While the second season of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story may not have had the same water-cooler success in the UK as its predecessor The People vs OJ Simpson, it could go on to have a greater cultural impact – if nothing else, as the springboard for Darren Criss, the magnetic young actor who stars as serial killer Andrew Cunanan.
Before the series aired, promo photos for the drama featured dazzling, pink-hued shots of Edgar Ramirez and Penelope Cruz as legendary designer Versace and his sister Donatella, but they turned out to be little more than bit part players. The real story is the corruption of Cunanan’s soul that led him to embark on a five-person killing spree, ending with the murder of Versace on the front steps of his Miami mansion in July 1997.
It represented a huge challenge for actor Criss, who is best known for his role in musical sitcom Glee. How could he humanise the killer without exonerating him? How could he entertain without glamourising his atrocities?
To put it mildly, he succeeded. Criss is at turns terrifying, charming and downright pathetic as the murderer, and is quite rightly tipped to be a force to be reckoned with come awards season. When RadioTimes.com met him in London a couple of weeks ahead of the show’s heartbreaking finale, he spoke openly about the empathy he felt for Cunanan, and the reasons why, he thinks, he went down such a dark path.
“There we were in Miami, in front of the steps [of Gianni Versace’s mansion] recreating this infamous murder,” Criss says, only his immaculately trimmed beard and multi-coloured nail polish betraying him as a different entity to Cunanan.
“This isn’t on a soundstage. This is in broad daylight in a very public place, in the same exact spot. That was just a tsunami of gravitas and weight that really… I haven’t found the proper adjectives for it yet, but it really gave me pause. Yes, you’re telling a story and there are cameras on, but I felt really bizarre to be doing this where it really happened.”
The actor is warm and thoughtful in person, taking each question down a series of meandering paths towards a thorough, considered answer. He doesn’t shy away from speculation about the drama’s wider conclusions about the murders, and has his own thoughts about the implications of Wednesday’s finale.
“It’s a very complex thing,” he says of the possible causes of Cunanan’s killing spree. “There’s this cocktail of a lot of really unhealthy things that were already in place. Things like homophobia in the world around him were just the catalyst to make it all blow up.”
As with the OJ verdict in season one, The Assassination of Gianni Versace contextualises Versace’s murder as a product of the era. Ricky Martin, who plays the designer’s lover Antonio D’Amico, said recently that “homophobia killed Gianni Versace”, suggesting that the FBI’s misunderstanding of the gay community was one of the primary reasons Cunanan was able to evade capture for as long as he did (he was wanted by the FBI for two months prior to shooting the designer).
Criss agrees with Martin to an extent, though he adds that Cunanan’s past played a major role, too: “You know, a lot of these investigative bodies not wanting to go into gay clubs to post flyers [was] not necessarily because they didn’t like gay people, so much as they weren’t sure if that’s something they could do. Maybe they were scared that they’d be perceived as homophobic.”
He continues: “There’s a history of mental health [issues] in his family, and there’s his own social economic situation, which has nothing to do with his sexual identity but his identity as a person in a social context: wanting to be wealthier than he was, and coming from such a poor area and having a delusional father.”
Criss says that while he believed it was his responsibility as an actor to empathise with Cunanan, he doesn’t expect the same from viewers.
“There’s no need to exonerate or forgive – these are horrible things that just break my heart,” he says. “But with someone like Andrew, it doesn’t boil down to just the most horrible things he’s ever done. The pallet of the human experience is so many colours and so many things, and the great thing about our show is that I’m not just playing ‘The Killer’: I’m playing a real person, who had wonderful moments, and we see him at his best, and he was loved, and had really lovely moments with people.”
Criss couldn’t escape Andrew’s humanity, even if he had wanted to. He says that friends and acquaintances of Versace’s killer approach him regularly and regale him – for the most part – with fond stories of their time with him.
“Everybody has an Andrew story. You know, ‘My friend’s boyfriend went out with him one night’, or had a roommate that spent time with him. Everybody tells me these stories, and I would say the majority of them are quite lovely.”
He adds: “You just go, ‘Oh my god, I don’t want to hear that’. I mean, I do, but it’s so sad. It’s just so sad that these people have nice things to say about him because, again, to put [the conflicting ideas of Andrew as a friend and a murderer] together is a hard thing to marry, I guess.”
