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The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Episode 3 Recap

This is the first episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace in which the titular Mr. Versace does not appear — in human form, at least; Andrew Cunanan does waft through one of his stores, caressing the bomber jackets and reading the coffee table books with either prurient or murderous interest (or, more likely, both). Instead, we travel farther back in time to two of Andrew’s earlier murders: that of a man the New York Times called a “wealthy Chicago developer” in this honestly slightly chilling article about his murder, written before any hint of Cunanan’s involvement had leaked to the press (the kicker, in particular, possibly haunts the woman whose quote it is), and that of a man whose truck Andrew needed to steal once he realized that the FBI was using early cell-phone technology to track his movements via the car phone installed in the Lexus he stole from Ed Miglin.

As ever, I have thoughts:

– Obviously, I didn’t go into this program thinking, “that Andrew Cunanan, so misunderstood!” But because I did start watching this not particularly knowledgeable about him beyond knowing that he shot Versace, I’d say that I was…open to feeling some kind of sympathy for him, and whatever circumstances of his life brought him to that place.  The show has done a great job of unfurling Cunanan’s truly monstrous behavior; the pathological liar, bad houseguest, and thief who seemingly stalked and killed Versace in what you could have perhaps argued (if you didn’t know better) was a crime of passion in the first episode has become the absolute sociopath that he presumably was.

– In addition to being a sociopath, Cunanan was not a very savvy murderer and it truly does seem like he should have been apprehended before he got to Versace — he certainly could have been caught before he killed William Reese for his truck, had the local radio not gone on air and said, “oooh, we heard the police are tracking Andrew Cunanan using his car phone! Andrew, if you’re out there, JUST FYI!!!!” Obviously, the story of EVERY serial killer involves a few close calls before they’re finally caught — if they are ever caught; from what I hear, the Zodiac killer is currently representing the great state of Texas in the US senate — but for someone who believes himself to be a genius, Andrew is not very good at the murder game. All I know about getting away with murder comes from watching TV, but it doesn’t seem very savvy to drive around in your victim’s flashy car. If you’re gonna steal someone else’s vehicle, obviously you do it in the dead of night so you don’t add to your body count (I found Cunanan’s murder of Reese particularly chilling; all of these are obviously very very very bad murders, and Cunanan is a very VERY very bad person, but he was truly just in the wrong place at the wrong time). When you’re swapping license plates, dude, steal the plate AT NIGHT in a parking lot and then place it onto your own vehicle somewhere more secluded, because switching around license plates in the middle of the day at, like, Target is very obvious!

– I continue to be impressed by Darren Criss in this part. This season of American Crime Story isn’t get the buzz that the OJ Simpson season did, but (a) the first season of an accomplished program always gets the most buzz, (b) the OJ trial itself was more firmly affixed to more people’s memories, and more a part of pop culture in general, © that season was truly, truly exceptional on basically all fronts, and impossible to top. But this season is also very well done, and he is EXCELLENT.

– I look forward to Judith Light’s Emmy speech. Vanity Fair’s coverage of this continues to be excellent, and their most recent piece about this episode indicates that Marilyn Miglin (whose products are still sold on HSN) has never admitted that her husband was gay, and that Cunanan’s relationship with him is a matter of supposition on the parts of, well, many many many people. It does seem unlikely that they were not known to each other. There seems to be some speculation that perhaps Andrew knew the Miglin’s son, Duke. Either way, I can understand that a family traumatized by a terrible murder would not want to indulge public speculation about their private lives.

What did you think?

Literally five people I know texted me, “OMG JUDITH LIGHT” as soon as they started watching this episode, and she is indeed great in it; Judith Light as a HSN powerhouse business lady is a brilliant stroke of genius on all levels.

“Remember payphones?” was a thing I sincerely thought while watching this episode. I also thought, “Judith Light’s luggage is gorgeous, but how does she keep it clean?”

However, it’s clear from the Miglin home that Judith Light knows all about keeping things sparkling white. (This home set is AMAZING.)

Don’t worry. That’s just some ham and not a part of someone’s body. (I did think, “OH NO WAS HE ALSO A CANNIBAL?!”)

This show, like Downton before it, cannot resist an overhead shot.

This is a stunning room, and almost certainly a location. TELL ME THE LOCATION.

It’s a bit hard to see here – why is this show so literally dark in the interiors sometimes? – but Judith Light’s Taffeta Skirt and Brocade Top formal combo just SCREAMED Elegant Lady of a Certain Age Attends a Gala in 1997.

