The first time Darren Criss and Edgar Ramirez saw “Alone,” the complicated finale of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” they had no idea how their respective stories would end. For Ramirez, it turns out that Gianni Versace’s last scene came at the very beginning of his journey with the character.
“That was my very first scene in the show,” Ramirez said earlier this week at an “American Crime Story: Versace” screening event at the Directors Guild Theater in West Hollywood. Joined by assorted cast and crew from the entire season, Ramirez and his scene partner Darren Criss both spoke about their reactions to the finale — which they had just seen for the very first time, and were still struggling to process.
In one of the final moments of “Alone,” as federal agents are descending on Andrew Cunanan’s hideout, we trip back to the past, as Versace (Ramirez) and Andrew (Criss) have a conversation on the stage of an empty opera house. After a long discussion about the nature of beauty in the world, Andrew leans in for a kiss. Even when Versace gently declines, the sequence still ends on a note of peace and calm. Immediately shattering that atmosphere, the show snaps to its present, when Andrew fatally shoots himself in the head.
Although the two knew that scene might be used, it came as a surprise to both actors to see that on-screen conversation between their two characters placed where it ended up. For them, it created a sense of ambiguity about whether or not that interaction was meant to have occurred in real life.
“Were we watching one of Andrew’s machinations? Were we watching something that actually happened? I love the way that I wasn’t even sure anymore. And I kinda like that, because it made me think, ‘Is everything I just saw a machination of Andrew’s brain?’ I don’t know,” Criss said. “It was very effective to me because he lived in this nebulous sort of world. Considering how pivotal, whether fictional or non-fictional, that moment would have been, to put it right there at the end of his life was quite powerful to me.”
Added Ramirez, “I think that’s the beauty of good storytelling — that, in the end, it will fill the holes and connect the dots that reality can’t. No one will ever know what went through the heads of Gianni Versace or Andrew Cunanan. No one will ever really know if these two guys ever looked each other in the eye and connected or passed any kind of energy to each other.”
For Criss, the moment also crystalized an idea that he’d had after hearing questions about how many other Andrew moments actually transpired the way they did in real life.
“People constantly ask us, ‘Did that really happen?!’ I don’t know. But that’s irrelevant to me. It actually doesn’t matter to me. It’s the emotional content that we’re providing for this particular narrative. And that’s what hits me harder,” Criss said. “Whether it happened or not, if Andrew had believed that the emotional value of a moment like that happened, whether it was a handshake, a high five, a glance across the room, or a poster on his wall, the emotional content of that scene existed in his brain. It’s what carried him through what we watched these past nine episodes. That’s what’s more important to me.”
Many of the panelists reiterated that for them, the series is a reflection of love in many forms. Whether it was Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light), who returns in the finale for an affecting coda, Versace’s partner Antonio (Ricky Martin), or the memories of lost companions that Ronnie (Max Greenfield) refers to in his passionate interrogation room monologue, that message came through for them just as much as the pain that one young man inflicted twenty years ago.
“You know what really happened? The love between Gianni and Antonio. That really happened. I met people who know and were witnesses of that love. I think that’s what the show brings. We all feel that we know the story, but the reality is that we didn’t know the story,” Ramirez said.
In assembling the rest of the episode, writer Tom Rob Smith wanted to address the kind of reality that Andrew would have created for himself. But a central driving question of this episode came down to why Andrew would decide not to continue his moment of notoriety into a drawn-out court case.
“You’re looking at a man who everyone said is obsessed with fame, why does he not take the showcase of a trial? This is someone who was put on this earth to impress people. That’s what he wanted to do. He lost his money, he lost his looks, he lost the ability to impress people, and he turns to notoriety,” Smith said. “But I think when he gets to this endpoint, I think he’s disgusted with himself. That comes through very strongly in this episode. This is someone who wanted to be loved and who screwed that up so badly that when that news coverage fades, he’s left with this sense of profound shame. That was at the heart of the episode.”
Part of that process involved digging deep into what really happened during the Cunanan manhunt. Key scenes at the Miami Beach marina, the state of Andrew’s hideout, and even the priest’s refusal to take Antonio’s hand at Versace’s funeral all came from verified accounts of the aftermath of the murders.
“We know that the thing with the boat, they found bits of bread and Andrew’s newspaper clippings. We know that he was trying to escape. His dad did say that he rang him. That is all true. The ‘A Name to Be Remembered By’ title is the title that Modesto Cunanan wanted Andrew’s life to be called,” Smith said. “Actually, when you look at it, there were loads of fragments that were absolutely true. The Versace magazines by the head, again, that was real. And the coverage is all archive. We’re just trying to string them together.”
