isn’t it also possible that he felt a deep sense of disgust at what he had done? This is not someone who spent his life being horrible to people, he was always trying to charm and impress them—he paid for dinners and tried to win people over. In those final days on that houseboat, there was a sense of great shame, I think. That’s our interpretation.

When you say that, is that what you imagine the actual, real Cunanan felt at that moment? Or do you see the show’s Cunanan as just a character, inspired but separate from the real killler?

In the end, I think you have to accept that it’s an interpretation. But you’re drawing on what there is. People have said, “Oh no, he committed suicide because he was trying to outwit the police.” I’m like, “He shot himself in his boxer shorts on a bed.” I don’t know how anyone would think that was a grand ending. The houseboat was in a state of horrendous decay—that space was a manifestation of what his life had become. He did die the day after Versace’s funeral, so he almost certainly watched Versace’s funeral on TV. I think he would have looked at that and seen a man who is adored, who has the most extraordinary funerals in Milan, while Andrew is in this hellish, sweaty physical decay, despised by the world.

Lots of killers go to trial—they quite enjoy it, in their own way, they enjoy putting the victim’s families through the trial, as part of their sickness. Very few of them commit suicide. So I think, whatever Andrew might have told himself, there must have been some deep sense of shame that he didn’t want to face in a courtroom. He didn’t want to have his crimes read out to him.

What details did you add to his final hours for the show, to help support that interpretation of Andrew?

Obviously, we don’t know what he watched. We just know what was on and we know that there was a TV [in the houseboat]. We do know that the Versace magazines were there, and we know that there was nothing left to eat in that houseboat. We know that he had absolutely no money. He had no way of getting any food and he was trapped. There’s that sense of the world bearing down on him. His dad claimed that he called him.

Really?

Yes, his dad claimed to Maureen Orth in Vulgar Favors that he called him—the exact claim is that Andrew called him to talk about the film rights. Of course, his dad could be lying. We certainly don’t know that Andrew asked his dad to come get him. But I didn’t make up the name of the movie title, A Name to Remembered By. The dad really did say that. But [Andrew] shooting the TV set isn’t true. We put that in because we wanted to get across that the sixth person that Andrew would have gone for next [to kill] would have been his dad.

Modesto Cunanan is a fascinating character, both in the show and real life. Did you guys ever find out what happened to the real person?

We don’t know, and actually we really tried to find that out. We don’t think he’s in America; we think he might not be alive anymore. It’s very hard to find someone. But I know that Fox did do research on that and didn’t come back with anything.

What we know about the real man is that that he gave Andrew the master bedroom, and that he then came in to use the closet. So he set up an excuse to go into there. To my mind, that was immediately a red flag. We also know from Maureen’s research that Andrew’s lie in Episode 1—“Oh my dad used to drive around with a chauffeur, and he was having an affair with the chauffeur”—that’s a real lie from Andrew. I always think that lies are very revealing. I remember first reading that and thinking, “That’s a strange lie.” That’s one of those interesting things about going backwards— you get that lie in Episode 1, and you think it’s just Andrew being crazy. When you get to Episode 8, you’re like, “Wait a minute. What was behind that lie?”

The show makes very explicit—especially in the finale—that one of the reasons the FBI took so long to catch Cunanan was a lack of connections in the gay community and a disregard for gay lives. That felt like a statement on the homophobia of the authorities in the ‘90s.

There’s a couple of things I’d say. This is not a story where it’s about the homophobic cop that doesn’t catch anyone. I think the most homophobic person in this story is Andrew Cunanan himself. He is just this horrific homophobic bully to Lee Miglin. He’s using everything he understands about shame and disgrace against his victims. And with David, he’s trying to trap him into to staying with him by saying, “The police will never believe you, they hate you.”

Many things he says have truth in them, and in Miami it was a fiasco. I don’t know why they didn’t put the flyers up, I don’t what was going on there. Other cities they were better—I think they were better in New York and San Francisco, and I think the various gay communities there were better connected to the police. But catching people is tricky, and people make mistakes without have a racist, sexist or homophobic agenda behind it. People just screw up.

But when an officer refuses to go into a gay club to put a flyer up, that is a real issue. And when Andrew was just walking around Miami—the diner where he ate was just directly opposite the police station. I do think you can say that Versace should not have died.

Given the title of the series, I think some fans were surprised that the show ended up being more Andrew Cunanan’s story than Versace’s.