As Heather pointed out on Twitter last week, TV truly does believe that women do a lot of Thoughtful Thinking while we moisturize. 

No, seriously, remember payphones? (Is it also terrible that this episode prompted me to think, “wow, backpacks really ARE useful”?)

Poor Lee Miglin. He had a beautiful office. I felt great, GREAT sympathy for him this entire scene. Per the assumptions set forth by this show, he was living a double life that was very difficult for him and it ended so brutally and at the hands of someone who truly was a sociopath. I cannot imagine how terrible this must have been for everyone in his life (I believe one of you noted that you were co-workers with his daughter? Did I imagine that?)

Again with the overhead shots! 

In case we forgot where this is all going.

Listen, those are some good jackets. They just are.

YES, YES, WE GET IT. Removing your makeup at the end of the day equals taking off the mask you show to the world, WE GET IT. (Having said that, this episode was directed by a woman, Gywneth Horder-Payton.)

Per Vanity Fair, the real Marilyn Miglin did go back to HSN three weeks after the murder, and honestly, good for her. I’m sure work was a balm to her; there’s a stronger parallel you could draw, potentally, between her and Donatella, but the show doesn’t go there directly. Perhaps it’s trusting us to draw that line ourselves.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Episode 3 Recap

Penelope Cruz Wears Versace, Couples Up with Javier Bardem at Goya Cinema Awards

Penelope Cruz looks stunning on the red carpet at the 2018 Goya Cinema Awards held on Saturday (February 3) at the Marriott Auditorium in Madrid, Spain.

The 43-year-old Oscar-winning actress was joined at the event by her husband Javier Bardem.

Also in attendance was actress Emily Mortimer.

This is the fourth year in a row that Penelope has attended the event in her home country. See her red carpet looks from 2015, 2016, and 2017!

Penelope wore Versace to the event the past two years, and now she’s playing Donatella Versace on American Crime Story. She’s once again wearing one of the brand’s designs.

It seems the Versace family’s distaste for the series has not affected their relationship with Penelope!

FYI: Penelope is wearing an Atelier Versace dress.

Photo gallery

How “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” Uses Dance Pop to Craft a Gay American Psycho | Pitchfork

Note: This article contains light spoilers.

There are plenty of murders in FX’s “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” but no one dies in the most terrifying scene that has aired so far. Midway through the second episode, gay-hustler-turned-serial-killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) picks up an older man at the beach. As they enter the john’s spacious hotel room, Andrew asks how many people he employs. “Five thousand, globally,” the guy admits, but hastens to add, “I can be submissive.” So Andrew covers his face in duct tape, hissing, “You’re helpless. Accept it.” Then he turns up the stereo and dances in his orange bikini-cut swimsuit to “Easy Lover” by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey until his mark stops struggling. At the last second, he pokes a hole in the tape.

The scene is chilling for many reasons. There’s the painful suspense of waiting to find out if Andrew will let the john die. (Because the season unfolds in reverse-chronological order, we’ve already seen him kill Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez) in the premier; we know he’s capable of it.) There’s the sadistic pleasure Andrew, who spends his days smoking crack in a $29.99-a-night Miami Beach motel room, takes in dominating a powerful businessman. And creepiest of all is Criss’ body language as he gyrates, his face frozen in determination while his arms flail. This is the moment we realize exactly how unhinged Andrew Cunanan is.

“Easy Lover” is a brilliant sync: a disconcertingly upbeat soundtrack to a man’s suffocation, with a touch of lyrical irony given Andrew’s line of work. But perhaps the most striking thing about using a Phil Collins song in this context is what the reference brings to mind: American Psycho, the Mary Harron film based on Bret Easton Ellis’ novel. Set in the 1980s, American Psycho finds yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman frequently extolling the virtues of his favorite soft rock hits. He turns on the stereo when he’s feeling great, which is mostly when he’s toying with a victim. In one scene, he plays Genesis’ “In Too Deep” and extemporizes on Collins’ career before he fucks and slaughters two prostitutes. Andrew’s encounter inverts the roles of sex worker and john, adding another layer of queerness to this tale of a gay man who preys on other gay men. “Versace” is using music to frame its subject as an explicitly gay variation on the American Psycho archetype.