Executive producer Brad Simpson explained that the process of putting together the final episode was something that came at the very end of the process, a more gradual way to piece together the culmination of a season-long reverse approach to understanding the crime.
“It was the hardest episode. It was the only one that we didn’t have a plan at the beginning of how it was going to lay out. I think [Tom] did a brilliant job figuring out exactly how to let you know what’s going on inside Andrew’s hand and surmise what might have been happening,” Simpson said.
“We’re dealing with fragments, but when you have ten pieces of a puzzle and they’re all a cathedral, you can kind of work out the rest,” Smith said.
Tag: tom rob smith
‘American Crime Story: Versace’ Finale Is a Warning About How a Killer Is Made
While the weeks after the premiere of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story illustrated the path that took Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) on a killing spree across the U.S., Wednesday’s season finale returned to the death of the famed fashion designer and the aftermath of his murder as Cunanan spent his frantic final days before killing himself on a Miami houseboat.
The episode brought back many of the series’ all-star guest roster — Judith Light as widow Marilyn Miglin, Max Greenfield as Cunanan’s junkie friend Ronnie, Annaleigh Ashford as Cunanan’s oldest friend Elizabeth Cote, Jon Jon Briones and Joanna P. Adler as Cunanan’s parents — to show how all of the series’ major players were coping with Cunanan’s crimes.
Miglin, on business in nearby Tampa, was hoping her husband’s killer would be caught. Adler’s Mary Ann was dumbstruck that her son was responsible for such heinous crimes, Cote pleaded for the return of her kind-hearted friend, and Briones’ Modesto, whom Cunanan called in a desperate haze after realizing he wouldn’t be able to escape the cops, told his son he’d help him but then gave an interview on the news about a potential movie instead.
Much of the hour-plus episode featured Cunanan becoming increasingly more emotional and hopeless as he took shelter in a houseboat, watching Gianni’s (Edgar Ramirez) Italian funeral on television and reminiscing about his time with the designer. “What if you had a dream your whole life that you were special, but no one believed it,” Cunanan asked. Versace responded that it wasn’t about potential, it was about following through.
Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin returned as Versace’s grieving sister, Donatella, and partner, Antonio D’Amico, respectively, for emotional scenes coming to terms with Versace’s death. And, after Cunanan ultimately shot himself, a final scene juxtaposing Cunanan’s unremarkable final resting place and lack of mourners with Versace’s opulent mausoleum and Donatella’s palpable grief.
For viewers surprised that Versace himself was present in so few of the series’ nine episodes, writer Tom Rob Smith tells The Hollywood Reporter that it was not his intention to tell Versace’s story.
“We were upfront about the source material,” he explains. “We were never doing a biopic of Versace, because that’s this amazing success story. We were always doing a crime story, and the crime story is Cunanan. And what is interesting in relation to the crime story is the symbolism of Versace. What he represents, how he overcame everything that Andrew failed to overcome: homophobia and relative poverty. All the things that made Versace a success compared to things that made Cunanan destructive.”
The finale, Smith explains, is “bringing together all of these people that were destroyed and damaged by Andrew, and really exploring what it is to lose someone. I think this is one of the few stories where the victim’s loss is at the center of this piece — this hole that was created by Andrew.”
While Cunanan’s final moments were largely fictional, since the killer was holed up in Miami alone, Criss tells THR that he first thought that Cunanan’s suicide was largely an act of desperation. But after speaking with Smith about it, he realized that the decision was very deliberate.
“This is a guy who could have gone to court,” Criss says.“He could have stretched it out forever. He could have been Charles Manson. If he was looking for fame and notoriety then he could have stuck with that. He could have been incarcerated and continued to be on magazines for the rest of his life.
He adds, "This is a guy who has curated his entire life’s story very specifically, to the T. His backstory, what his parents did. Different people knew different versions of him because he was very specific of how his image would appear and what his story was. So I think he must have come to a point where he realized that if he was incarcerated, that narrative was taken away from him and the only way to control or almost canonize his notoriety and infamy would be to take his own life.”
The season also touched on the internalized homophobia within law enforcement at the time that potentially hindered the investigation of Cunanan’s other murders before Versace — David Madson, Jeff Trail, Lee Miglin, William Reese — but Smith tells THR the way the homophobia affected Cunanan was also incredibly destructive.
“Ultimately the homophobia, I think, is much more about Andrew’s homophobia — the way it beat him as a person and the way he soaked up everything, rather than it just being a personified police officer doing it,” he says.