I was sent Maureen’s book two years ago, and I was always adapting this book. The Versace story is not a crime story—his life story is a success story. And in Maureen’s book, [Versace’s] only really in the story at the end. One of the things we talked about is that we really want to bring him to the fore, because he’s such an interesting counterpoint to Andrew. I don’t think you can just say Andrew was a product of society. Andrew was his own creation. He was beaten by things other people overcame. Andrew was lazy, vain and entitled. Yes, he did encounter enormous prejudice, but so did Versace, and Versace overcame those things. So when you look at it that way, it became a very interesting counterpoint. That was the genesis of the story. But I can understand why people thought it was going to be a biopic.

The real Versace family publicly condemned the show and the book as “a work of fiction.” Have you heard anything else from them since it’s been airing?

No, only the initial statement, which is the same statement they brought out at the publication of the book. One of the advantages of not doing a Versace-intensive biopic is that you can concentrate on what was amazing about that family. You don’t really need to get into the other gossipy stuff about relationships or drugs. None of that is relevant to this story. It’s just about saying what was amazing about Donatella and her relationship with Gianni because that’s what we’re counterpointing against Andrew.

In the end, it’s just a story about two families. You’re comparing them. That’s what I really love about Episode 8. I don’t know anything about how [the real Versace family] feels, but the show is really a celebration of Gianni Versace as an artist.

What happened to Andrew Cunanan’s parents, Modesto and Mary Ann Cunanan?

Warning: This post contains slight spoilers for the final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace.

The story of Andrew Cunanan, the serial killer who fatally shot fashion designer Gianni Versace in 1997, ends this week, in Wednesday night’s finale of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. But while it’s over for the characters in the Ryan Murphy’s FX series, the real people affected by Cunanan’s killing spree lived on far beyond the events that end Season 2—including Cunanan’s parents, Mary Ann and Modesto.

Both Mary Ann and Modesto Cunanan (Joanna Adler and Jon Jon Briones, respectively) play key roles in the ninth and final episode of Assassination of Gianni Versace, each affecting the final hours of their son (Darren Criss) in their own way. But what happened to the real people after the nightmare was all over?

Mary Ann Cunanan

After her son’s death, Cunanan’s mother Mary Ann lived out the rest of her life quietly, if oddly. When journalist Maureen Orth interviewed Cunanan’s mother for her 1999 book Vulgar Favors—the basis of the FX show—she reportedly told Orth that her son did not kill Versace and that his previous murder spree was a mafia setup. She lived alone in National City, California, when Orth visited her and had dedicated a nearby plot of land to grow a memorial garden for Andrew. Orth also described “a shrine to Andrew” in Mary Ann’s living room.

In an anonymous blog post published by the San Diego Reader in 2009, someone who claims to be the daughter of the Cunanan family’s next-door-neighbor wrote, “The last time I saw Mary Ann, she was covered up in an old coat and sunglasses with a scarf tied under her chin. It was a hearty spring day that didn’t require a coat, and she dipped a hankie and washed her hands in a fountain at the Mercado shopping plaza.”

Several online obituaries list Mary Ann’s death at the age of 73, on April 15, 2012. Besides Andrew, she had three other children with Modesto Cunanan: Elena, Christopher and Regina.

Modesto Cunanan

Cunanan’s father—whose real name was Modesto but went by “Pete” in America—returned to the U.S. from the Phillippines after his son committed suicide. (He had fled the country after being accused of fraud in the ‘80s.) In 1999, two years after his son’s death, he arrived in Los Angeles with a Filipino filmmaker, determined to make a documentary about his son’s serial murders—which, the elder Cunanan told the Los Angeles Times, he believed was an FBI conspiracy. “The American people are being misled,” Modesto said. “They swallowed everything hook, line and sinker because it came from the FBI.” In addition to maintaining his son’s innocence, he also denied that Andrew was homosexual, calling him “gay by association.”

Around the same time, Orth spoke to Modesto for Vulgar Favors. She described that meeting in a recent article for Vanity Fair. “Cunanan told me that Andrew was being set up by the mafia, and maybe I could go in on the movie treatment he was peddling about Andrew for half a million dollars,” Orth wrote. “’I know who should play him,’ Pete Cunanan said. ‘John F. Kennedy Jr.’” According to Orth, Cunanan had also “joined a survivalist cult and was seeking buried gold he claimed the Japanese had left behind in World War II.”

