Emmys wrote:American Tragedy
May 15, 2018
“One of the great goals in my career is to keep things as versatile as possible and to confuse and to throw people off,” he says. “So, I like it when you have a room full of Sundance people, you know, music folks, music supervisors, filmmakers that are like, ‘Wait, what? He’s a songwriter?’ That really excites me. The same way that, when I was mostly playing music and booked an acting gig, people would be like, ‘What? You’re an actor?’”
Unlike his famous costars, who have toplined studio movies (Ramírez), won an Oscar (Cruz) and enjoyed huge musical success (Martin), Criss has been waiting for his breakout.
Spending time with the San Francisco native, one can easily spot some similarities with Cunanan — a man who, with a slightly different nudge to his trajectory, might have become a brash social-media personality.
Criss oozes charm and willingness to entertain. During this interview, he quickly turns the tables and pretends he is the one asking the questions, complete with an exaggerated news-anchor voice.
It’s all part of what Criss brings to the table, according to Murphy, be it for a role or an everyday interaction. “He’s a great performer and kind of a showman,” Murphy says.
Criss, who hasn’t seen the final three episodes at this point, then drops the façade and admits he is nervous about how his performance will be received. The series has just begun airing. Appropriately, Criss is wearing a maroon sweater emblazoned with cheerleaders spelling out the word H-E-L-P. “I just hope to be cool enough to have a movie at Sundance someday,” he says.
Considering that such a prospect seems well within the realm of possibility, it’s unclear if he’s joking or feeling a genuine twinge of career apprehension.
“I think Darren has a strange mix of charm and vulnerability as well as danger,” says Tom Rob Smith, the British novelist who wrote all nine hours of Versace. “And that, I think, was the key to Cunanan.”In March 2015, the final season of
Glee had recently wrapped and Murphy was in preproduction on
The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. But he was already thinking ahead when he ran into Criss on the New Orleans set of
Scream Queens. Criss was traveling with Swier, who directs and produces promotional content and campaigns for Fox series, including Murphy's
Scream Queens.Criss, about to star in
Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway, was looking to line up his next gig. He pitched himself to Murphy as “a wily bellhop to come in and cause shenanigans around the hotel” for
American Horror Story. Murphy interrupted the pitch with a dismissive “No” — but only because he had a better idea.
“He said, ‘We’re doing this anthology, American Crime Story, and we’re thinking about the Andrew Cunanan story. How much do you know about him?’” Criss recalls. “I didn’t know anything.”
He only vaguely remembered Cunanan because they shared a half-Filipino ancestry. But other than that, he could only recall that Cunanan had killed Versace — nothing about the four other victims or the high-profile manhunt or his suicide as the authorities closed in, eight days after his shooting of Versace on the steps of his palatial Miami home. Nevertheless, he felt excited by the prospect of reteaming with Murphy.
“'You’re the one with the keys to this castle, so I’ll wait by the phone until you’re ready to go,’” he told Murphy. “It took three years.”
That’s because a Hurricane Katrina–focused tale was poised to follow O.J. as the second
American Crime Story outing. But that series kept hitting script snags and became too sprawling, even for an FX-backed anthology series. “Ultimately, I decided this is not the right way to tell the story. The story is too big,” Murphy says of shelving the Katrina project. “The episodes became so expensive that we could not produce them.”
Just as that decision was being made, Smith delivered three
Versace scripts — based on Maureen Orth’s 1999 book,
Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History — that blew Murphy away. In many ways, they offered “something that was the opposite of O.J.,” he says.
With Cunanan, he got just that — a killer unknown to the general public until he took down a world-famous fashion designer. By contrast, Simpson was already one of the most recognizable names and faces in the world before he was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman in the so-called trial of the century.
Aptly, Cunanan proved to be a Zelig-type character in the southern California gay community. Everyone seemed to have crossed paths with him or knew someone who had.
“I also had a visceral personal connection to that Cunanan story when it was happening,” Murphy says. “I was living in Los Angeles then, and I had friends who knew him. So, there was a personal thing there for me with that story.”
By the end of 2016, FX was thrilled by the scripts coming in, so it committed to shooting Versace in 2017. And Murphy could already count on Criss, who, he says, was “the only person in the world who could play Andrew Cunanan effectively.”
Coincidentally, Criss was once again starring in
Hedwig — this time in San Francisco — when he saw an online news story that
Versace was a go, instead of Katrina. He texted Murphy immediately to make sure their conversation in New Orleans still held true.
“He was a man of his word,” Criss says. “I ran out of words to express my thanks for his belief in me. If he hadn’t gone through with this, that would’ve been fine — I wouldn’t have held it against him.
But he really did what he said he was going to do. And so here we are.”
Murphy didn’t exactly meet resistance when he first floated Criss’s name. But, initially, there were some blank stares. However, the über-producer was emphatic. “If Darren didn’t play this part, then we weren’t going to make it,” he says. “When you lead with that kind of passion to a network or a studio or other producers, they sit up a little straighter, and they’re like, ‘Oh, okay.’”
Coming in, Criss wasn’t a name actor like Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr., who’d portrayed Simpson. Playing in Criss’s favor was his ethnicity — half Filipino from his mother’s side (unlike Cunanan, whose father hailed from Manila). Hollywood has taken a PR drubbing for casting white actors and actresses in roles that called for Asians (think Scarlett Johansson in
Ghost in the Shell). No one involved with Versace wanted to court the inevitable Care2 petition.
“I thought it was completely necessary [to cast a Filipino actor],” Murphy says. “I didn’t want to whitewash that part. I had been obsessed with the Cunanan and Versace story for years and years and years. And I remember, when I first cast Darren on
Glee back in 2010, just filing it in the back of my head. Like, ‘Well, there’s your Cunanan.’”
More important, he was convinced that Criss could pull off the gravitas of a killer.“Darren had been typecast before as this good-time Charlie song-and- dance guy,” Murphy adds.
“But I always thought, having seen him do Hedwig on Broadway, that there was a darkness in Darren that I knew he was wanting to show. As somebody who supervised the editing of all of the episodes,
it was almost always Darren’s first take that we used. He was just plugged into the experience of ‘I’m going to go for it.’”
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