Thankfully, for those of us who have no desire to revisit “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” or “Walking on Sunshine,” the show doesn’t overstate its case by cutting in additional Bateman murder jams. While the music of American Psycho captures the banality of Reagan-era capitalist evil, it’s the female-fronted house and dance-pop tracks that would’ve played in a typical ‘90s gay bar that suffuse this season of “American Crime Story.” Released the same year Cunanan turned violent, 1997, Jocelyn Enriquez’s egregiously overplayed “A Little Bit of Ecstasy” blasts as Gianni and his partner, Antonio (Ricky Martin), arrive at the club for yet another hedonistic night out, and soon decide to leave because they’d rather be alone together. Later, Andrew dances to La Bouche’s “Be My Lover” and Lisa Stansfield’s “This Is the Right Time” at the same venue as he prowls for victims, clients, hookups, or all of the above.

Like the disco that soundtracked the sexually fluid nightlife of the 1970s, the songs selected by music supervisor Amanda Krieg Thomas layer mantras of pleasure over beats that thump like an overexerted heart. Their appeal in the context of a gay club in the mid-‘90s isn’t hard to grasp: This is the only public place where queer men can express their desires without fear, and the music heightens that temporary sense of invincibility. The only threat in a room like this is AIDS—until Andrew appears. As soon as he enters the frame, all you can hear in these otherwise liberating hits is artifice, recklessness, and caprice.

Outside the club, the pop songs Andrew loves can sound even darker. In a flashback from the premiere, Stansfield’s “All Around the World” plays as a younger Andrew tries on expensive suits owned by his rich friend Lizzie’s (Annaleigh Ashford) husband. While she scolds him for raiding the closet and he reminds her, “I have nothing,” the song emphasizes the disconnect between his worldly pretensions and his parasitic lifestyle. The first time we see him in episode two, Andrew is a fugitive speeding toward Versace’s part-time home, Miami Beach, in a stolen truck. After catching a radio news report about himself, he finds a station playing Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,”cranks up the volume, and screams along with abandon. As high on his own notoriety as Patrick Bateman was on frivolous bloodshed, Andrew is celebrating the murders of men—three of them gay—with an iconic gay disco anthem.

There is a crucial difference between the American Psycho approach to music and the way “Versace” uses it, though. Bateman is a caricature of vain, ruthless, materialistic finance bros—a monster brought to life by a dominant culture that elevated those destructive traits. His affinity for Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and the News is an indictment of those artists. (Ellis agreed: “I ended up feeling bad for Bateman’s loving attention toward the band [Huey Lewis], which, in itself is this kind of criticism of the culture,” he told* Billboard.) Their songs are just another blandly sinister accessory to Bateman’s vapid existence, like his tanning bed and his embossed, bone-colored business cards.

As interpreted by this season’s writer, Tom Rob Smith, Andrew Cunanan is less a reflection of gay culture than a plague on it. If the john he nearly kills before going after Versace hadn’t been closeted, it’s quite possible Andrew would have been caught before he killed the fashion icon. When Andrew leaves the hotel room, the traumatized businessman slips on a wedding ring, calls 911, then thinks better of it and hangs up. Andrew’s earlier victims, who we’ll meet later in the season, are also casualties of the closet. In that sense, Andrew is the personification of society’s homophobia, which he uses to isolate and manipulate his targets, as well as HIV, which can turn sex deadly. In Miami Beach, he hides from the FBI in plain sight, buying neon tank tops and Speedos to blend in with the throngs of innocent gay vacationers. Music is one more layer of camouflage. Andrew’s grotesque enjoyment of “Gloria” isn’t a criticism of the song—it’s a perversion of its liberating meaning, and a threat to the culture that cherishes it.

How “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” Uses Dance Pop to Craft a Gay American Psycho | Pitchfork

Just another pretty face: should Hollywood stop giving bad guys a face-lift?

One of Hollywood’s most time-honored traditions is praising actors in recognition of the physical transformation required for certain roles. The awards come flooding in, as do vague references to Stanislavski’s method, and the clickbaity headlines set the internet ablaze: Matthew McConaughey packs on 40lb for his turn as a gold-miner! Christian Bale ate a single can of tuna a day for The Machinist! Cameron Diaz uglies up in Being John Malkovich!

Watching the spectacle of celebrity mutation excites us both as gossip-mongers and moviegoers, since we appreciate dedication to craft as much as we do a grainy on-set photo of Matthew McConaughey cradling his pot-belly like a stray dog he’s just encountered.

But just as often as these good-looking people make themselves less so in the name of art, actors are cast as substantially less attractive real-life people and don’t undergo the same bodily metamorphosis. CGI, hair and makeup go a long way, but for every Charlize Theron-as-Aileen Wuornos or Robert De Niro-as-Jake LaMotta, there are times where we’re asked to accept a character as “ugly” because their hair is frizzy or their teeth imperfect. But let’s face it: sometimes, by no fault of their own, actors are simply too attractive for the role.