Not long after his son’s death, Modesto remarried to a Filipina woman. His current whereabouts—and whether he is still alive—are unknown.

You can read more about Cunanan’s parents in Newsweek’s Assassination of Gianni Versace fact vs. fiction breakdown.

What happened to Andrew Cunanan’s parents, Modesto and Mary Ann Cunanan?

‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ fact vs. fiction: What Episode 6 got right

**SPOILERS FOR NEXT WEEK’S EPISODE**

The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode six, “Descent,” takes place one year before Andrew Cunanan (played by Darren Criss) began the killing spree that ended with the murder of the titular designer on July 15, 1997. There are no murders in this chapter, but plenty of tension and suspense, along with the usual blurring of facts.

Here’s what “Descent” got right—and where series writer Tom Rob Smith and director Gwyneth Horder-Payton took creative liberties.

Norman Blachford

The episode opens in 1996 in La Jolla, California. Cunanan is living in a beautiful seaside condo with his wealthy male friend, Norman Blachford (played by Flashdance star Michael Nouri). Cunanan has designed and decorated the home and is paid with room and board, though we soon learn there is more to the arrangement.

The real Blachford was a San Diego businessman who made a fortune producing insulation for cars. He did support the future killer for nearly a year, beginning in 1995, in his La Jolla home. According to a May 1997 report from the San Diego Reader (after Cunanan became wanted by the FBI for the murders of Jeff Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin and William Reese), Blachford was thought to be in his 60s when he got involved with the 26-year-old Cunanan.

Journalist Maureen Orth, whose 1999 book Vulgar Favors is the basis for the FX show, backs up this account, adding that Blachford afforded Cunanan a $2,000 a month allowance and a 1996 Infiniti I30T—the car we see Criss driving in the opening shot of the episode. Several reports mention that Blachford—and briefly Cunanan—were members of Gamma Mu, then a private fraternity and social club for closeted gay men. The Assassination of Gianni Versace leaves Gamma Mu out of its American Crime Story, perhaps because the fraternity is now openly supportive of its LGBT members.

Whether or not the real Cunanan did design Blachford’s home is unknown. One Gamma Mu member told Orth he assumed “Andrew was hired to be Mr. Blachford’s decorator.”

In the episode, Cunanan leaves Blachford after the older man refuses him lavish gifts, and moves into this own place. In reality, he crashed with a couple he knew, Erik Greenman and Tom Eads, a waiter and restaurant manager in San Diego. It was Eads who told Orth that Cunanan requested a Mercedes 500SL and first-class flights from Blachford. Criss’s Cunanan presents a similar list of demands on the show, with an extra request: to be written into Blachford’s will. There is no evidence of the latter request.

In the episode, Nouri’s Blachford accuses Cunanan of manufacturing their "accidental” meeting. This is based in fact. A 1997 Washington Post profile noted that Cunanan was “a multilingual sophisticate who knew exactly which older men he wanted to meet.” Friends said he would spy on his conquests, gathering intelligence about their interests. Nicole Ramirez-Murray, a columnist for the San Diego Gay and Lesbian Times, said that if an older man was interested in orchids, “Cunanan would go out and buy every book available on orchids and soon he would be talking about the subject as if he had studied it all of his life.”

The birthday party

According to Orth, at Cunanan’s 27th birthday party, hosted at Blachford’s estate, he coerced his friend Jeff Trail (the ex-Navy officer played by Finn Wittrock), into giving him a gift that he had selected; on the show it’s a pair of Ferragamo shoes, though Orth didn’t specify the gift in her 1997 Vanity Fair article.

The real Cunanan also instructed Trail to introduce himself as an instructor at the California Highway Patrol, as a way to impress Blachford. This plays out in the epsiode, with some variation. Cunanan tells Trail to say he’s a Navy officer (this was after Trail had left the Navy) not to impress Blachford, but his new romantic interest, David Madson (murdered in episode four).

Orth does not mention whether or not Madson attended that California birthday party, as happens in the episode. It’s even less likely that Lee Miglin, the real estate tycoon from Chicago and Cunanan’s third victim, showed up, as Mike Farrell does in “Descent.” And though it makes for a very dramatic moment, no picture exists of Cunanan with three of his five victims, as the episode claims.