The star is aware too of the ethical dilemmas for which the series has been criticised since it was announced last year. Among these are the emotional distress it has caused families of victims – the Versace family has voiced their disapproval on multiple occasions, while D’Amico told Radio Times that it was an inaccurate portrayal of his relationship with the designer – but Criss is happy in the belief that the drama was created to serve a greater purpose than exploiting a tragedy.
“I mean, gosh, If any of these things had happened to somebody that I loved would be equally as vocal about it,” he says. “And, if I had the public platform that the Versace family did I would say the exact same thing. I think they’ve every right and every reason to feel the way they do.
“But, I hope they understand that we’re not exploiting a story for commercial value. There’s a larger story at play here that isn’t necessarily about this one horrible thing, which is the Versace murder, but an investigation and exploration of the time and the tragedies which that entails.”
Wednesday’s finale sees Cunanan at the end of his spree, holed up in a houseboat knowing that his days of walking around free in public are numbered. He’s at the end of his tether; members of his victims’ families including Marilyn Miglin and David Madson’s father haunt him through the multiple TV screens dotted throughout the house. he eats dog food to sustain himself, as entering a shop to purchase food would likely see him caught.
Whichever way you look at it, it’s distressing to see a human in such dire straits.
“The real tragedy to me is just the complete and utter loss of promise and potential,” Criss says, “and that someone who was clearly gifted, who could have used his gifts to make something, decided to use them to destroy. That’s the real heartbreak in the American crime, and how that was allowed by a series of circumstances that were sort of out of his control.”
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We need to talk about Darren Criss’s killer performance in The Assassination of Gianni Versace
There’s a bravura moment in The Assassination of Gianni Versace – American Crime Story when murderer Andrew Cunanan, resplendent in a red PVC jumpsuit, dances wildly on his own in front of a group of bemused partygoers.
It’s not quite up there with Cunanan dancing in only a tiny pair of orange pants to Philip Bailey and Phil Collins’s Easy Lover as one of his pick-ups, a closeted gay elderly gentlemen, writhes in terror, his face a mask of gaffer tape. But it’s close.
If you haven’t seen The Assassination of Gianni Versace yet, then please, run directly to iPlayer with your arms outstretched and feast on any episodes that remain there. It’s brilliantly written by British screenwriter Tom Rob Smith (who also wrote one of my all-time favourites, BBC2’s London Spy, in 2015) and has an astounding central performance from Darren Criss as Cunanan.
I’d never heard of Criss (he was in Glee, which passed me by) but as Cunanan, he delivers the performance of a lifetime. (Cunanan murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace in July 1997, the culmination of a serial killing spree that left five men dead. Cunanan later killed himself as police closed in.)
What Rob Smith and Criss have done is make a whole person, someone who exists outside of those few bare details. Versace hardly appears in the series, which belongs almost entirely to Cunanan/Criss, as we witness a damaged life spin slowly, then quickly, then completely, out of control.
Cunanan seems at first the quietest of whirlwinds, a handsome boy who drips with charm and affability. But – and this is what Criss and Rob Smith are so good at conveying – there’s something a bit off, something not quite right you can’t put your finger on. Like a photo that’s a little out of focus. And then the killing starts. Brutal, swift, out of nowhere. Yet you’ve been expecting it all along, and not just because this is an infamous story. It’s because Criss’s Cunanan trembles with murderous fury, even when he smiles. Particularly when he smiles.
Rob Smith, who is so adept at digging into the dark mud of broken lives, cleverly throws out any accepted version of narrative to play around with the timeline, and with Cunanan’s descent.
So it’s only in this week’s eighth, penultimate, episode that we learn of his twisted childhood as the “special” son of a narcissistic, fraudulent, abusive liar of a father and a fragile, emotionally vulnerable mother.
Criss’s Cunanan is terrifying. Good-looking, personable, but you don’t want him around. There was a point in one episode, when he rang the doorbell of the man who would become his next victim, when I shouted, “Don’t answer the door, don’t let him in!”
Despite all of those very generous outward charms, you know straightaway why people around him find him unsettling to be with and uncomfortable to know. He’s obsessive and forces his way into “friendships” with unwilling men who just wish he’d go away. Or he preys on older gay men who’ve never been able to come out.
Of course, none of this is easy to watch, which is just as it should be. Cunanan’s story was inescapably one of obsession and violence. But as a cautionary tale about someone who wants above all else to be famous, it’s very, horribly, modern.
