The role Darren Criss was born to play

THE last person you expect to play a notorious serial killer is a sweet-voiced alumnus from Glee. But, damn, if he isn’t amazing in the role.

THE last person you expect to play a notorious serial killer is a sweet-voiced alumnus from Glee.

While Darren Criss’ most famous character saw him favouring bow-ties, cardigans and being an unabashedly good guy, his latest role calls on him to repeatedly drive a claw hammer into one of his victims, blood spluttering all over the walls of a downtown warehouse conversion.

Andrew Cunanan is most famous for gunning down Gianni Versace as he stood outside his beachside Miami mansion in 1997. But before he drew his weapon at the designer’s head, Cunanan had wreaked havoc with four other killings.

Even though American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace — with an A-list cast that includes Penelope Cruz, Edgar Ramirez and Ricky Martin — appears to be a drama about the famed design house, Cunanan’s story makes up something like 80 per cent of the time.

By structuring the series in reverse linearity and opening with the Versace murder before each subsequent episode takes a step backwards, to the other killings and back to Cunanan’s adolescence and childhood, it seeks to explain how someone as charismatic as him could end up where he did.

With the weight of almost the entire nine episodes on his shoulders, Criss gives a nuanced and powerful performance that’s been talked about in terms of how many statues he’ll nab come awards season.

Oh boy, nineties fashion Photo: Ray Mickshaw/FX

The key to that is that even though you see his character commit monstrous deeds, Criss imbues so much humanity in his portrayal that you can’t help but empathise with Cunanan. But he’s quick to generously give the credit back to the audience.

“I think it’s less about my approach and more about your compassion,” he tells news.com.au in Sydney during a promotional tour. “Because the show goes in reverse it’s this inadvertent redemption tale because you’ve seen something awful and you so badly want something redeeming to happen.

“You want so badly for this person who has a lot of good things going for him to do something that could somehow justify or exonerate these horrible things he’s done, which I don’t think ever happens but your desire for that makes us cringe the most because we’re constantly disappointed.

“That’s exciting to me because it tells me there’s a great deal of compassion and more complex emotions happening with audience members than just this person is bad, end of story.”

Nothing says serial killer than sitting on a beach by yourself looking regretful Photo: Ray Mickshaw/FX

Like Cunanan, Criss is of mixed Anglo-American and Filipino heritage, grew up in California and attended private schools. And like Criss, Cunanan spent a good deal of time crafting different personas to present to the world, though he wasn’t getting paid and no one was filming him.

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is Criss’ third collaboration with uber producer Ryan Murphy after Glee and a bit part in one of the American Horror Story instalments. A prolific TV man with credits including Feud: Bette and Joan, Nip/Tuck, Scream Queens and, of course, American Crime Story: The People v O.J. Simpson to his name, Murphy has just signed a $US300 million output deal with Netflix. It significantly gazumps the $US100 million deal Netflix signed with Shonda Rhimes not that much earlier.

Murphy is also the reason why Criss took on the challenge of Cunanan. “He’s the golden child right now,” Criss says. “He’s at the front lines of this really incredible television renaissance that’s happening.

“You feel [on a Murphy series] not only is the story so interesting but that it’s going to be told in a very compelling way, and that people, putting ego aside, are going to watch it.

“Knowing that your work is not for naught is a nice bonus because it’s a story you want to talk about.”

Darren Criss also regularly performs on Broadway Picture: Brett Costello

One of the aspects of the exposure that comes with a show that has clout like American Crime Story is the impact it might have on the real-life counterparts of the story. Two decades is only a blip and Cunanan’s victims’ families weighed heavily on Criss during production.

“That was the hardest part about this,” