Take my breath away Klaine

The second series in Ryan Murphy‘s American Crime Story franchise premieres tonight with the story of the murder of Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) outside his palatial Miami Beach home in 1997 at the hands of spree killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss).

Inspired by actual events and based on the book Vulgar Favors by Maureen Orth, The Assassination of Gianni Versace begins with the shooting of Versace outside his home in South Beach, but also traces the cross-country, three-month spree of murders committed by Cunanan and examines how cultural homophobia and prejudice delayed law enforcement’s capture of the murderer.

Parade.com spoke to the former Glee star about getting inside the head of the murderer who was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List.

Is this the most difficult role you’ve played?

An actor’s job playing anybody has to take into account not only the worst moments, but the best moments, and you have to find as many common denominators between you and that person as possible, and that’s a lot easier than you’d think.

He was not your typical, American serial killer where there’s a lot of tells a year prior to their acts. He was loved by many, and he was an enjoyable, delightful, smart, brilliant kid brimming with potential. So you kind of reverse engineer that. You latch onto those things, and you have to ask yourself: At what point could this have been me? At what point in my life could I have done these things that we would conventionally understand as abominable?

How did you get into the mindset of Cunanan every day on set?

I guess with any character, you have to approach everything from a common denominator. This is very eye-roll-y actor jabber, but you find the primary colors, the very basic things that aren’t so complicated. We’re all ones and zeros. So, the first couple of ones and zeros are things like what it feels like to want something that you’re not allowed to have or wanting to rise higher than your station.

Then you add on the other layers of what was happening in his home life, what was happening in his socioeconomic situation, and what was happening with his own sexuality, and that adds the other colors. But you start with the things that you can relate to, and then you let the script and the world around you, at least the one that Ryan’s curating, do the rest of the work.

It’s not as hard as it would seem. And any time you’re doing things that seem extreme and hard to relate to, these extreme acts of violence, if you go far enough back in the ones and zeros, you remind yourself that these acts come from places of pain, places of hurt and places that I can relate to.

I don’t relate to the execution of said emotions, but I can relate to the emotions. And so, I’m not saying it makes it easy by any stretch of the word, but it makes it more accessible.

What were some of the relatable things in Andrew’s life you found?

We both went to Catholic school. That’s a big one. There’s basic things. We both had a desire to stand out. His was for social gain. Mine was because I just didn’t want to be like everybody else, so they were routed to different places. He did something very interesting where he was the kind of kid, people said, that would put dimes in his penny loafers, not put pennies. And I thought, “Hell, yeah, I would’ve put dimes in my penny loafers.” Our motivations were different, but I understand the desire to not be ordinary.

Would Andrew have been a good actor if he decided to go that way?

I think he would have. We are both performers. I do it professionally and he did it personally. That’s a very good question. I was always curious why I never saw him involved in drama at school or anything. My two-penny analysis would be that he wasn’t a hard worker. Part of his sociopathic pathology is that he wanted greater things than what he had, but didn’t want to work for them. He wanted fame, fortune, glory, and recognition, but he wasn’t willing to put in any of the actual labor, like memorizing lines.

But he certainly was a successful actor in his everyday life, convincing people that he was different people, but this was also at a time where you could do that. Nowadays, social media would call it out immediately.

When you were doing research was there anything that really surprised you about Andrew that was not what you were expecting?

He was not your typical spree killer, at least in the way that we think of that conventionally. This was not somebody who had a history of killing small animals and burying them in the back yard. There was no behavior that would point to what we now know as a spree killer. So, he’s an anomaly in that sense. He was a charming, affable, liked person, despite everything that we know on the outside looking in.

I’ve had an overwhelming amount of people who have come up to me, specifically to say, “I knew Andrew in different parts of his life.” They either knew him as a teenager or in his early 20s and for the most part, people loved Andrew. “Oh, he was the life of the party, he was this, he was that. ” They have all these positive things to say, and they always say how mortified they were when they found out what happened.