Cunanan’s friend Lizzy

In the episode, one of the guests at the birthday party is a young woman named Lizzy, who Cunanan calls his “best friend from San Francisco.” The character (played by Masters of Sex’s Annaleigh Ashford), is based on Elizabeth Cotes, who, according to Orth, was Cunanan’s close friend from junior high school. (Viewers may recall meeting her briefly in the first episode; Cunanan brags to her about meeting Versace.)

It’s true that Cunanan was the godfather of Cote’s children. Before he killed himself, a month before his 28th birthday, the real Cote and her children recorded a videotape, pleading with him to end his killing spree. They were prompted to do so by the FBI, but the message never reached Cunanan in time: On July 23, 1997, he put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Andrew DeSilva

“Your name is not Andrew DeSilva, it’s Andrew Cunanan,” accuses Nouri’s Blachford, midway through the episode. “Andrew DeSilva” was the pseudonym Cunanan used in the San Diego LGBT scene. According to Orth’s reporting, the stories he told acquaintances using that name bordered on the absurd. Some made their way into American Crime Story.

At one point on the show, Cunanan tries to tell Blachford he has a Ph.D. According to Orth, the real Cunanan told his friends he had gone to Choate, dropped out of Yale and transferred to Bennington. In fact, he quit after one year at the University of California, San Diego, where he majored in history. (Orth reported that Cunanan spent two years at the college, but a 2001 Time article states he quit after freshman year.)

David Madson’s LA visit

While there’s no evidence that the real Madson visited La Jolla, he did let Cunanan pay for him to visit Los Angeles, as we see in “Descent.” Orth reports that on Easter weekend in 1997—a month before the killing began—Cunanan bought two $395 hotel rooms at the Chateau Marmont, one for himself and Madson, and one for Madson’s San Francisco friends Karen Lapinski and Evan Wallit, who were engaged. Lapinski and Wallit are omitted from the episode. Police said that Cunanan told Lapinski he’d pay for her wedding reception. Cunanan did buy Madson a new suit, as we see on the show.

Reportedly, the real Madson and Cunanan fought that weekend, after Madson refused Cunanan’s romantic advances. American Crime Story turns the advances into a proposal. Who knows if that actually happened, but the real Cunanan did once call Madson “the man I want to marry,” according to friends who spoke to Orth.

Family lies

The tales Cunanan spins about his parents are pulled from the testimonies of acquaintances. Perhaps he never told Madson that his father retired a rich stockbroker to run a pineapple plantation in the Philippines, but according to Time, Cunanan did often say he was the son of wealthy Philippine sugar-plantation owner. (In reality, his father fled to the Philippines after he was accused of embezzling, abandoning his family—more on that in episode eight.)

In that same scene, Cunanan tells Madson his parents gave him the master bedroom growing up. This is reportedly true. Cunanan’s sister Elena said as much to journalist Diane Sawyer in an a 1997 interview on ABC. “He got everything that he needed,” she said. “My dad gave him a sports car. He had the master bedroom. He had his own bath and everything.” (American Crime Story delves deeper into Cunanan’s childhood in future episodes.)

Cunanan also tells Madson he’s in the movie business, another favorite of his lies. Madson’s friend Lapinski reportedly told the F.B.I. that Cunanan once said he was making movie sets with a friend named Duke Miglin (the name of Lee Miglin’s son). The real history of Cunanan’s relationship with Miglin is unknown; the Miglin family continues to insist that there was no prior relationship before Lee was murdered, but American Crime Story implies it began before the episode’s birthday party.

Using and dealing

The episode’s titular moment is Cunanan’s descent into drug use after Madson refuses his proposal. The real Cunanan was a drug user and dealer. According to a 1997 Washington Post profile, he became addicted to Vicodin while selling prescription drugs to his friends. And testimonies from San Diego bartenders who spoke to Orth say that by April 1997—the month he murdered Trail—Cunanan was drinking Merlot "like there was no tomorrow.”

Orth also reported that Cunanan wanted Trail to help him with a cocaine deal, which Trail wanted nothing to do with. She even cited it as the reason Trail left San Diego and moved to Minneapolis. But there is no mention of that in the episode; rather, Trail says he’s leaving because he’s unhappy.

At the height of his drug spiral on the show, Cunanan begs Blachford to let him back into his home, after they have broken up. Blachford says no and calls the police. There is no evidence of that this occurred.