This came to mind when the former Disney Channel star Ross Lynch playedJeffrey Dahmer last year, and when Zac Efron was cast as Ted Bundy in an upcoming biopic, and when Margot Robbie channeled Tonya Harding, and, most recently, as Taylor Kitsch and Darren Criss appear, respectively, in the new seriesWaco as Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh, and as serial killer Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.

In Waco, Kitsch tries to expunge himself of Friday Night Lights heartthrob Tim Riggins to play Koresh, pseudo-prophet, alleged sexual abuser, and leader of the Branch Davidian religious movement. Kitsch plays the part formidably, but you can’t help but wonder how Waco would look if the camera weren’t so enamored by its lead, who broods and smizes so frequently it’s as if he’s been conditioned to play up his looks. Then you remember it’s Kitsch, and he probably has been.

Although he shares something of a resemblance to Andrew Cunanan, Darren Criss’s performance in Versace is similarly gratuitous in the way only an excessively handsome person could make it, and the end result is a particularly doe-eyed brand of menace. I’ll hold off on any pre-emptive judgment of Efron’s turn in the new Joe Berlinger-directed Bundy biopic, but I’m not optimistic about that one, either.

Hollywood is of course a business, one that’s in the business of prettification; often, our enjoyment of its product is incumbent on our suspension of disbelief. But that becomes more difficult with biopics, particularly those concerning subjects of ill repute. When serial killers and cult leaders and disgraced figure skaters are made more attractive – read: packaged for box office consumption – than they really were, is something lost in the process? Are the films forcing upon us a redemptive arc that hasn’t been earned?

First, let’s look at the scholarship: there are, to put it mildly, competing schools of thought among academics about the conflation of beauty with evil. In a 1998 essay, the philosopher Mary Devereaux looked at the case of Leni Reifenstahl’s 1935 film Triumph of the Will, regarded by most cineastes as one of the most important, visually engrossing films ever made and, also, a heinous lionization of Adolf Hitler and the Nuremberg rallies (pardon the obeisance to Godwin’s Law).

Devereaux argued that the film’s valuable insofar as it makes you question the Platonic notion that beauty and moral goodness proceed from one another.

“Indeed, one of the most shocking things about Triumph of the Will is that it so clearly demonstrates that beauty and goodness can come apart,” she wrote, “not just in the relatively simple sense that moral and aesthetic evaluation may diverge, but in the more frightening sense that it is possible for art to render evil beautiful.” Some scholars are purists, and others still feel that the moral can’t be divorced from the aesthetic, and that the gussying up of reprehensible people amounts to a reappraisal, a muddying of the ethical waters.

Triumph of the Will is of course a loftier, more high-stakes case study than the ones at hand; Hollywood has so far stopped short of casting a preternatural beauty to play Hitler. But there’s something to be said about the industry’s insistence on endearing us to crummy people by making them sexy. If it’s not manipulative and cynical, it is disingenuous; these casting decisions are oriented around bankability, not believability.

In the best-case scenario, the performance, like Robbie’s in I, Tonya, is still gutsy and commendable, even as the film itself lazily deploys scrunchy hairbands and braces to sell its version of Harding (her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly also gets a not-insignificant sprucing up at the hands of the uber-handsome Sebastian Stan). At worst, they result in tone-deaf marketing, like how Jennifer Aniston, in Cake, was meant to be “ugly”.

“This isn’t about culling conventionally attractive people from your TV screens,” wrote Lindy West in a Jezebel piece called Why We Need More Ugly People on TV. “It’s not about telling you who you ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ find attractive. It’s about decoupling women’s value from their desirability, and embracing the idea that people are more complicated than that.”

Maybe this is why, when we talk about the lengths actors go for roles, the reverse facelifts they execute in the name of authenticity, we so readily wax poetic about their commitment and artistic zeal. Because, most of the time, studios are actually quite lazy in this regard. It’s a point of fact that when we watch a movie or television show the actors therein are considerably better-looking than us laymen. But Ted Bundy was no centerfold, and it seems just a bit unscrupulous to reimagine him as one.

Just another pretty face: should Hollywood stop giving bad guys a face-lift?

Gianni Versace’s Partner Slams American Crime Story Portrayal as a ‘Misrepresentation’

Antonio D’Amico, the longtime partner of the late Italian designer Gianni Versace, is not happy with FX’s new series about Versace’s life and death, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story — and he tells PEOPLE exclusively that the project contains multiple inaccuracies.