We need to talk about Darren Criss’s killer performance in The Assassination of Gianni Versace
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story: Ascent – S2
The lies continue to slip off Andrew Cunanan’s tongue. He changes his
surname, his parentage, his racial identity, his education, his occupation and even his interests more frequently than his socks. He even utilises other people’s memories if he feels it would impress or endear him to someone.But if you’re wondering why so many apparently intelligent people fell for his fantasies, this episode explains it a little. We see how he cleverly targeted Norman Blachford (who survived Andrew’s killing spree) and how he dazzled David Madson (who did not) with his apparently glamorous lifestyle. Darren Criss is equally dazzling as Cunanan.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story: Ascent – S2
The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 4 recap: the drama returns to Andrew Cunanan’s first killings
BBC crime drama The Assassination of Gianni Versace took a particularly tragic turn in episode four, returning to the very beginning of murderer Andrew Cunanan’s killing spree.
After watching him murder his final three victims – Versace, Lee Miglin and cemetery worker William Reese – in cold blood in the previous three episodes, episode four sees Cunanan undergo an emotional journey as he builds towards the murder of his former lover David Madson.
It’s the first time we see Cunanan seemingly emotionally attached to anyone, and provides some insight into his motives and the downward spiral that leads to the murder of the fashion designer.
Who is Jeffrey Trail?
We get very little insight into the character of Cunanan’s first murder victim; presumably that is coming in the next episode, with the series retroactively exploring Cunanan’s murders.
But, for the record, Jeff Trail, a former naval officer, was a friend of the murderer’s from his days in San Diego. According to a New York Times report from July 1997, Cunanan told friends shortly before leaving for Minnesota that he was flying to Minnesota to “settle some business” with an old friend.
The report goes on to suggest that the two had been romantically linked, but this was denied by Trail’s family.
Cunanan’s motives are clearer than ever
For the first time in the series, the murders Cunanan commits appear to have a clear motive. The episode opens with Versace’s assassin pummelling his first victim – his friend Jeffrey Trail – to death with a hammer in front of David Madson, who is frozen in fear.
A brief conversation between Trail and Madson suggests that Cunanan, who was in love with Madson, had found out that they had been sleeping together, and that Cunanan had killed him out of jealousy – thinking that somehow he and Madson would be able to build a life together with Trail out of the way.
As the episode unfolds, however, Cunanan begins to realise that his ex is never going to love him back, and that Madson is likely to run away at the first opportunity. He appears to realise this as he sits watching real-life musician Aimee Mann perform a cover of the Cars’ 80s anthem ‘Drive’.
Elsewhere in the series, there had been suggestions that his killings were a result of his craving notoriety (the day after he kills Versace, he picks up a copy of every newspaper to read the reports), but the murders that kicked off his spree appear more emotionally motivated.
Why didn’t David Madson escape?
The episode is particularly excruciating because we know exactly where it’s going. David Madson fails to escape Cunanan despite several opportunities on their road trip.
It is worth noting that this is one of the areas where the writers have had to embellish the most, as very little is known about what transpired in those days in late April and early May in Minnesota after Andrew Cunanan arrived to visit Madson and Trail.
“We know there was this murder, and then we know they were in a car together, and we know that David begged for his life at the end,” American Crime Story executive producer Brad Simpson told Vanity Fair, “but we had to fill in what might have happened during that time.”
A report by Newsweek in July 1997 stated, “Madson’s role remains hard to figure out. He apparently made no effort to leave; neighbours saw the two men walking Madson’s dog the day after Trail’s murder.”
The drama itself suggests that he was motivated purely by fear.
The killer’s misdirection
The show’s writers have been detailing repeated errors by the police, many of which may have resulted from stereotyping and a lack of understanding of gay life. In episode four, Andrew Cunanan throws the police off his scent by placing sex toys and gay porn magazines out on Madson’s bed before they flee, leading the police to assume that some sort of sex act had gone wrong.
The police later tell Madson’s parents ominously, “I can tell you with certainty, there’s a great deal you don’t know about your son”.
This continues the drama’s exploration into gay politics of the era, following the allusions to the AIDS crisis, and the police’s aggressive questioning Versace’s lover Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) about his sex life on the day of the murder.
Where are Donatella and Gianni Versace?
For the second episode in a row, two of the series’ most prominent figures, as played by Penelope Cruz and Edgar Ramirez respectively, are nowhere to be seen, as the show continues to delve deeper into the life of the fashion designer’s killer.
