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How Darren Criss Transformed Into Versace’s Charismatic Killer

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The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story hopes to illustrate how homophobia led to the loss of one of the greatest creative minds of a generation.

On one side of that coin is Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez), the household name that broke barriers with his ostentatious and bold view of fashion and his love for life and the world. On the other is Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), the charismatic murderer who seduced and murdered four other people before fatally shooting Versace in the face.

It’s a career redefining role for Darren Criss, who first entered the pop culture zeitgeist far on the other side from Cunanan as Blaine Anderson on Glee. His tenure on the musical high school show had Tumblr dub him as America’s boyfriend. Fans who remember him as the sweet-hearted, tender Blaine — and those who dismissed him because of it — will be shocked as they tune into Versaceto see Criss play smarmy, manipulative and deeply disturbed. The young actor deftly makes you feel for and deeply fear Cunanan at the same time.

Episode 2 revealed how the series plans to pedals backward through Cunanan’s killer spree to show the evolution of a murderer in a new way. While Versace holds title prominence, it is Criss’ performance as Cunanan that the series hinges on for the rest of the run. TV Guide talked to Criss about sinking his teeth into the role, the weight of knowing Cunanan’s victims’ families are watching and why Glee co-creator and American Crime Story overlord Ryan Murphy handpicked him to play the game-changing part.

You’re a little bit too good, if you know what I mean, at playing a serial killer.

Darren Criss: Well, I am not thinking of it in terms of playing a serial killer. That’s not how I would wake up going to work. So when people say that, it’s odd to me because I forget that’s something he did.

How did you think of it then?

Criss: I thought of an excitable, ambitious, hungry, young man whose obsessions got the better of him and other people. And he had very basic desires that were pushed to huge extremes. So I would try to not focus on the things we do know and focus more on the things that we didn’t get to see and the things that one could like Andrew for, which made those horrible things much harder to ingest because you are coming from a point of entry that’s much more palatable, ideally.

Why The Assassination of Gianni VersaceWill Be Ryan Murphy’s Masterpiece

Do you want people to sympathize with him, or is that dangerous?

Criss: No. No, no, no, no, no. We have to. First of all, I can say this because I am very cognizant of somebody reading this or hearing this or seeing something. Every day, I walked into work with the weight of the family and friends of his victims, who are very much alive, who are very much around, who are very much, I’m sure, familiar of the TV zeitgeist that this show will be and how difficult this will be for them to have something they’ve tried to make some kind of peace with over 20 years and all of a sudden it’s water cooler talk.

That really weighs heavy on me, so I say that as a prologue to, as an actor, it is my job to sympathize with Andrew. I’m in the business of empathy. That is my livelihood. That is what I do for my living and for my livelihood. It’s so hard to do that with somebody like Andrew, but it’s necessary, not only for me but… I’m not asking people to sympathize with him. I challenge them to see what happens when they put aside the worst things that a human being can do and not think about, I guess, the end horrible products and seeing where they came from and really questioning at what point could this have been you or could’ve been any of us, as hard as that is to grasp.

And it is in that journey that we can really start exploring larger issues about obsession and about things that come from good places that can turn into dark endings. That’s what I’m hoping happens. It’s not as simple as asking people to just sympathize with somebody. It’s more about questioning themselves and seeing how much they can find in common with a conventional monster.

Did Ryan Murphy tell you why he thought that you would be the best person for this?

Criss: No…I mean, look, I’m half Filipino, in the same age range as Andrew, and I’m very lucky to be in Ryan Murphy’s camp. So part of me jokingly was like, “Ryan, while I know there’s plenty of wonderful half-Filipino actors out there, as far as finding another person that kind of looks like him, is in the same age range, and is in your Rolodex of actors, I defy you to find somebody else, man.” I would say that jokingly as almost like holding him hostage. Like, “If you want to do this, let’s do this together.”

So while I’m sure there are a lot of other people that could’ve done this, I think he stuck with me because I was probably the one closest to his world that was not only game but kind of fit the bill. I also think that if they didn’t get a half-Filipino actor to do this, I think the Filipino community would’ve cried bloody murder, and rightly so. So here we are.

How much research did you do for it beyond the book the series is based on? Or did you kind of want to stay within the script?

Criss: I’m glad you asked that. There’s only so much research one can do for somebody like Andrew because he was a hundred different people to a thousand different people, so even the people that I have talked to who have approached me, that knew Andrew in different capacities, even different stages of his life, knew him at different moments, so there’s only so much you can glean from that.