“Significant parts of the [series] on Gianni Versace’s murder do not reflect the reality of the events that took place,” says D’Amico, 59. “I feel — together with those who know me well — that my character … is a misrepresentation of myself and what our relationship was like.”

In particular, D’Amico points to a scene early in American Crime Story‘s second season where Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan, is depicted meeting him onstage in San Francisco after an earlier encounter at a club. (It’s not quite clear whether the series is endorsing this version of events, which appears to be told from Cunanan’s perspective.)

D’Amico tells PEOPLE the sequence “is pure fantasy as I was with Gianni — together with a number of other people, like the ladies from the San Francisco Opera council — for the entire time he was at the theatre and then we went back to our hotel together.”

“I remember it clearly because it was quite an event,” he continues. “That supposed meeting never took place. At least not on that day and in that setting. Just an aside, Gianni did not drink alcohol — everyone knew that — so even the champagne scene with Cunanan is fictitious.

D’Amico also says that the series gets wrong a few things about his 15-year-plus relationship with Versace.

“Neither Gianni nor I were looking to get married or to have children,” he says. “All we wanted was to live our relationship in the open — as we did. We were more than happy to have the nieces and nephews that we had and were not seeking children of our own.”

D’Amico isn’t the first to speak out about The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Versace’s family has also criticized the show as “reprehensible” and “bogus.”

In response, producer Ryan Murphy told Variety, “We issued a statement saying that this story is based on Maureen Orth’s book [Vulgar Favors],which is a very celebrated, lauded work of non-fiction that was vetted now for close to 20 years. That’s really all I have to say about it, other than of course I feel if your family is ever portrayed in something, it’s natural to sort of have a ‘Well, let’s wait and see what happens’ [stance].”

Speaking specifically about Versace’s sister, Donatella, played by Penélope Cruz in the series, Murphy said: “I don’t know if she is going to watch the show, but if she did I think that she would see that we treat her and her family with respect and kindness.”

Last year, D’Amico spoke to Ricky Martin, who plays him in the series. According to Martin, he reassured D’Amico that he would be satisfied with the portrayal.

A rep for FX did not immediately return a call for comment.

Gianni Versace’s Partner Slams American Crime Story Portrayal as a ‘Misrepresentation’

Darren Criss revives a monster in ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ – The Boston Globe

Are you watching “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story”? I’m loving it for a number of reasons, not least of all the performances. It begins with Darren Criss’s Andrew Cunanan shooting Gianni Versace on his mansion steps, then moves backward across the season to chronicle his previous four murders.

As Cunanan, Criss is surprisingly good — surprising, if you only know him from “Glee” as the openly gay student Blaine, who went on to marry Kurt. He’s creepy and slippery as the killer who, Mr. Ripley-like, pathologically lies his way into the lives of wealthy gay men, many of them closeted. He’s a primping, rabid social climber who carefully studies and researches his prey, with Versace — with whom he has a date years before the murder — as his big goal.

I can’t say Criss humanizes Cunanan, even as he removes layer after layer of Cunanan’s armor as the script moves back to his formative years. And that’s a good thing; we get to see what may have contributed to his devolution, and the way he is a creature of homophobia as well as an exploiter of it, but we are never asked to see him sympathetically. He’s clearly a grandiose monster of bottomless insecurity. But then Criss also allows us to see how Cunanan managed to con smart men, how he remade his hatred into a kind of aggressive come-on in certain situations.

Criss delivers an energetic, committed, and thoroughly macabre turn that holds the nine-episode series together. In “Glee,” he was dreamy; in “Versace,” he’s the stuff of nightmares.

Darren Criss revives a monster in ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ – The Boston Globe

Finn Wittrock On Playing Andrew Cunanan’s First Victim in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story”

As a frequent member of Ryan Murphy’s core ensemble, Finn Wittrock is used to being murdered. But in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, there’s the added weight of playing the real-life victim of who is referred to as a America’s first gay serial killer.

“It was surreal,“ Wittrock tells INTO. "It was one of the most, just physically and technically one of the hardest things. I was dead and covered in blood and prosthetics for about 12 hours for three days, and they kept telling me they were going to use a fake body double but they used me a lot more than I thought they would. I feel like I earned my stripes that day.”

