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Ryan Murphy is poised to give audiences another jolt of innovative storytelling starting Wednesday with the premiere of FX’s “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.”

The producer took time out from “Versace’s” Jan. 8 premiere party at the Hollywood Palladium to speak with Variety about the development of the series and the revelatory performance by series star Darren Criss as killer Andrew Cunanan.

How did you come up with the idea of having the story unfold in a backward-chronological fashion?

The idea of telling the story backwards was [FX CEO John] Landgraf’s. We had written the first two (episodes) and then you go in and talk to John and say, “OK, here’s the story.” We just started talking about the “onion peel” of shame — because really it’s all about shame — and we just started talking narratively about that. The more we talked about it in the room, the more we liked it. We knew that we were following ‘The People V. O.J. Simpson” which is a really difficult thing to do so we have to do everything we can to make it special.

What did that require of you on the production end?

It’s a very hard thing to construct because you have to be uber-prepared. The actors have to be very informed. I liked to work by giving (actors) concentrated information but not giving them much more than that. It was hardest on (writer) Tom Rob Smith and the actors. But it was the question of how do we keep being ambitious, how do we keep challenging ourselves? When you go backward in someone’s trajectory it’s more surprising for the audience and I think the experience is deeper. We tried to make it so that if you watched the show backwards it would be an interesting and oddly symbiotic thing. It’s a narrative device that takes a lot of extra planning, but when it works it’s great.

Darren Criss has drawn mostly rave reviews for his performance, which is very against type for the former “Glee” trouper. What was it that gave you confidence he could handle this role?

It was important to me that we were true to Cunanan’s ethnicity (Filipino and Italian). I had only directed him once (on “Glee”) but we stayed friends. I remember thinking he was a really good dramatic actor. He did something weird once in a “Glee” scene. I told him please don’t lose that excitement, and he never did. He always checked in and checked in with me. I called him when we were ready to greenlight (“Versace”). I wanted Cunanan like Darren to be a discovery for the audience. The interesting thing about Cunanan is you don’t know what he’s capable of and to have the actor in it be on the same powerful journey and I think it is.

Did he have any pause about taking on the role of a spree murderer?

(Darren) really went for it. He studied it, he pushed himself hard. His performance got quieter and more concentrated and studious and I like that. It was powerful to watch. I was not interested in just doing a serial killer story but to track the idea of how does someone become a monster?

How do you think the audience will react?

Darren is reminding me a lot of Sarah Paulson’s trajectory. It was powerful to watch somebody step into adulthood in a way. It’s very rewarding.

With “Versace” you are continuing your commitment to hiring women for at least half of the directing assignments on your show. Your Half Foundation has also been proactive in opening doors for female directors. These initiatives could not be more timely as the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements take root.

Everybody’s talking about it. it’s important. I changed the dynamic of my company. The most important thing is that the culture has changed to be more about ideas and the exchange of ideas than ego. It’s interesting when women direct. The work is better. They ask more people to participate. I’ve been doing this a year and a half. It’s been a really good change in my life. That foundation may be the most important thing I’ve ever done in my career. I’m delighted to just keep going.

Ryan Murphy on ‘Versace,’ Darren Criss’ Star Turn and the #MeToo Movement

The most important word in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story isn’t “Versace.” It’s “assassination.” That’s going to throw some people, but I think it’s key to why the new FX miniseries works at all.

Assassination is the follow-up to 2016’s massively acclaimed, heavily viewed The People v. O.J. Simpson, which won nine Emmys and was nominated for even more. It was a smartly conceived look at an event in American history that had been written off as tawdry tabloid fodder, but one that nevertheless spoke to conversations we’re still having in America about race, class, gender, and power. And yet it was also a lot of fun, if you didn’t want to dive any deeper than wondering what the hell John Travolta’s performance was supposed to be about.

Assassination is … not that. It’s a grim tragedy whose structure moves backward in time and forces you to keep thinking about the dark ends that many of its characters will meet at the hand of spree killer Andrew Cunanan, who killed five people in 1997, culminating in the death of famed fashion designer Versace.

There’s not as much Versace as you might expect, and it barely delves into his fashion empire. The designer is, instead, a kind of ghost haunting the proceedings, an out gay man who lives openly with the love of his life, insulated by the money that has given him the security to be open about himself.

Assassination may not be as enjoyable to watch as O.J., but it’s striking to see how thoughtfully all involved approach a very different story in a way that gives it its own tone, its own themes, and its own grandeur. This is a more difficult but more ambitious work, and it stands as a worthy companion.