There’s a couple of different Andrews that exist to me. There’s the one that walked and talked and navigated this earth. That person I will never get to know. There is the person that I can glean from Maureen’s book, which is, again, a thousand different Andrews. And then there is the person in the script that is written by Tom Rob Smith and the world that Ryan Murphy has curated. That’s the one I have to service. We take some liberties with characters. I don’t think for any storytelling flourish but for necessary thematic connective tissue. So that was the one that I ultimately wanted to service.

There’s only so much research I could do, which is nice because it’s a nice way to be like, “I don’t have to do any research.” But that’s not the case. I think you just have to make yourself available to all emotions at all times, and then just go into work every day playing each individual scene and hoping they stitch together as a whole.

I think as far as getting into Andrew’s head is concerned, there’s a lot of things that I found in common with him, and I think there’s more things that we all have in common with somebody like Andrew than we like to admit. And so just holding onto those common denominators are not only important but easy and a good way to stay on his, dare I say, side, as horrible as that sounds.

What was the shooting order for this series? Did you guys largely go in episode order? Because I know you went and shot at the actual house.

Criss: It was all over the place. It was like shooting a nine-hour movie. We shot everything all over the place. Yeah, it’s kind of hard to track the timing of stuff.

Even the order of the series is kind of weird because we’re going backwards through his evolution as a serial killer. So for you, how did you track of like, “Okay, it’s this day, and I am at this place in his psyche”?

Criss: Oh, yeah. I enjoy that chronological Tetris. I sort of have this masochistic joy of piecing those things together. Maybe it’s my weird OCD thinking. So it wasn’t hard for me. I enjoyed that challenge. I don’t know what the question is. I think I’m just agreeing with you that, yeah, it’s hard, but you do have to sort of map out where everything is. And you have to be very delicate with it because you can’t go to a 10 when you know in sequence you haven’t earned it yet. Or conversely, let’s say you’re at Chapter 2, and you dial it to an 11, but now you’ve blown your wad on where you get to in Chapter 12.

Emotionally mapping things is really, really fun for me, so it didn’t get confusing. It’s like a fun game for me as an actor, and I enjoy that process a lot. But yes, to your point, yes, I did do that. And that’s a very important thing to do because we went a lot through time. And I still haven’t seen the series, so I have no idea how it ends up playing out.

The series is going backwards through the murders, which is sort of a weird trip for the audience to go through.

Criss: What I realized we were doing while we were shooting was that we’re setting up — because you’re going backwards — you’re starting with the worst parts of Andrew. So it’s really weird to go back and then see the best parts of Andrew, and then really kind of question how they’re connected, but you see how they’re connected at the same time. And it feels bizarre.

The tension of this is built on his obsession with Versace and that connection that he feels to the designer, but you and Edgar don’t share a lot of time on screen together. Did you and Edgar keep that distance off set as well? What were those conversations like about forming Andrew and Gianni’s relationship?

Criss: I didn’t observe that distance because we were already apart most of the time anyway. But I think we are both excited to see the show for many reasons, but one, because we didn’t get to experience each other’s experience of the show. I haven’t seen all the stuff with the Versace family. He hasn’t seen any of the Andrew stuff. He wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. So it was like we were shooting two completely separate movies. One existed in this very glamorous, beautiful, lush world of ‘80s and ‘90s excess, and the other one exists in this very dreary, sad world.

For that reason, I think we’re both excited to see what it looks like and how they juxtapose against each other because with the show, what we’ve heard, what we’re going for was kind of dichotomizing these two men’s lives and trying to parallel them or juxtapose them in whatever way they naturally do.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story continues Wednesdays at 10/9c on FX.

How Darren Criss Transformed Into Versace’s Charismatic Killer

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Will Expose the Stigmas of the ’90s

The Assassination of Gianni Versace is not just about the takedown of the day’s most famous fashion designer, but also of the homophobia and stigmas prevalent during the time period leading up to his death.

Actor Edgar Ramirez steps into the iconic shoes of the titular designer in the next installment of Ryan Muphy’s American Crime Story anthology series. The show will not only tackle Versace’s death but also the events in his life that paralleled those of his killer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), the most significant of which was Versace’s HIV diagnosis in the mid 1990s.

Ramirez sat down with TV Guide at the Television Critics Association winter press tour on Friday and explained how issues like HIV and homophobia will take center stage when the series premieres later this month.