But the juxtaposition between the two men from similar backgrounds who grew up to do vastly different things with their latent potential is what the finale ultimately drove home.
“You can’t just say Andrew was beaten by society. Other people overcame the things that he didn’t,” Smith says. “You’re contrasting, I think, two very different people who have many similarities in the beginning and why one person was full of love and created so much — Versace and this genius — with one person who became such a monster. That, to me, is one of the central shapes of the story.”
‘American Crime Story: Versace’ Finale Is a Warning About How a Killer Is Made
‘The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Season Finale: What Does Designer’s Murder Mean 20 Years Later?
Tonight we returned to the July 15, 1997 crime scene where serial killer Andrew Cunanan guns down famed Italian designer Gianni Versace on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion, and a manhunt pursues. Having once been tested with an I.Q of 147, Cunanan was brilliant and he was able to dodge the Feds and change his appearance not just for another eight days in Miami Beach after his notorious crime, but for roughly three months prior after taking the lives of naval officer Jeffrey Trail, lover David Madson, Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin, and caretaker William Reese.
Cunanan ducks and covers in a house boat, where he watches the media coverage of his slaughter, that is until the police descend upon him, and we see that he commits suicide with the same gun he used to kill Madson, Reese and Versace.
Some have criticized this second season of American Crime Story for not having the resonance of 2016’s The People v. O.J. Simpson. In an era where social media over hypes headlines, that tabloid trial continued to ring true 20-plus years later, not only in the way it was originally covered by the media, but it also touched upon the reality that times haven’t changed. As series EP/writer Scott Alexander assessed during a panel for the show, bad relationships between police departments and blacks continues to exist, ditto for gender inequality in the workplace as we saw portrayed in Sarah Paulson’s Emmy-winning performance of prosecutor Marcia Clark.
If there was a gripe by critics over the Assassination of Gianni Versace, it was a superficial one, as the miniseries across nine episodes didn’t dote on the ins and outs of the intriguing fashion designer’s life, rather the deplorable murderer Cunanan. However, much like O.J. Simpson focused on how a fractured American has remained exactly that, Gianni Versace zeroed on the complexities that the gay community weathered in the late ’90s, and how homophobia continues to pervade society.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the piercing speech delivered by Ronnie (Max Greenfield turning in an Emmy worthy performance) to the Feds after they bring him in for questioning over Cunanan’s whereabouts. Wiry and HIV-positive, Ronnie berates them for their insensitivity and idiocy in not catching Cunanan sooner while he was in plain sight in Miami (As EP Tom Rob Smith said at TCA, the Cunanan murder case “was the largest FBI fail of all-time.”)
Ronnie blasts, “The other cops here, they weren’t searching so hard were they, why is that? Because he killed a bunch of nobody gays?…You know what the truth is, you were disgusted by him, long before he became disgusting. You’re so used to us lurking in the shadows. Ya know, most of us, we’re obliged! People like me, we just drift away, we get sick, nobody cares, but Andrew was vain. He wanted you to know about his pain, he wanted you to hear, he wanted you …he wanted you to know about being born a lie. Andrew is not hiding. He’s trying to be seen.”
EP Ryan Murphy at TCA said that Versace’s murder was a “political” one and that Cunanan was “a person who specifically went out of his way to shame and out people…He was having a form of payback for a life he could not live.” At one point Murphy and the American Crime EPs considering putting Cunanan’s name in the title, but they decided they didn’t want to glamorize him.
At a post season finale screening Q&A Monday night at the DGA Theatre in Hollywood, EPs and cast members discussed the personal impact for them working on the show, and how the gay community has been effected in the years since Versace’s murder.
Judith Light, who plays Marilyn Miglin, the wife of Cunanan victim Lee Miglin, said that Gianni Versace, “is a cultural and historical event, and that’s what I think is so powerful about it. And when we talk about the time it happened and the love that people had for each other, particularly Antonio and Gianni, and that relationship is iconic in the sense that we’re still living in a time of homophobia. And what this does, it talks about that and brings it present and reminds us where we were in the ‘90s and talks about that we’re still not finished with it today.”
“Had Andrew had a life where he could have been open and lived his life in a way that was supportive to him, these things may not have happened,” added Light.
“We live in divided times about how separate we all are, but it (American Crime Story) shows how interconnected we are” said Tom Rob Smith about how Cunanan’s atrocities didn’t just damage those in rich Italian circles, but extended to various society levels, rich and poor. Smith wrote tonight’s episode “Alone,” which was directed by Dan Minahan.
