CRIME OF FASHION
New crime series The Assassination of Gianni Versace relives the lifeand death of the star designer and his charming killer.
Penélope Cruz is in shock. The actress, clad in a black robe and blonde wig, is playing Donatella Versace in US cable network FX’S The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story and is deep in the mourning scenes.
The miniseries is filming on location at Gianni Versace’s former Miami Beach home, Casa Casuarina, and this afternoon Cruz is shooting in Donatella’s old bedroom. Donatella has arrived after Gianni’s brutal murder and must face the aftermath. “It was very moving, sometimes disturbing,” Cruz says of shooting at the designer’s house. “We all felt a very powerful energy. It just made me have more passion to tell this story.”
Downstairs, executive producer Ryan Murphy sits behind the monitors directing. Take after take, Cruz enters her bedroom and reacts in horror to the crowds and media circus gathering below her window. She covers her mouth, unable to fathom her brother’s death and the frenzy that’s ensued.
The world was equally aghast when news broke on July 15, 1997, that Gianni Versace had been murdered. Openly gay Versace was one of the most exciting and provocative designers of the moment, famous for his bold skin-baring designs. “Gianni was a disrupter,” says Èdgar Ramírez, who plays the colourful figure. “He was doing things at the time that no-one else was doing. He had this rock-star vision of couture and was the master of combining fashion, celebrity, and fame in a way that had never been combined before.” But his future was cut short by an intelligent, handsome and highly disturbed young man from San Diego named Andrew Cunanan ( Glee’s Darren Criss). Versace hopes to show how these two men’s paths crossed and ended so violently. “Here are two men from comparable backgrounds that had all kinds of similarities,” explains writer Tom Rob Smith. “They came from parents who were striving but not wealthy. They had the Italian-heritage connection. This feeling of being an outsider. The sexuality connection. Why does one go on to become this incredible creator and great life force? And the other young man ends up destroying so much?”
Versace (set to screen in early 2018) is the ambitious follow-up to last year’s The People v. O.J. Simpson. That miniseries became FX’S highest-rated series ever, with 13.2 million US viewers a week and a slew of awards, including nine Emmy wins. Along with American Horror Story, its American Crime Story series is now a bona fide franchise for FX, with future instalments already in the works: the seasons following Versace will cover the fallout around Hurricane Katrina and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But the true-crime field is now much more crowded than when O.J. Simpson debuted. “I would only feel pressure if we were doing, like, the Menendez trial,” says Murphy, referring to the high-profile case of two brothers who murdered their wealthy parents in 1989. “But this is so dramatically …
different, and it’s about fashion and celebrity. Everything feels like you’re jumping off a diving board for the first time because there’s no template.”
The titular assassination happened early in the morning on July 15. Versace had left to go on his regular run to Miami Beach’s News Cafe. As he returned home, Andrew Cunanan, a sociopath who had become fixated on the designer after reportedly meeting him years earlier, walked up behind Versace and shot him twice in the head. The designer’s longtime boyfriend, Antonio D’amico—played by star singer Ricky Martin—found Versace’s body. It would ultimately signal the end of a killing spree that took Cunanan from Minnesota to Illinois to New Jersey and then to Miami, Florida, where he settled for two months before claiming his fifth and most high-profile victim. The news media quickly seized on the celebrity angle of the grizzly story and breathlessly covered the FBI’S search for Versace’s murderer. The heavy attention made Cunanan famous almost instantly and forced the previously out-and-about murderer to go into hiding. Meanwhile, panic had set in among the gay community as it appeared there was a killer on the loose who was targeting them. After countless reports of Cunanan sightings, the 27-year-old was eventually found on a houseboat in Miami eight days later, where he had taken his own life before anyone could discover a motive for his crimes.
The tale haunted Murphy, who pitched it even before O.J. Simpson aired. “I kept going back to Versace because it was different from
O.J. tonally,” says the executive producer, sitting on the back patio of Casa Casuarina. “It was a manhunt and it takes place all over the country.” And just as the O.J. Simpson trial was a lens through which to examine racism, Murphy sees the Versace murder as a chance to do the same with sexuality and homophobia in the 1990s. (The designer was also reportedly Hiv-positive, a claim Versace treats as truth.) “The more I had read about it, the more I was startled by the fact that Cunanan really was only allowed to get away with it because of homophobia,” says Murphy. “There was this great apathy about it. It seemed like gay people were disposable in our culture.”
