14. American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
(FX/BBC Two) One of the performances of the year: against a vividly painted backdrop of US gay culture in the 1990s, Darren Criss seared the screen with a terrifyingly immersive turn as lonely, raging killer Andrew Cunanan. Read our full review
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story was, for better or for worse, told in reverse, beginning with Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) murdering the fashion icon and then painstakingly detailing how Cunanan became a killer. “House by the Lake,” shows Cunanan’s first kill: his one-time friend Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock). It is gruesome and terrifying, not just because of the gore, but because Criss and Cody Fern, playing their mutual friend David Madson, are respectively demented and paralyzed with fear. The murder itself prompts revulsion, but it’s the subsequent drama when Cunanan takes Trail hostage on a doomed road trip that provides the episode’s gripping tension. Even though viewers know the awful outcome, Cody Fern’s desperate performance somehow makes the past seem present and the inevitable seem almost changeable as we root for him to run. –Malcolm Venable
6. The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story Network: FX
Underappreciated by critics, under-watched by audiences, and misunderstood by those expecting the focus to remain squarely on House Versace (ably handled by Edgar Ramirez as the late fashion designer and Penelope Cruz as his sister, Donatella), the second installment of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series is an even pricklier treatment of “true crime” than the first. Anchored by Darren Criss’ mesmerizing performance as spree killer Andrew Cunanan, the nine-episode season, penned by Tom Rob Smith, unspools backwards in time from the morning of the murder; its twinned narratives (Versace’s rise, Cunanan’s long unraveling) split open the scars left by a homophobic culture, from the AIDS crisis to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and reveal both how much, and how little, has changed. Along the way, Murphy, Smith, and directors Gwyneth Horder-Payton and Daniel Minahan flesh out the biographies of Cunanan’s lesser-known victims, turning the lives of Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock) and David Madson (Cody Fern) into profiles in courage, and thereby challenging their erasure in the popular imagination. What emerges, as I wrote at the start of the season, is an ambitious, unorthodox, potent, frankly astonishing reconsideration of what it means to be and be called a faggot, animated by one indelicate imperative: Queer lives matter, and not just their ends. —Matt Brennan (Photo: Ray Mickshaw/FX)
Winner: Darren Criss, “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace”
Andrew Cunanan was a man of many faces. On the surface, he was a gruesome spree-killer who took five lives, including those of his close friends. Taking a deeper look into his persona, Cunanan was a charismatic speaker and a pathological liar with a knack for manipulating those around him.
It is no surprise then, that watching Darren Criss’s portrayal of Cunanan in “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace” feels like watching the same actor in a hundred different roles. Criss goes from a remorseless killer to a sweet-talking lover in the blink of an eye, and it’s that sense of emotional whiplash that keeps the audience on their toes — and fearing for their lives. Criss’s Cunanan is like a bomb that could go off at any second, except in this case, the bomb is deftly trying to convince you that everything will be okay.
Even in his calmest moments, Criss can be delightfully eerie, his well spun words sounding too smooth and his voice too light. The show never lets its audience get comfortable enough to fully sympathize with him, keeping with the undercurrent of violence and rage that drives Cunanan to murder.
All in all, Criss represents the many-sided complexities of Andrew Cunanan with an electrifying confidence, and there is no doubt that his role in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” will be a turning point in his career.
americancrimestoryfx: Congratulations to @darrencriss for being named one of @entertainmentweekly’s Entertainers of the Year for his unforgettable performance in #ACSVersace.
In a brilliant moment of serendipity, Darren Criss discovered he had been Emmy-nominated as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for The Assassination of Gianni Versace at an airport branch of Planet Hollywood. “We were sitting there looking at the most Hollywood thing we could. That just tickled me to no end,” regales the former Glee star, who played Kurt Hummel’s love interest, Blaine Anderson, in the musical comedy television show.
At the time, Darren was on his way to a gig in Aspen, Colorado. “The Emmy nominations were coming out at 8.30am and the flight was leaving at 9.45am and we – me, my fiancée, my manager, publicist, basically the work family – all wanted to go and watch it together, somewhere I would be close enough so that when it was announced I could run over to the gate.”
The punchline came while sitting there waiting for the nominations to be revealed: his Glee version of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” also started to play on the speakers. Looking around to see if perhaps one of the servers had clocked him and was being “cute”, because it was quite a bizarre coincidence, he realised that nope, “this is 8.30am in the international terminal and nobody gives a shit about my version of ‘Teenage Dream’,” he laughs. “But we just couldn’t fucking believe it, like what a crazy auspicious moment! But it was a nice little story.”
By now, it’s one that will have its ending fully wrapped up: the Emmys took place on September 17 in LA, which is where Darren is now on the other end of the phone. For context, it’s one of those intensely hot end-of-July days that everyone in London is complaining about. For Darren it’s a day of playing “Mr Octopus” as he puts it. “Today is insane. When you have ‘free time’, it’s actually more hectic because in the absence of stuff that you’re obligated to do you immediately see everything you’ve neglected a lot more clearly.”
In his perky twang, he gives me “the shorthand” of this: Elsie Fest to organise for autumn, the New York show-tune themed festival he founded; music to work on for Computer Games, the band he started with his brother; marketing for the new piano bar he and his fiancée, Mia Swier, have opened; projects he can’t talk about but is excited about; a wedding to plan “at some point” next year; work on the house; and that general life admin that creeps up on all of us. “Hey, we all got stuff,” he chimes.
What if you had a dream your whole life that you were someone special, but no one believed it; not- not really? They’d smile at you and say, “Oh, sure, sure.”
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