Two years on from The People vs OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, Ryan Murphy’s most acclaimed anthology series will return for its second run, this time chronicling the murder of designer Gianni Versace. The opening nine minutes were shown to reporters at the TCA Press Tour this week, and they are ravishing, exhilarating and deeply stressful, devoting equal time to establishing Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez), larger-than-life and seemingly untouchable, and the man who is about to kill him, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), shaky and clearly unhinged.
After the footage screened, the show’s producers and cast fielded questions from journalists, with Criss, Murphy and the series writer Tom Rob Smith (London Spy) weighing in on their unusual portrait of a serial killer.
“Andrew was so many different personalities to so many different people,” Criss told BAZAAR.com, referring to multiple conversation he’s had with people who knew Cunanan. “For me, that makes things a bit easier—we see him at his best, we see him at his worst, we see him at his most charming, we see him at his most hurt. It's been one of the most exhilarating characters that I've spent time with because he is so all over the place, and he's capable of truly great things. My goal is to have people exercise their sense of empathy, because from the get-go we all know that he's capable of something truly horrendous… it’s been a wonderful challenge to find as much humanity as possible.”
The book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, by Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth, is the source material for the season. Very little is known about Cunanan beyond what Orth pieced together, but Smith teases out a parallel between Versace and his killer. “We were talking earlier about the similarities between somebody like Gianni and someone like Andrew,” Criss continued. “On paper, you go, that’s insane, you can’t possibly compare the two, and obviously they’re very, very different men. But we try to find common denominators between these two men who had different levels of brilliance that were guided in very, very different ways.”
Per Smith, Cunanan’s story is “much closer to a story of radicalization than a typical serial killer.” Prior to his killing spree in 1997, Cunanan had no criminal record of any kind; instead, “go back a year and he's in a million dollar condo in La Jolla talking about politics or art, and really charming people. How do you get that person in that condo to a person who can brutally kill someone with a hammer?” The series opens with the event we all know about—Versace’s murder on the steps of his Miami home—and then, over the course of ten episodes, deconstructs that event and its backstory through the parallel tangents of victim and killer.
“You’re looking not at someone who is inherently monstrous,” Smith concluded, “but someone who has similarities to Versace from the outset, and the reasons why his footsteps go in one direction and Versace goes in a completely different direction.”
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story will air in January 2018.