Assassination’s most notable structural element is the way that writer Tom Rob Smith (who wrote all nine episodes — of which I’ve seen all but the finale) begins the story with Versace’s death and then mostly slides backward in time. The first two episodes deal, somewhat, with the bungled manhunt for Cunanan, but from episode three onward, the series traces the killer’s tracks backward through the country, turning three of his other victims into characters in their own right.

Thus, Cunanan kills David Madson, the man with whom he shared the most vivid romantic connection, in one episode, and then Smith fills in the details of their relationship and its splintering over the next several episodes. It’s vaguely similar to the structure of the Christopher Nolan film Memento, which uses its backward structure to mimic the way its protagonist suffers from short-term memory loss. But Smith has something more on his mind.

As with O.J., the central idea of Assassination is that this crime allows viewers to examine certain dynamics of American life that allowed for this to happen. This idea can express itself in something as straightforward as authorities not picking up Cunanan because there was an unexpressed disinterest and distaste for a killer who targeted gay men, or as complex as a military man trying to cut off his own distinctive tattoo so he won’t be outed by a fling who spotted said tattoo and, thus, kicked out of the armed forces. American society in the ’90s didn’t force Versace or Cunanan into the closet — both were out, Versace very publicly so — but it was all too happy to build the closet, leave the door open, and gently coax them toward it.

Some of this allows the miniseries to play around with the idea of just how much things have changed in terms of LGBTQ rights since the 1990s. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” no longer exists as policy, for instance, and the idea of two men having a long-lasting relationship with each other is no longer seen as a curiosity in the public eye. But the series is also about how the inability to live your life and sexuality openly becomes a kind of buried trauma for an individual, for their family, for their nation.

The series is never as simplistic as “Society is the real monster!” It’s very clear-eyed about the idea that Cunanan might very well have been a sociopath. (We still know strikingly little about him.) But the existence of a killer like Cunanan requires a society that’s all too comfortable with burying secrets as deeply as it possibly can. Thus, the backward-tracking structure becomes central to the series’ larger themes: Here, secrets are thrust out into the open, with blood and fury, and then Smith’s scripts push them back down beneath the surface.

A closeted businessman is murdered, and even as the details are covered up by his family — who to this day insist the murder was completely random, despite the fact that the man had clearly let Cunanan into his house — the scripts move backward in time, both resurrecting him and restoring whatever secrets he kept. Truth is glimpsed, and then you look away.

This structure means that Assassination ends up in an intriguing but potentially frustrating place for many viewers. It’s perhaps the most somber piece of work producer Ryan Murphy (who directs the premiere) has ever been associated with, and watching eight episodes over two days put me in a bit of a sour mood (in a good way, I think). A lot of people won’t want to take this particular wallow, and I don’t know that I’d blame them.

But the deeper I got into Assassination, the more I became convinced it’s somewhat brilliant in how its structure mirrors the story it’s telling. And as with any given Murphy production, the show’s cast is electrifying. Édgar Ramírez and Ricky Martin craft a deeply believable love for a lifetime in the handful of scenes they share together as Versace and his partner Antonio D’Amico, while Penélope Cruz might seem over the top as Donatella Versace, until you check out actual footage of the woman and realize Cruz has absolutely nailed her performance.

The actors playing the less famous characters have even more room to win over viewers. As Madson, Australian actor Cody Fern plays the closest thing the series has to a conscience, and both he and Finn Wittrock (as Cunanan victim Jeff Trail) are mesmerizing as young men who have to live with the compromises of being openly (or not so openly) gay in the 1990s. Judith Light pops up in a one-episode role that stays on just the right side of camp (and the great TV director Gwyneth Horder-Payton, who directs three of the nine episodes, gives her a terrific final shot).

But it’s Darren Criss as Cunanan who leaves the biggest impression. Criss is best known as a dreamy song-and-dance man from Glee, and his take on Cunanan is the very best kind of take on a dark character. He doesn’t want to create empathy for Cunanan so much as a kind of understanding. You are invited to think about him less as a person and more as an aberration, like some dark part of America’s worst self-made flesh. This is going to redefine Criss’s career, and it deserves to.

If all of this sounds like the series is more interesting to think about than it is to watch, well, sometimes that’s true. But it’s still fascinating to observe Smith and his collaborators navigate a story filled with pitfalls (not least of which is how many stories in our culture have depicted gay men as vicious, vacuous killers — a description that could maybe fit Cunanan) and make it about more than just itself.

The characters in Assassination of Gianni Versace come so close to glimpsing a better life for themselves, only to find it was a mirage all along. Things have changed since the 1990s, sure, but not as much as we might hope they have. The closet is less visible, but its shadow remains.

American Crime Story’s Versace season is far more about the murderer than the murdered