The first thing you notice about American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is that it doesn't spend much of its time with the famous fashion designer in its title. The second thing you notice is the person the show does follow for most of its run: the man who murdered him. As Andrew Cunanan, the darkly charismatic and deeply disturbed man who killed Gianni Versace, Darren Criss is the unquestionable star of the show. Of course, he wouldn't blame you for not knowing that from the start. After all, neither did he.
"I knew as much as most people know about it," Darren Criss tells me during lunch while promoting Versace in New York. "But I've spoken to a lot of people... and they said, 'I didn't even know he was killed!"
At first, you might not know what to make of Criss's performance as the notorious murderer. He spends much of the show's premiere evading capture after having killed one of the most prominent figures in the fashion world and largely getting away with it. As the show stretches back into Cunanan's history, the overwhelming completeness of Criss's transformation becomes remarkable. He shifts from sinister gunman to a darkly enchanting boy genius, a guy who belts the lyrics to Laura Branigan's "Gloria" as he arrives in Miami to kill Versace, wining and dining victims and cohorts alike with a chilling talent for cycling through whatever emotion or approach will get him what he wants.
It's a huge shift for the energetic and irrepressibly pleasant actor who became an overnight teen idol for playing Blaine Anderson on Glee—a role that put him in the orbit of Ryan Murphy, who years later, would reach out to Criss with the role that will doubtless cause many Blaine fans great distress.
"Andrew is kind of the stuff of urban legend, especially in the gay community. I had a friend who told me, 'Oh you're playing the gay boogeyman?'" Criss tells me. "And I was like, really? This was a guy who was a young man in the '90s, and he was like 'Oh yeah, we would joke about it, like, Oooooo Andrew Cunanan is gonna come get you,' obviously very irreverently."
Like a lot of jokes, there's a dark truth to that bit of irreverence. Versace's murder is but a trap door leading to an unfortunate but under-discussed truth to his sensational, broad-daylight killing: That it was the very public finale to a series of murders committed by Cunanan, a young man warped by the circumstances of his upbringing and his own unique pathology, coupled with a culture of homophobia that kept him from ever finding the level of acceptance that he sought. That perfect storm slowly set Cunanan down his bloody path across the country and gay communities both closeted and out, one chronicled in the book the series is based on, Maureen Orth's Vulgar Favors: The Assassination of Gianni Versace.
Across nine episodes, the show reconstructs the major events in Orth's book in reverse, beginning with Versace's murder and moving backwards through Cunanan's life and four previous victims, one episode at a time. If there's a running thread, it's how homophobia didn't just afflict Cunanan and help spur his crimes, it also shielded him and kept him from capture. Cunanan's story is one of shared cultural shame, chronicling how attitudes widely held twenty years ago—attitudes that are, frankly, still present—let a killer evade justice.
"I think what people might think of when they think of homophobia is the most extreme manifestations, same as when you think of racism. You think of hate crimes, acts of violence," Criss says. "Homophobia exists on much subtler, more institutional levels. So in this case, the failure to investigate the community that it did not understand is less about personal, rampant homophobia, a gay-bashing FBI. It's more of a systematic and institutionalized fear of not knowing how to breach this subculture, and how that adds up to the largest failed manhunt in FBI history. That's the tagline of [Orth's] book, but you go. 'Wait, that's a huge fuckin' superlative.' Like, how is that not a way bigger deal? It's not, because it was a story that was fighting an uphill battle in mainstream interest."
Criss also sees homophobia as an internal driving force in Cunanan's story, referring to "his hatred of that which made him different" as an aspect of his character that goes lockstep with '90s mainstream culture's indifference to and ignorance of the gay community.
"Which is interesting because he also celebrated [what made him different] when it was convenient. When it could be used as a weapon I think he enjoyed it," Criss says. "People tend to just assume, 'Oh, here was a man who was obsessed with glamour and fame and success.' Sure, but Gianni Versace also had that. Gianni was also an extraordinarily heroic figure in the gay community, to be coming out with the status that he had. The interview he did with Advocate, coming out with his partner was really a heroic thing, and a very inspiring thing for anybody, much less a closeted young gay man."
This is something that has weighed heavily on Criss as he spent much of the last year getting inside Cunanan's head, attempting to emotionally reconstruct words and thoughts that no one still living was present for, scenes we'll never know the truth of. As pleasant and ebullient as he is in person, Criss always speaks about the specifics of his portrayal of Cunanan with great sobriety. To him, an important aspect of Cunanan is the tragedy of his turn toward destruction. Andrew Cunanan, as Criss envisions him, was a man whose desires and ambitions were all things anyone would want, and anyone can relate to having denied: To rise above your station, to love someone, to be remembered. To feel cheated by a world that conspires against you, drowning those aspirations with an impossibly stacked deck—a mentally ill mother, and a delusional, criminal father, a false sense of entitlement given by those negligent parents.