“The AIDS crisis — the AZTs and new medications were kicking in and some people had access to it. People weren’t physically condemned to death at that time, but socially they were still condemned to death, to death socially,” he said. “Part of what we wanted to explore is all the prejudice, all the misrepresentation and all the stigmas that lead up to his assassination.”

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story premieres Wednesday, Jan. 17 at 10/9c on FX.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Will Expose the Stigmas of the ’90s

Why The Assassination of Gianni Versace Will Be Ryan Murphy’s Masterpiece

In the first episode of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story Versace’s (Edgar Ramirez) partner Antonio D’Amico (played by Ricky Martin) is grilled by an investigator who’s totally clueless about the icon murdered moments ago. Who was he, really? the investigator wants to know. D’Amico, his white shirt stained with the blood of his partner, musters, “He was a genius.”

He was, but “genius” doesn’t fully convey the enormity of Versace’s thinking, or his impact. Gianni Versace rose from opening a small Milan store in 1978 to being a fashion, media and branding virtuoso with an empire worth $807 million by the time he was murdered in 1997. As much as he shaped those worlds, his story may seem like a puzzling choice for Ryan Murphy’s next American Crime Story after the seismic shifts of The People v. O.J. Simpson. Whereas the O.J. story divided America along racial fault lines, Versace’s murder (by a gay man on a killing spree no less) didn’t have the same impact to people outside the insular, elite realms of fashion and media. But if there’s one thing Ryan Murphy loves, it’s the element of surprise, and stories with high octane-impact. And while Versace’s murder is a heinous injustice on its own, Murphy took on this story because it has implications bigger than a celebrity’s death. American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is Murphy’s way of demanding accountability, of forcing the public to understand that the brutal slaying of one of the world’s greatest talents was due to deeply ingrained anti-gay discrimination within law enforcement and society as a whole.

“People often ask us if we’re going to do JonBenét Ramsey,” executive producer and frequent Murphy collaborator Alexis Martin Woodall told TV Guide. “It’s a big crime but it doesn’t have larger implications. We always have to have a social context. I think it’s really important to shine the light on the world FBI’s largest failed manhunt and why that happened.” That’s why this iteration of American Crime Story has “assassination” in the title: it chronicles how homophobia ended the life of one of the world’s greatest talents. Entrenched homophobia caused local police teams to bungle investigations of Andrew Cunanan (played by Darren Criss) as he killed his first victims in Minnesota and Chicago. It’s also why the FBI botched its manhunt in spite of generous evidence, clues and tips. And internalized homophobia is certainly why the gay community itself downplayed the fact a gay killer was on the loose, afraid of making gay people look bad.

Yes, Versace’s murder was a high-profile crime. But what should have been a watershed moment to look at how bias let a madman murder five people, including Versace, went to waste because the mostly closeted gay community was afraid (understandably) of the attention Cunanan’s sexuality would foist upon them. Twenty years later, the prolific showrunner is getting justice. Because of his need to correct the record, their shared sensibilities and his singular penchant for visual razzle-dazzle, Murphy is the only TV producer who can give Versace’s death as much meaning as his life. Unsurprisingly, it’s also his best work yet.

“Dramatic, emotional, brash — big primary colors of emotion and subtlety,” is how Tim Minear an executive producer who’s worked with Murphy on AHS and Feud: Bette and Joan, described the House of Murphy sensibility to TV Guide. “Pushed,” is another word he uses frequently. It’s a nebulous term, but one that makes sense to anyone who’s been yanked through the screen by Murphy’s heightened sense of, well, everything in his shows, whether it’s a chorus of gay schoolboys signing Katy Perry on Glee or Chaz Bono hacking off his hand in Horror Story.

Murphy and Versace don’t make the same products, obviously, but fundamentally, they create the same effect: baptism into a world of media obsession, celebrity worship, glamour, filth and sex. “I think it’s the responsibility of a designer to break rules and barriers,” Versace once said, and he lived it. Versace bucked fashion rules that said expensive clothes were supposed to look refined. He borrowed from taboo subcultures — punk, bikers, sex workers — and made dresses that were loud and risqué, purposefully showing too much skin or too much pattern, to upend ideas of good taste. He also single-handedly rebranded Miami, where he created an opulent mansion, as a destination for beautiful jet-setting people. He practically created “supermodels” — Naomi Campbell was his main muse — and, as the first to deliberately place celebs like friends Prince and Madonna in the front row of his shows, he pioneered the idea that fashion could mean celebrity, rock & roll and sex.