In the new FX mini-series, Wittrock plays 28-year-old Jeffrey Traill, a former lieutenant in the U.S. Navy whose time in the military coincided with the realization of his homosexuality as well as the instatement of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Traill, a Gulf War veteran from a blue collar Illinois family, once appeared on 48 Hours to discuss being gay in the navy, though he was shrouded in shadowy anonymity to protect himself from dishonorable discharge.

“Gays are here in the military,” Traill told host Richard Schlesinger. “We perform our jobs and we do it well. … You’re gonna weaken our national defense if you remove gays from the military. And you’ll never be able to do it 100 percent—it’s just whether or not you continue to hunt us and force us to fear.”

“I watched that a lot—every day, over and over, and tried to get his cadence and his rhythm and his shame and also his pride,” Wittrock said of the 48 Hours segment. “He is a complicated fellow. And such a tragic ending because he seemed to have so much potential and just figuring out who he was and what he wanted to do with his life and he lived in a time when he was just a little too early for his time, kind of a trailblazer in a way, you know?”

Traill was, by all accounts, a good guy—maybe too good in that his friendliness and empathy may have cost him his life. Or perhaps it was just bad luck. Traill met Andrew Cunanan after leaving the Navy, but staying near port in San Diego, where Cunanan was a fixture of the nearby gayborhood. In her book Vulgar Favors, journalist Maureen Orth details both Cunanan’s history with wonts of flashiness and propensity for compulsive lying as well as Traill’s loneliness and internalized homophobia as he ventured out of the military and into gay bars. Their fateful meeting turned into a friendship that ended with Traill’s being beaten to death with a claw hammer in a mutual friend’s Minneapolis loft.

The Assassination of Giannini Versace writer Tom Rob Smith adapted his teleplay largely from Orth’s book, as she covered the case for Vanity Fair before Cunanan even reached Versace in Miami in July of 1997. (He would kill himself eight days later.) What Orth’s book offers is not just an in-depth look at Cunanan’s background and psyche, but extensive research into the victims (Traill and Versace as well as architect David Madson, real estate tycoon Lee Miglin, and cemetery worker William Reese), as well as the landscape of American homophobia that factored heavily into how Cunanan’s pre-meditated murder spree was able to unfold.

The FX series attempts to fit as much backstory as it can into a narrative that is by and large about Cunanan (Darren Criss) more than it is Versace (played by Edgar Ramirez), but it’s also more about the anti-gay rhetoric that existed in America at the time than it is about the specificity of Versace’s shooting.

"Certainly for me and I think for Ryan, too, the homophobia that runs through the story is—it brings up painful memories,” says out EP Nina Jacobson. “It is a reminder of how much had changed in 20 years. But to read even in Maureen’s book about where these guys are being outed as they are being murdered; [that police] go to the parents and say, ‘Well, there’s things you don’t know about your son’—it’s just so wrong and so disturbing.”

Jacobson brings up how the FBI knew Cunanan was not just gay, but a frequenter of gay nightclubs, and yet, they wouldn’t canvas gay bars in their manhunt.

“They wouldn’t go into the clubs, they wouldn’t put the flyers up,” Jacobson says. “They wouldn’t go into the community, into the gay bars saying, ‘Have you seen this guy?’ And he’s right there. The politics of that to me were really devastating.”

Versace, she says, didn’t have to die. And that’s one case that the show attempts to make as it tells the story of Cunanan and his murder spree in a backward fashion of sorts.

“There are so many chapters and its such a sprawling, interesting narrative—it’s like a tree that grows all these different branches,“ Wittrock says of the show. "Episode by episode kind of takes you down this individual arc that leads back to the main thing, so I am amused by the structure of it and the writing.”

“Just learning about who Andrew Cunanan is just an amazing dark rabbit hole to go down,” Wittrock continues. “It’s like learning about Jack the Ripper. It’s like you are horrified, but can’t turn away.”

As Traill, Wittrock may meet an untimely death, but he otherwise poses a powerful authenticity that Cuanan seemed to be envious of. Although he was closeted while in the military, Traill risked his career doing not only the 48 Hours interview, but also protecting another soldier from being gay bashed, spurning rumors about his own sexual identity. When Cunanan attempted to out him to his father by sending a romantic sounding postcard to his family’s home address, Wittrock held his composure but decided to cut Cunanan out of his life—at least, that’s what he said he’d planned to do after allowing Cunanan to visit him one last time.

