Their roles couldn’t be more different — from aspiring spies (Holly Taylor on The Americans) to awkward tech execs (Zach Woods on Silicon Valley) to sheriffs searching for justice (Scoot McNairy on Godless) and a man who loses his longtime partner at the hands of a serial killer (Ricky Martin on The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story) — but one thing these 33 supporting actors have in common is that they’ve all brought to life memorable characters on TV in the past year. On April 17, at a beautiful estate in Silver Lake, these breakouts gathered together for The Hollywood Reporter’s annual megashoot, which reunited old friends (like This Is Us’ Susan Kelechi Watson and Insecure’s Yvonne Orji, who stuck around after the shoot to snap selfies together) and brought together many actors who’d never met before. By the end of the lovely garden party shoot, a few stories had been swapped and new friendships forged as they all prepared for the long Emmy season ahead.
Ricky Martin ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ (FX)
What inspired you to act? A movie many years ago called The Priest. I grew up Catholic, and it was sad, it was intense.
Most intimidating scene? I was playing Gianni Versace’s lover, so to have to shoot a scene where you find your lover murdered in the streets was intense. I think I lived as Antonio for those 10 days that we were in Miami because we were in the set, we were there right where it actually happened, so the energy of that house really was of impact for me and my performance.
While the challenge often is truncating an abundance of material, sometimes the dilemma is the opposite. In producing the follow-up to the hit limited series American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, producer Nina Jacobson found that FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace proved a more difficult story to tell than its predecessor.
“Whereas with the O.J. Simpson trial virtually every person involved with the story had written a book, in the case of Versace, we had much less information available to us,” she says.
The series creators based many of the key events in the story of Andrew Cunanan, who murdered the famous fashion designer outside his Miami home, on Maureen Orth’s 2000 book Vulgar Favors. They gathered additional information from newspaper accounts and available video footage. “But what happened between David Madsen and Andrew Cunanan, for example, when they went missing for several days, or how exactly some of the murder scenes went down — the only people who know about them are dead,” says exec producer Brad Simpson. “They had to be imagined based on what we knew of the personalities and the crime scenes.”
That’s where the storytellers must rely heavily on what they call “emotional truth.” “Marcia Clark used that phrase after she saw [People v. O.J.]. She said, ‘It’s not a documentary, but they captured the emotional truth of what happened,’” recalls Simpson, adding that producers did not, for either season, contact any of the people involved. “We want to be cognizant of the victims, but at the same time we think it’s best to tell the story based on historical evidence and to try to unpack what happened but not be beholden to telling one particular story in one particular way. That’s been our approach for the Crime Story series in general.”
kmannmakeup: Darren Criss & The Drama Actor Roundtable @hollywoodreporter #photo by @kouryangelo #grooming by me #darrencriss #americancrimestoryversace #bts
There are few things that can make a sextet of generally loquacious actors freeze up faster than an open-ended question about gender pay parity. Unlike their female counterparts, many of whom have not only forced the dialogue but also demanded action via the Time’s Up movement, the men gathered for The Hollywood Reporter’s annual television Drama Actor Roundtable find themselves looking awkwardly around the table, waiting to see who will bite.
On this afternoon in late April, it’s Ozark’s Jason Bateman, 49, who jumps in first; but it doesn’t take long before The Americans’ Matthew Rhys, 43, interjects, diffusing any tension with a joke — which, to everyone’s delight, changes both the tenor and the direction of the discussion. Fortunately, the group — which also includes J.K. Simmons, 63 (Starz’s Counterpart); Jeff Daniels, 63 (Hulu’s The Looming Tower, Netflix’s Godless); Michael B. Jordan, 31 (HBO’s Fahrenheit 451); and Darren Criss, 31 (FX’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace) — is considerably better suited for an eclectic and often hilarious conversation about the easy yesses (and easier nos), the roles still on their bucket lists and, yes, the on-set politics of prosthetic penises.
Darren, you signed on to play Andrew Cunanan, who is not only a real person but also a serial killer. What were your concerns going in?
CRISS I’ve been lucky, I kind of fell ass backwards into the Ryan Murphy camp, which has been the gift that keeps on giving. The only thing that gave me pause was playing a real person, and this particular person had very lasting effects on people who are still alive and the echoes of the tragedy and the destruction that he wrought. I couldn’t help but think about the sons and daughters and husbands and wives who were affected by this guy, and now they’re like, “Oh God, we have to revisit this and make it pop culture fodder.” That weighs on me.
JORDAN Did you ever think about reaching out to them at all?
CRISS I thought about it. Out of almost respect to them, I didn’t want to bug them about it. Again, this is a horrible thing to have to think about, so I let it go.
The charts below reflect how THR’s awards columnist Scott Feinberg believes the Emmy standings would look if voting for the 2018 race ended today. (Work released between June 1, 2017 and May 31, 2018 is eligible.) These projections are formulated using a combination of personal impressions (from sampling many programs), historical considerations (how shows with similar pedigrees have resonated), precursor awards (some groups have historically correlated with the TV Academy more than others) and consultations with industry insiders (including voters, content creators, awards strategists and fellow members of the press).
ACS news 