Have we seen the last of the show’s glamorous duo? As has become increasingly clear, the show isn’t really about Versace. Oscar-winning Cruz and beautiful Miami beach scenes have give way to something far more cold and brutal…
What time is American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on TV?
What can we expect from the next episode?
Writer Tom Rob Smith leads us to the very start of Andrew Cunanan’s killing spree, the one that would culminate in the murder of Gianni Versace.
In a tense, terrifying, almost Hitchcockian hour of the most awful suspense heralded by a murder of ferocious violence, Cunanan slips the few remaining bonds that tether him to the rest of humanity.
In Minneapolis, where he’s staying at the apartment of an architect friend David Madson, quite without preamble or warning, he slaughters an acquaintance of them both, Jeffrey Trail.
Cunanan, using his usual mix of guile, petulance and his terrifying presence, persuades Madson that they should go on the run, and that because the body is in Madson’s apartment he is heavily implicated.
Darren Criss as Cunanan is remarkable as a man who’s both charming and winning, but who is as unstable as dynamite.
What time is American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on TV?
What time is American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on TV?
What can we expect from the next episode?
We now move away from the bloody events in Miami to explore Andrew Cunanan’s previous murders, starting with elderly Chicago property developer Lee Midlin. There’s been some controversy over this drama’s accuracy even though it runs a disclaimer to that effect at the end. Certainly it looks so glossy and unfolds at such a luxurious pace that it’s hard to believe this horrific killing spree really did happen.
But it’s riveting, especially Darren Criss’s portrayal of the murderous fantasist. The emotional dialogue when he coldly executes a random pick-up driver has clearly been made up, but the scene still chills you to the bone.
What time is American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on TV?
What time is American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on TV?
The new series telling the story of the fashion designer’s murder is on 9pm, Wednesday 7th March, BBC2.
What can we expect from the first episode?
There are moments of deep, dangerous darkness in Tom Rob Smith’s brilliant screenplay for this very adult, hugely accomplished drama as we step into two worlds that will soon collide.
Fashion designer Gianni Versace is at the height of his career, while Andrew Cunanan, the man who is plotting his murder, has already killed four men when he arrives in Miami. He’s an unstable, terrifying presence, a fantasist who can’t stop telling stories and is unpredictable and obsessive.
There are echoes of Tom Rob Smith’s London Spy as Cunanan follows Versace (Darren Criss and Edgar Ramirez, both terrific) into Miami’s edgy gay underworld. But Versace returns to his opulent beachfront home, while Cunanan holes up in a rancid, cheap hotel.
What time is American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on TV?
Assassination of Gianni Versace viewers praise Darren Criss for his “gripping” performance as Andrew Cunanan
The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the follow-up to 2016’s true crime drama The People vs OJ Simpson, debuted on BBC2 last night – and viewers were blown away by former Glee star Darren Criss’ striking performance.
The second series of American Crime Story centres around the killing of the legendary fashion designer, but his alleged murderer, 27-year-old socialite Andrew Cunanan, is the real focal point, as the show’s writers attempt to build a narrative around the crime and Cunanan’s personal life.
Criss is undoubtedly brilliant in the role, creepy, manipulative and alluring all at once. Fans took to Twitter to lavish him with praise after episode one.
American Crime Story: Why did Gianni Versace die?
The audacious murder of Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace, shot in cold blood on the marble steps of his Miami Beach villa in 1997, has never been a “whodunnit”. The perpetrator is well known.
He was 27-year-old Andrew Cunanan, a serial killer who had already murdered four men before gunning down Versace on a sticky July day over two decades ago. Cunanan killed himself in a houseboat over a week later, following what remains one of the biggest manhunts in US history.
But mystery still shrouds the murder, with numerous conspiracy theories as to why Cunanan targeted Versace and whether the two had been lovers.
The second season of American Crime Story, entitled The Assassination of Gianni Versace, seeks to filter these murky waters, relying heavily on Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth’s bestselling book on the Versace murder, Vulgar Favours.
The series, starring Édgar Ramírez as Versace, Ricky Martin as his long-term lover Antonio D’Amico, Penélope Cruz as Gianni’s sister Donatella and Glee star Darren Criss as Cunanan, was filmed in Versace’s Miami Beach villa, now a boutique hotel, which looks much as it did when the designer lived there.
The series has received positive reviews from critics and viewers since it premiered in January in the US, with the exception of one family. The Versaces have broken years of silence to publicly condemn everything about the series and Orth’s version of events.