I’m less disturbed and creeped out than I am just utterly heartbroken by the loss of so much clear potential that was misappropriated, put through the wrong avenues. But your question was did I find anything surprising? Yeah, that there were so many positive things about him. What was surprising to most people was that he’s not your conventional killer type. He defies all of those sort of textbook analyses.

Was there something eerie about walking up to the actual steps of Versace’s house with a gun in your hand?

That was an overwhelmingly emotional day. We spent a lot of time in that mansion, and there I was dressed as Andrew with his likeness put on my face and into my hair. Andrew never made it inside the mansion, and there I was, hanging out having lunch for a couple weeks. That was not lost on me.

You have this overwhelming sense of this is where it happened. It was the stairs, the street, everything is as it was, the only difference is it’s been 20 years, and the stains have been removed. I had a moment when I walked in the building where I really could feel Gianni’s presence, not to be super Hollywood medium.

If you walk into any other house, it’s a house with walls and a door. You walk into Versace’s house and the very fabric and infrastructure is steeped in him. It’s just dripping with his oeuvre, because you see every design. Granted, things have changed a little bit, but for the most part, it’s still Gianni Versace, so I found myself walking in there and sort of talking to Gianni, and being like, “Look, man, this is a really horrible thing that happened here, and I’m so appreciative of what you’ve given the world.”

It’s really given me a new appreciation of his legacy. I’m playing this guy that ultimately did something really horrible, but, hopefully, we can find some light within this story from the darkness that was the end of the story.

We can begin a new one and a new dialogue that he would have been interested in and would have liked people to tell, so I found myself trying to make peace with it a little bit, driving the car of this person that represents something so horrible.

When you’re done with a role, do you just leave it, or do you take something from every role you’ve played and carry it with you?

No. It lives and dies on the stage. I say that now, I don’t know, talk to me when I’m in an insane asylum in a couple years, and I say, “Oh, they never left, I couldn’t get them out of me.” But for the most part, they do.

On  Glee, Murphy’s hit musical comedy, Criss played happy, confident high school student Blaine Anderson, the openly gay leader of the Dalton Academy Warblers. Cunanan is a tonal about-face. But because of some superficial similarities between Criss and his character—both half-Filipino and California-raised—Criss told Murphy, “I defy you to find somebody else.”

Murphy didn’t need persuading. He’d seen Criss on Broadway, in the musical  Hedwig and the Angry Inch, playing a tortured, genderqueer German rocker—a notoriously taxing role. “I just felt there was an untapped, dramatically darker side of him,” says Murphy. “He was hungry and anxious to push forward. When  Glee ended, that was graduation day for [American Crime Story]. I always thought he was the only one for Cunanan.”

The serial killer will certainly put a creepier spin on the 30-year-old performer’s career, which began with  A Very Potter Musical, a 2009 parody of J.K. Rowling’s universe. Criss co-wrote and starred in it with University of Michigan theater friends, and it quickly went viral. “I don’t think I’m being delusional when I say that was the genesis of my career,” says Criss. “It brings a huge smile to my face when people approach me about that.”

Glee took a viral fan base and quadrupled it. The TV show’s fastest-selling single was Criss’s version of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” and he was nominated for a 2015 Emmy for writing the song “This Time” for the show’s finale. Last March, he debuted his indie rock band, Computer Games, with brother Chuck, and in December, he released a solo EP,  Homework, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Chart.

Criss expects to get more serious attention for Cunanan than for covering Perry, even if he sees no distinction in the effort made. “There’s a notion, which I’m allergic to, that the darker the role—the more a departure a role is from somebody—the more weight it has,” says the actor, who took the part of Cunanan because it allowed him to “tackle someone with a huge emotional range. It was my job to understand Andrew, as hard as that may seem, [without] glorifying someone who was monstrous.” 

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