One of the more intriguing turn of events following Versace’s murder which tonight’s season 2 finale briefly covers is how the fashion designer’s boyfriend Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) was arguably casted out by the Versace family following the murder; blocked from taking ownership of the Lake Como property promised to him by Gianni no thanks to sister Donatella and the label’s board. The miniseries shows Antonio taking his life with a bottle of pills, when in fact that’s debated whether he actually went that far in his depression following Gianni’s murder. What is known is that Antonio is alive and well, with his own fashion label in Northern Italy, and a reported $30K a month payout for life in Versace’s will. Overall, Donatella and Antonio were never on good terms.
Having been a closeted gay during pinnacles of his pop music career, and finally coming out in 2010, playing Antonio was both a cathartic and painful experience for Ricky Martin.
“I feel so much sadness seeing this last episode, and also a lot of anger; this could happen over and over again,” said Martin about the struggles which gay men go through in a homophobic society. He is proud that Versace possessed a strong courage to be out. As Martin confessed on stage the other night he personally “made a lot of my partners hide” and endured “a lot of self hate.”
But despite reliving the pain, there was a positive, resilient takeaway from The Assassination of Gianni Versace for Martin.
Says the Grammy winner, “I just want to be louder, louder and louder”
A Quick Chat With Tom Rob Smith, the screenwriter of The Assassination of Gianni Versace – American Crime Story
How did you get involved with The Assassination of Gianni Versace – American Crime Story?
It was never called that at the beginning. The producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson sent me the book which the series is based on by Vanity Fair journalist Maureen Orth, called Vulgar Favors. They said they were thinking about doing a mini-series based on it. Both Brad and Nina knew my writing from my novel CHILD 44, and the scripts for LONDON SPY. And that was how it began.
What was it about the project that attracted you?
The material was challenging, the main character – Andrew Cunanan – is intriguing and human in his early years, but gradually descends into addiction and murderous madness, so the challenge was how to structure the story because once Cunanan starts killing he can’t be the centre of the episodes.
Was the fashion world one you were already familiar with?
I knew a little, I guess. I read everything that had ever been written on Versace. I was surprised by how little attention and scrutiny he’d been given, considering he was such an amazing man.
How did you carry out research?
Maureen Orth is the journalist, so she provided the bulk of the research, I also read through all the FBI files, and as I said, everything that been written about Versace. I also travelled to San Diego and went to all the most important places in Andrew Cunanan’s life, just to get a feel for them.
During the writing of the drama did you warm to the principal characters, as you found out more about them? Did your preconceptions change?
The most unusual aspect of this show is that the victims are the central characters, they are the heart and soul of the piece. I have to admit, before I read the book all I knew of the case was that Versace had been shot on the steps of his Miami mansion, it’s remarkable to me that the entire story was in shadow. Those other victims were extraordinary people, their stories deserved to be told.
How different did it feel writing your first true crime story? How much did you have to fill in the gaps of existing material or ‘dramatise’ events?
There are gaps, but any dramatisation was only ever done to support the larger truths. We all knew that David Madson had nothing to do with the murder of Jeff Trail, we all felt that very strongly, so we needed to figure out how to convey that innocence to the audience, to show why David left with Andrew.
Do you think the title of the show represents what it is really about?
I actually didn’t choose the title so I can’t address that question but I don’t think the title of the non fiction source material would have been right.
We understand the Versace family are not happy with the show. Has this been very disappointing and how have you dealt with this?
Their position is the same as they had with the source material – their statement is very similar. In the end, this is a celebration of an amazing man, it was a tragedy that Versace was taken from the world, both from his family, and from a creative perspective. We set out to contrast why one man was so great, and one man became so despicable.
Do you think your background as a novelist help or hinders screenwriting?
Both! There are advantages and disadvantages, but mostly advantages I think. This series plays a long game, the lie that Andrew tells Versace in Episode One, seems like a piece of nonsense, but we reveal how much truth there is in it, how much sadness, in Episode Eight.
Is it very different working as a screenwriter in the USA from the UK? Are there key differences?
At the moment writers are considered more central to the process in the US than in the UK, but the UK model is in the process of changing.
What have you got coming up next?
A new show for BBC Two, called MotherFatherSon, an eight part original show.
via Sharon Marie Wright’s Facebook page | 20 March 2018
ACS Versace Cast at the For Your Consideration event IG Story Video Compilation via amber_curry, eli.n.or, keonityler, ohheylynette, rachacha920 and robert.liu’s Instagram Story (March 19th, 2018)
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