"These are all things that are unfortunate. People have risen above that," Criss says. "There are resilient people who are not bound by those things, and Andrew was not one of them. There's several moments where he could have taken these hardships in stride, but for whatever reason he just covered the stench with more perfume."
It's also not lost on him that by playing Andrew Cunanan, he's getting the life that Andrew Cunanan always wanted.
"That sits with me. We spent a lot of time at what used to be the Versace House, which is now a hotel, and I just had a very profound moment when I walked in the house, dressed as Andrew," Criss says. "Because Andrew—literally, metaphorically, spiritually—could never get inside. He could never get into the gate, he was never allowed. And there I was, just walking right in, like it was nothing. There was a real sobering moment about that, where I had such sadness for Andrew. Most of the show... it's just me in a room feeling things and existing with a very pained person. The stuff that I think creeps people out or disturbs them—that's not the effect that it has on me. It breaks my heart. Andrew breaks my heart."
He recalls someone who knew Cunanan in high school, someone he was introduced to after news broke that he would be playing the role. She had described Andrew as "somebody you could count on." Just a teenager that, despite his shortcomings, burned brightly enough to be remembered fondly—now reduced to one thing: Murderer.
"We are all closer to the darkest parts of everybody else than we care to admit," Criss says.
There is a danger to telling Cunanan's story, a pitfall waiting for those who wouldn't tread carefully. It's there in the pages of Maureen Orth's book, one that Versace, as a series, works very hard to avoid. It's one of lurid fascination, the hint of voyeurism that initially brought Cunanan's victims—the closeted naval officer Jeffrey Trail, the Chicago real estate magnate Lee Miglin, the young architect David Madson, the innocent bystander Bill Rees, and Gianni Versace—to the public eye. It was the pulp thrill of tabloids and a post-O.J. media landscape primed for scandal, eager to paint Cunanan's spree as a dark tour of a seedy underground subculture, one steeped in the homophobic view of gay culture as inherently perverse. In headlines of the time and in Orth's book, sex dungeons and S&M parties are described in distracting detail, and while they played a role in Cunanan's story there's a fascination that has not aged well. Criss—a straight man who has developed a reputation as an ally to the queer community following his prominent roles in Glee and Hedwig and the Angry Inch—thinks it should be addressed.
"With respect to Maureen—who's been very kind to me—we have an older white, white-collar female journalist, diving into the depths of a community that, uh....She's not going to those parties, you know?" Criss laughs sympathetically. "I don't think she's been to a basement S&M rough trade gathering—I mean, neither have I, but when you [aim for] that sort of objectivity, it can't help but read as lurid fascination. In her defense, I think she had to take the reader by the hand and sort of explain: 'Just in case you didn't know, there's this thing, called this, and we hear they do this.' And while it may seem pandering, it's important to set some sort of precedent for the world we live in."
Criss assures me that he isn't all "that far from Maureen Orth." Like the reporter that informed the character he now plays, his career has brought him into a community he doesn't come from, and he's very aware that his observations as a straight white male can only count for so much. But as an observer, his time as Andrew Cunanan has given him a lot to process.
"I think one of the backbones of the queer community is re-identifying yourself throughout your life. Finding a new identity for yourself is really important. Just like anybody finding their identity in life is huge, but in the gay community, it's a much harder climb, it's historically a difficult one to make it through, and if you have made it through, it's a very celebrated thing that connects the gay community, and gives it a strong presence, a strong voice." He pauses. "Having said that—Andrew finding himself in a place where alternate identities are understood and supported can become a problem. He's living in San Diego, already a dichotomous town of wealth and disparity. You have military, you have a booming gay culture, and it's a lot of people suppressing and compartmentalizing their identities and supporting that."
It's an idea that Versace explores in its fifth episode,"Don't Ask, Don't Tell," one of the show's best hours, focusing on the life of Jeffrey Trail, Cunanan's first victim, and one that brings his turn towards murder into sharp focus through Trail's parallel struggles of being a naval officer in the era of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and Cunanan's attempts to relate to him in his own exploitative, manipulative way.
"You're exploring another side, another version of Andrew that wants to exist so badly, [in a community] that won't accept him," Criss says, "Two different versions of that but the same plight. Jeffrey was somebody that made it through. Andrew couldn't, and had to destroy him."