Despite the star power that Ramirez, Ricky Martin, and Penelope Cruz inevitably bring to the series (Martin plays Versace’s long-term lover Antonio D’Amico; Cruz is a campy yet convincing Donatella), Darren Criss is truly the star of Assassination. The name recognition that Versace brings has overshadowed the other victims’ deaths since they took place, but now, the cast and crew insist, they use it not just to draw viewers in, but to take away the iconography Cunanan would have wanted for himself as a fame-seeking serial killer. Instead, Jacobson says, the EPs were hoping the theme would be more about "the inability to be authentic and the struggle for authenticity.”

“And the courage of Versace’s heroism,” she adds, “which I didn’t realize really. When you put him in a timeline, the only other designers who were out were dead, and they were out because they died of AIDS. He chose to come out at a time when Ellen wasn’t out yet. It was a very different time.”

And while Versace’s own hard working history and public coming out was admirable (both on screen and in real life), it’s Wittrock’s broody but noble sailor-turned-factory worker that brings the most relatable heart to the series. Watching him spar with Criss as his scene partner are some of Assassination’s most heartbreaking, too, when you know it’s based on a true horror story.

“We had a good time,“ Wittrock said of working with Criss. "There are some projects where you really take the relationship off screen and this one was more us talking as co-conspirators figuring it out together. He is a very generous person on set and a remarkable versatile actor and really jumps in and out of the character very fluidly.”

Wittrock said Murphy approached him about the role right as he was finishing up The Glass Menagerie on Broadway, and the timing was right not just for him to jump at a new series, but at another chance to work with Murphy, whose prolific creativity can be hit or miss, but is at least always fun for the actors.

“I think that I have been lucky to fall into the Ryan Murphy fan group and that has its own niche within it,“ Wittrock says. "I am honored to be in anything that he has me do, and its cool to play the spectrums of yourself.”

And for Wittrock, playing yet another queer role in the Murphy universe invites an opportunity for him to connect with a fanbase that has supported him in American Horror Story iterations and his role in The Normal Heart. A fanbase that, in 2018, is hopefully outraged by the homophobia that was implicit in the deaths of four gay men (Reese, victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, was straight) as it is excited by the idea of seeing Wittrock, Criss, Ramirez, and Martin play queer roles for nine episodes of Ryan Murphy television. It’s certainly a different landscape than when Versace came out, one of few public figures to acknowledge that not only was he gay, but he was happy, too.

Says Wittrock, “Bring on all the gay fans!”

Finn Wittrock On Playing Andrew Cunanan’s First Victim in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story”

TV review: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace is all about gay shame

THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE: AMERICAN CRIME STORY, premieres January 17 and airs weekly on FX on Wednesdays at 10 pm. Rating: NNN (Entertaining)

Ryan Murphy’s latest series is gruesomely intimate.

In recounting serial killer Andrew Cunanan’s cross-country murder spree in the lead-up to the fashion designer’s brutal shooting death, The Assassination Of Gianni Versace doesn’t shy away from showing exactly how his five victims met their violent ends.

In July 1997, Cunanan shot Versace twice in the head at point-blank range in broad daylight on the steps of his palatial Miami home. Murphy’s camera lingers over the bullet holes in his cheeks as he lies dead on a gurney, and later shows embalmers covering them with makeup. Another man-made orifice, a bullet hole in an eye socket, is the subject of a sweeping camera shot.

When another victim is brutally beaten in the head with a claw hammer, the show manipulatively cuts to his mother leaving messages on his answering machine at the exact moment of his death.

The nine-episode series – the second edition of Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology – uses the Versace murder to probe internalized homophobia, and it’s an opportune moment to revisit the shame-wracked Cunanan. Last year, U.S. president Donald Trump introduced a tax bill cutting services for LGBTQ people. Meanwhile toxic masculinity, gay misogyny and closeted Hollywood stars are simmering topics online and in the news.

Similar to how season one of American Crime Story, The People V. O.J. Simpson, used the football player’s murder trial to echo current conversations about race, this second instalment treats the Cunanan manhunt as an extension of conversations around law enforcement failing LGBTQ people.

But this is a Ryan Murphy series, so the social commentary comes with a heavy helping of sadistic horror gore, 90s gay club anthems, gratuitous nudity, luxury real estate (producers filmed in Versace’s actual South Beach home), era-specific wigs, wardrobe and props, and a supporting turn by pop star Ricky Martin.

The Assassination Of Gianni Versace is sensational enough to be addictive episodic TV, but the intimacy of its violence is rarely matched emotionally. Instead, its fascinating story falls victim to an over-reliance on cheesy genre trappings, an under-directed performance by lead Darren Criss and lazy violations of its story-in-reverse framework.