The Versace fitting

The scene where Versace takes Cunanan’s measurements is a drugged-out hallucination (obviously). It’s also actor Édgar Ramírez’s only screentime in this episode.

The idea that Cunanan was jealous of Versace’s glamorous life as a gay man, as Criss’s short speech in the scene suggests, was a popular theory among journalists after the murder. But as a 1997 Post article revealed, investigators never nailed down a precise motivation.

Cunanan’s mother

In the final minutes of "Descent,” Cunanan returns to his childhood home, where we meet his mother, MayAnn Schillaci-Cunanan (played by Joanna Adler). The show presents a woman who is clearly unstable—she sniffs her son while bathing him, declaring he smells wrong, and begins scrubbing him vigorously.

Not much is known about the real women, other than her name and that she was Italian-American. Orth described her as “a devout Catholic, a bright but emotionally fragile woman.” Several online obituaries list her death as April 15, 2012. Time reported that she legally separated from Cunanan’s father, Modesto, after he fled to the Philippines and then lived on welfare and food stamps.

There’s no evidence that Cunanan visited his mother before he took off for Minneapolis, and American Crime Story undoubtedly took liberties with her personality. Drama demands creative license.

‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ fact vs. fiction: What Episode 6 got right

‘American Crime Story’ Star Darren Criss On Serial Killers and Queer Narratives

The title for the second season of Ryan Murphy’s true crime anthology series, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, is misleading. Yes, it concerns the murder of the famous Italian designer, but it is about the man who killed him, the serial killer Andrew Cunanan. Versace was the last of his five victims, before Cunanan killed himself.

Murphy’s first American Crime Story, which premiered in February 2016, was a critically acclaimed no-brainer for American audiences: The People v. O.J. Simpson focused on America’s most infamous modern crime. Gianni Versace’s murder, which happened in 1997, was shocking at the time and is now mostly forgotten. The luxury label Versace has been run by his sister, Donatella, for so long, a generation of fashionistas think it was she, rather than her older brother, who started it. And Cunanan? Even in a country fixated on serial killers, his name rarely comes up.

But it certainly makes sense for Murphy and his producing partner Brad Falchuk to take on this tale. The duo’s résumé of shows—Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story, Feud—are stories of excess, envy, greed and revenge; Versace lived a fabulously extravagant lifestyle in Miami, and his luxurious clothing and ad campaigns were created to titillate. Murphy’s casting hallmarks are well represented too; there are offbeat choices (Ricky Martin plays Versace’s boyfriend), A-list movie stars slumming it on TV (Penélope Cruz plays Donatella) and a plum part for a regular—in this case, Darren Criss as Cunanan.

On Glee, Murphy’s hit musical comedy, Criss played happy, confident high school student Blaine Anderson, the openly gay leader of the Dalton Academy Warblers. Cunanan is a tonal about-face. But because of some superficial similarities between Criss and his character—both half-Filipino and California-raised—Criss told Murphy, “I defy you to find somebody else.”

Murphy didn’t need persuading. He’d seen Criss on Broadway, in the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, playing a tortured, genderqueer German rocker—a notoriously taxing role. “I just felt there was an untapped, dramatically darker side of him,” says Murphy. “He was hungry and anxious to push forward. When Glee ended, that was graduation day for [American Crime Story]. I always thought he was the only one for Cunanan.”

The serial killer will certainly put a creepier spin on the 30-year-old performer’s career, which began with A Very Potter Musical, a 2009 parody of J.K. Rowling’s universe. Criss co-wrote and starred in it with University of Michigan theater friends, and it quickly went viral. “I don’t think I’m being delusional when I say that was the genesis of my career,” says Criss. “It brings a huge smile to my face when people approach me about that.”

Glee took a viral fan base and quadrupled it. The TV show’s fastest-selling single was Criss’s version of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” and he was nominated for a 2015 Emmy for writing the song “This Time” for the show’s finale. Last March, he debuted his indie rock band, Computer Games, with brother Chuck, and in December, he released a solo EP, Homework, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Chart.

Criss expects to get more serious attention for Cunanan than for covering Perry, even if he sees no distinction in the effort made. “There’s a notion, which I’m allergic to, that the darker the role—the more a departure a role is from somebody—the more weight it has,” says the actor, who took the part of Cunanan because it allowed him to “tackle someone with a huge emotional range. It was my job to understand Andrew, as hard as that may seem, [without] glorifying someone who was monstrous.”