He was openly gay, a rarity in the days when “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” was supposed to be progress but barred gay people in the military from speaking about their personal lives. Being out was so rare and risky for a public figure then — yup, even for a fashion designer — that in April 1997, just months before Versace died, Ellen DeGeneres came out and saw her sitcom canceled and career stalled for years. Versace was a rebel. Versace invented giving zero f–s. Just as Versace didn’t simply make clothes but rather, a feeling, Ryan Murphy doesn’t make TV as much as he makes commentary. Nineteen years younger than Versace, Murphy also comes from humble beginnings (working class Indianapolis) and cut his teeth writing about entertainment for glossy pop culture magazines. Then he started creating pop culture himself, first with Popular, then Nip/Tuck, Glee, Scream Queens, the AHS series, The People v O.J. Simpson and Feud. Though every subject has been different, Murphy imbues every show with the same principles of contradictory emotion and images that leave viewers asking aloud and/or rewinding to see what the hell they just saw.

Murphy never hid his sexual orientation in his cutthroat industry, either. And just like Versace, Murphy’s distinctly gay sensibility informs his shows as much as a queer point of view was imbued in Versace’s clothes and casa. Their common language is camp, expressed through an innate instinct to provoke people with a patchwork of disparate, non-conformist influences. Gay men, particularly those of a certain age who endured hardships of yore, are unmatched in their ability to merge the sad, beautiful, profane, holy and hilarious in a single sentiment. If anything unites Murphy’s wildly different works, it’s delighting in the mix. Their end products aren’t the same, but Murphy and Versace are cut from the same cloth.

Andrew Cunanan, on the other hand, was the shadow image of the two. Using the thoroughly researched book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History as its bible, the FX series depicts how Cunanan had all the desire to be as prominent as Versace or Murphy but did nothing to accomplish it other than lie and con. Versace and Murphy achieved success with endless hours of work and sacrifice, but Cunanan just earned the tokens of it — cash, clothes, drugs — through manipulation and sinister deception. And where Versace and Murphy boldly confronted homophobia by being out and outspoken, Cunanan succumbed to it by lying and pretending to be somebody else, so much that nobody who knew him really knew who he was. He killed his closest friends in egomaniacal tantrums; Cunanan shot Versace because he represented what Cunanan could’ve been, and what he felt he deserved. He wanted to be famous. “The most ironic thing of all,” Alexis Martin Woodall said, “is that he wanted to be remembered and nobody remembers who he was. Everybody thinks fame is the answer and for most people, fame is totally destructive.”

Murphy delights in showing monsters up close, as he does in American Horror Story, but he’s most poignant when he probes how real-life monsters became that way. The Assassination of Gianni Versace allows Murphy to do what he does best: make viewers understand — but not empathize — with the devil. And only Murphy could achieve the delicate balance of vilifying a person without vilifying an entire culture — exactly what kept the case from having the same kind of cultural impact that O.J. had. That long overdue impact can now finally occur in Murphy’s dramatic retelling.

Murphy directed the first episode of Versace and, as everyone knows, he never shies away from brutal images. The season opener goes back to Versace’s face, ripped open by the stolen .40 caliber semiautomatic Cunanan used, several times in the hospital and autopsy room. It is gruesome and haunting, yet fitting. Versace made Medusa, the mythological monster with a head full of snakes, his logo; he saw the beauty in the grotesque and knew that shock had value. Murphy has made those elements hallmarks, using them as Trojan horses to make points about racism (O.J.), sexism (Feud) and now, homophobia, a subject that’s obviously personal. In the years since Versace’s demise, many groups and museums — and even his sister Donatella (portrayed in the FX series by her friend Penelope Cruz) — have honored Versace’s legacy. But 20 years after Versace’s death, Ryan Murphy has created a work that not only pays respects to the legendary designer but channels righteous anger at the institutions that robbed the world of a master whose sole life purpose was to create beauty, fun and love. And he manages to do it in a way that doesn’t shy away from the fact that Versace’s killer was cut from what Cunanan considered to be the same cloth. The result is a series so intense that even the cast and crew cried while shooting.

“The word genius is overused,” said Woodhall. “Except with Ryan. He really is a genius. He is a visionary.”

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story premieres Wednesday, Jan. 17 at 10/9c on FX.

Why The Assassination of Gianni Versace Will Be Ryan Murphy’s Masterpiece