Based on the 1999 book Vulgar Favors by Vanity Fair journalist Maureen Orth, the series opens with Versace’s murder and then reverses the story, Memento-style, retracing Cunanan’s spree to his formative years as a boarding-school-educated golden child in La Jolla, California.

This case is well documented, so the drama for Murphy, his team of directors and writer Tom Rob Smith (London Spy, Child 44) comes from trying to figure out why Cunanan did what he did, what made his victims vulnerable to his sociopathic charms and the wider social context of the mid-90s.

The Murphy-directed season opener immediately sets up Versace (Edgar Ramirez) and Cunanan (Criss) as opposites. The murder is depicted in a grand, near-wordless eight-minute overture soundtracked by opera music. We follow Versace as he casually strolls to a newsstand while an agitated Cunanan cradles a pistol on a nearby beach.

Versace, it is later shown, is a hard worker whose brush with ear cancer emboldened him to come out of the closet and design clothes for women he imagines to be proud and strong. Cunanan is a highly intelligent, status-obsessed compulsive liar who uses sex to gain wealth and kills gay men, seemingly to out them.

After the first two episodes, the show reduces the Versaces – including Donatella (Penélope Cruz) and Versace’s lover, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) – to supporting players who sporadically return to provide contrast in episodes that focus on the other victims.

Since Cunanan took his own life without explaining his motives, Smith and Murphy must take dramatic liberties, but the view always feels outside-in. Though Criss looks the part of a crypto-conservative 80s preppy killer, he gets stuck in an American Psycho caricature mode.

This is partly due to edits, camera framing and B-movie music designed to deliver easy shocks. Other sequences are weightier, eschewing dialogue and taking time to unfold. There’s nothing wrong with pulpy horror and drama, but the producers can’t seem to settle on a tone. And by withholding Cunanan’s motivations until the final episodes, we’re left desperately searching Criss’s timid performance, which never evolves, for some sense of inner life.

The most tragic parts of the story come in the middle episodes devoted to Jeffrey Trail (Finn Wittrock) and David Madson (Cody Fern), two friends who fatally fall into Cunanan’s orbit. The show leans heavily on reductive flashbacks that not only slow down the main story, but take the onus off the actors to convey the complexities of shame and self-hatred.

What the show does more successfully is capture the class-blind nature of institutional homophobia. In one scene, police discover a body and immediately resort to stereotypical theories. These sex-obsessed conversations continually sideline investigators, creating a sense of high stakes that’s far more impactful than a creepy music cue.

Another highlight is Judith Light, who effectively steals the series in episode three. From the moment she drums her manicure on a countertop, we can tell this performance is about more than a high-camp wig. She plays Home Shopping Network (yes, the Toronto-based TV channel) beauty expert Marilyn Miglin, whose real estate tycoon husband, Lee (Mike Farrell), was Cunanan’s third victim.

She returns home to find something amiss, and soon her facade of hard-fought dignity starts to suggest a tragic mix of denial, love, compassion and anger. Light’s subtle performance is helped by the deliberate, almost real-time pacing of the sequence. (Perhaps David Lynch’s extended floor-sweeping in Twin Peaks: The Return is starting to have an influence?)

But in a show about parallels, the similarities between Marilyn and Donatella are largely left unexplored. Like Marilyn, Donatella must put grief aside to deal with business, police and media. And like Light, Cruz gets an extended intro – albeit more glamourous – that follows her chauffeured journey to Versace’s home, past the bloody steps. Sadly, as the story reverses, we don’t come to learn how the workaholic Donatella is able compartmentalize emotions (at least in the first eight episodes made available for review).

Interestingly, her character comes to represent the ways capitalism contributes to repression and shame. Late in the series, Donatella warns her brother to take the fashion house’s retail expansion and potential public offering into consideration before coming out.

“The rock stars, the actors, the royalty whose endorsements we cherish – they might not want to be associated with us,” she says, adding that designer Perry Ellis faced a backlash after going public with his AIDS diagnosis a decade earlier. “After that, people stopped buying his clothes.”

“Some people,” her brother shoots back.

(Incidentally, in advance of the show’s premiere, the Versace family issued a statement denouncing producers for entertaining Orth’s claim the designer was HIV-positive when he died. Rumour or not, two decades on, some people still think it shameful to be HIV-positive.)

It’s a worthy scene. But, too often, The Assassination Of Gianni Versace just can’t resist hitting its audience over the head.

TV review: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace is all about gay shame