“The Versace family has neither authorised nor had any involvement whatsoever in the TV series about the death of Mr Gianni Versace,” reads a statement released by the fashion house.
“Since Versace did not authorise the book on which it is partly based, nor has it taken part in the writing of the screenplay, this TV series should only be considered as a work of fiction.”
Putting aside the family statement for a moment, it must be said that Orth is no slouch. She started following Cunanan after his second murder, analysing the gay scene in California where he had built a life on dreams and lies at a time when most of the mainstream media were nervous about broaching such topics.
She followed his trail from San Diego to San Francisco and on to Minneapolis and Chicago, and was ready to publish a piece in Vanity Fair on the unknown serial killer when she got the news that Versace might have been her subject’s fifth victim.
The story of a serial killer quickly became solely one about the murder of one of fashion’s greatest icons. “Versace’s killing meant calling the piece back, taking it apart on an impossible deadline and trying to stay ahead of what rapidly became the number one story in the country,” Orth wrote recently.
“The media circus was on; in this pre-social-media time, Cunanan’s murder spree was an early harbinger of someone willing to do anything to become famous.”
Orth had Versace’s name in her notebooks long before Cunanan ever arrived in Florida. She was then the only one on the scene with insider knowledge of the suspect during the manhunt, from interviewing countless of Cunanan’s friends and associates.
Many told her conflicting tales based on Cunanan’s tangled web of lies, but they almost all agreed on one thing: Cunanan had met Versace.
American Crime Story picks up this thread and runs with it, which was always the Versace family’s greatest fear. They not only strongly deny that Versace knew Cunanan, they also denounce rumors that the fashion designer was HIV positive.
The Versaces were able to seal Gianni’s autopsy report and keep it from the press, so no one outside the family knows whether the designer had HIV, a cornerstone of Orth’s version of events.
As the theory goes, Cunanan was worried he had had HIV and suspected Versace was the one who gave it to him. But as the Versace family makes clear in its statement, that version is conjecture: “Orth makes assertions about Gianni Versace’s medical condition based on a person who claims he reviewed a postmortem test result, but she admits it would have been illegal for the person to have reviewed the report in the first place (if it existed at all).
“In making her lurid claims, she ignores contrary information provided by members of Mr Versace’s family, who were in the best position to know the facts of his life.”
Those who were in the Versace villa the morning he died also dispute facts in the drama’s version of events. As an investigative reporter, I covered Versace’s murder in the mid-1990s and recently travelled between Miami and Rome to talk to the people who were around him at the time of his death.
I had previously met Antonio D’Amico, Versace’s partner, now 59, but he had always refused to discuss the case. In the wake of the drama being broadcast, however, he finally agreed to talk to me about that day.
He told me the drama is in stark contrast to the actual events as he remembers them. “What is depicted is not what happened that morning,” he explained, saying that he never once touched Versace’s body, so therefore was not covered in blood as Ricky Martin is in the opening scene. “It is an inaccurate portrayal of [Gianni], of that day and of how we were as a couple.”
“Significant parts of the [series] do not reflect the reality of the events that took place. I feel – together with those who know me well – that my character… is a misrepresentation of myself and what our relationship was like.”
D’Amico only met Martin, who plays him, after filming was finished.
The drama also suggests that D’Amico regularly procured young men for himself and Versace, any of whom could have given the designer HIV. D’Amico has declared that he does not have HIV as proof that Versace didn’t either.
Others around him also suggest that there is no way Cunanan could have stalked Versace and learnt his daily routine, as is depicted in the TV series. According to Charles Podesta, Versace’s butler at the time, they had only just arrived in Florida from the designer’s couture show in Paris. Podesta remembers the details of that morning.
“Gianni stopped by the kitchen to say he wasn’t eating first, as usual,” Podesta told me in an interview in Miami last December. “Instead, he was going to the corner for some magazines.”
That wasn’t his usual routine. His staff regularly brought the morning papers to the outdoor table where he and D’Amico ate breakfast by the swimming pool. He also remembers the distinct sound of gunfire that followed, “a strange noise, several loud pops one after the other”. And it was he, Podesta, who called 911.
While such details may seem banal, in the bigger picture they do beg the question: what other lines have been blurred, by Orth and the programme-makers, between fact and fiction?
American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace – UK Promo
Pics 1, 2 + 3 – Radio Times
Pics 4 + 5 – TV & Satellite Week
Pic 6 – Total TV Guide
Pic 7 – What’s on TV
ACS news 