Versace gets the titular murder out of the way in the first eight minutes of Episode 1. The rest of the nine-episode series pieces together Cunanan’s story, in reverse chronology, with glimpses of Versace (Édgar Ramírez) and his family, before and after his death. Series writer Tom Rob Smith based the show on the 1999 book Vulgar Favors, by investigative journalist Maureen Orth, who conducted hundreds of interviews with people who knew Cunanan.

Good looks and intelligence got Cunanan in doors—particularly those of older, wealthy gay men in San Francisco. A pathological liar, he spun tales about his past that eventually began to fray, as did his behavior; an affable charmer one minute, he could be calculating and menacing the next. By the time he made his way to Miami, and Versace, he was one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives and clearly unhinged.

Criss, who was only 10 at the time of the murder, had never heard of his character before Murphy offered the part. “I knew that [Versace] was murdered,” he says. “That was about it.” According to Murphy, Criss had numerous conversations with Orth, but, says Murphy, “I don’t know if you can ever prepare for this sort of role, besides learn everything you can about the real guy.”

Research revealed that Cunanan was from a broken home, that there was mental illness in the family, and that his father encouraged an inflated sense of entitlement. But where many people would have sought help, says Criss, “Andrew chose the path of destruction.”

Many scenes are necessarily fictional, since there are no existing interviews with Cunanan, says Criss. But what he came to understand was that Cunanan, like an actor, was always performing. “I gave lots of different takes for every scene, because Andrew was giving the world so many different versions of himself,” says Criss. “I would do a scene at an 11, then do another take at four. I still don’t know which ones they ended up using.”

Criss “thought about Cunanan’s victims every day”—William Reese, Jeffrey Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin and, of course, Versace, all killed within the span of three months. “My greatest fear was that suddenly [members of Trail’s family] hear there’s going to be a series about Uncle Jeff’s murder. How bizarre and twisted that must be,” says the actor, who considered contacting the victims’ families but decided that wasn’t a good idea. “I realized we had to finish the work and let it speak for itself.”

He encourages people who knew the victims to reach out to him once they’ve seen the series, “not for research or for vanity, but just to let them know that I’ve been thinking about them.” (The Versaces have condemned the series, saying, in a statement, that “it should only be considered as a work of fiction.”)

As a gay man in the ’90s, Cunanan was living in a country still struggling to accept the queer lifestyle. Orth’s descriptions of Cunanan’s wild sex life caught flack; a 1999 New York Times review said the author was “guaranteed to flout political correctness and court charges of homophobia.” Murphy, who is openly gay, avoids any stereotyping and makes homosexual discrimination a main theme of the series via Cunanan’s closeted victims. (Both Murphy and Criss have nothing but kind words for Orth, who spent time on set.)

“Your heart aches for those who have lived these lives of suppressed identity,” says Criss. He found his character’s murder of Lee Miglin (played by Mike Farrell) particularly painful. Cunanan outed the Chicago real estate tycoon, leaving him to bleed out in sexual bondage gear, surrounded by gay porn. “Andrew wreaked havoc on this closeted, sweet, good man,” says Criss. “It didn’t help that Mike Farrell is a very dear, sweet man. I just went, ‘I’m so sorry!’”

The intention behind the show, says the 52-year-old Murphy, was to expose the entrenched homophobia he grew up with. “I’m continually amazed at the pain and difficulty of being an out or in-the-closet gay person in the ’80s and ’90s,” he says.

Unlike the other victims, Versace was openly gay. “Andrew not only envied the wealth and success of Gianni, but also that he was a famous, out man who had love in his life,” says Criss. “For Andrew, whose homosexuality keeps leading him to dark places, to see somebody so victorious at it had to be infuriating.”

The actor, who describes himself as a “straight, cisgendered white dude,” has now played three queer characters. Without having experienced the emotional toll of coming out, he has great empathy for those who go through it. An advocate for the Trevor Project, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing suicide among LGBT youth, Criss says he wants “to give as much positive representation as I can to those characters offscreen.”

And for Murphy, it is less the murders committed by Cunanan than this country’s narrative of queer oppression that makes The Assassination of Gianni Versace an important American Crime Story. “It was a crime, and it continues to be a crime,” he says. “Is it getting better? A little bit. Can we do a lot better? I think we can.“

‘American Crime Story’ Star Darren Criss On Serial Killers and Queer Narratives