At the time, there was still great fear in coming out of the closet, which hit close to home for Martin, who came out only seven years ago. “There was a scene where Gianni is weak and almost falling on the beach and I touch him and he goes, ‘Don’t touch me! Paparazzi!’” he recounts. “That took me back to eight years ago when I was in the closet, and it just moved me.”
Murphy has never been one to shy away
from provocative storytelling and sees Versace as a grand rebel yell against Trump’s America: “It’s the perfect timing based on this president we have. I felt there was so much progress in terms of gay rights and rights for any marginalised groups of people [under Obama]. Suddenly it felt like Trump is inaugurated and the door closed and there’s fear again and they’re trying to take away everything that we fought for. This is a bracing cold slap against the policies that the current government has.”
For the miniseries, which is based on Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors, producers eschewed a standard writers’ room in favour of Smith, who’ll craft all nine episodes. And while O.J. Simpson had a linear narrative, Versace will cut back and forth between 1997 and Versace’s and Cunanan’s pasts. There’s a propulsive thriller energy to the episodes, as well as heavy doses of family politics and glamour, given the main players of the designer’s life. (Giorgio Armani will appear but has yet to be cast.) Adds Ramírez: “It’s a very dramatic story. It’s a story about family. It’s a story about fate. In a way it’s very classic—it’s almost like a Greek tragedy.”
For the villain of this tragedy, Murphy was adamant that Darren Criss, best known as sweet, bow-tied Blaine on Glee, play the twisted Cunanan. A Talented Mr Ripley- type character, Cunanan charmed his way into wealthy circles before his violent break; he’s far from a one-note monster. It’s unquestionably the biggest, most challenging role of Criss’s career so far. “Actors are only as good as the parts they get. This is one of those ship-coming-in moments where Ryan has given me this massive opportunity,” he says.
To sell his creative team on his vision, Murphy sent Smith and executive producer Brad Simpson to see Criss in the touring production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. “Once every night he jumps into somebody’s lap and makes out with them,” says Simpson. “In the middle of the show, he jumps in the audience and rips my glasses off and makes out with me. It was very charming and a very Cunanan thing to do, to be a little devilish. Cunanan charmed people and then turned them off. We’re talking about a serial killer people liked.”
Criss jokes: “I casting-couched the shit outta that! In my defence, I didn’t know it was Brad Simpson. I’m glad I didn’t know.”
But the trickiest role to nail down was Donatella. Murphy needed someone who could imbue the role with humanity. He had met Cruz when he directed her husband, Javier Bardem, in 2010’s Eat Pray Love. Cruz, who’s had a long-standing relationship with the fashion house, wanted to check in with Donatella before signing on. “That was very important to me. I think she knows that the way I’m playing her, that I truly love her and respect her,” says the Oscar winner ( Vicky Cristina Barcelona).
Murphy says that Donatella’s biggest concern about the project was the role of her children in the miniseries, particularly daughter Allegra, who captured the public’s imagination at the time of Gianni’s death as the 11-yearold heir to the company. Says the producer, “She didn’t want her children to be characters in the show or exploited, and I understood that, so we removed that element.”
He adds: “Penélope’s portrayal is very real and human. I think Penélope is to Donatella what Sarah [Paulson] is to Marcia Clark [from O.J. Simpson] in my book. I think people have marginalised and underappreciated Donatella.”
Back on set, rain has been falling all day but suddenly clears in time for an elaborate party flashback in the pool area of Casa Casuarina. C+C Music Factory is blasting in the background. Cruz, in a neon pink gown, slinks through the crowd of shirtless men and women in bodysuits and glides up to a seated Ramírez and Martin. The house is alive and vibrant and full of life again. “This was a creative house,” explains Simpson. “They had these huge parties and always had artists here.” The producer remembers a day during production when they had multiple units shooting in the house and writers for both Versace and Katrina working in various rooms. “I walked around and I was like, ‘Oh, this is how he used the house.’ It was full of creative energy, and that felt good and inspiring.” The mood changes beyond, however. “You do feel this heaviness when you’re outside on the steps. All you can think about is what’s been lost.”
“We’re talking about a serial killer people liked” —Brad Simpson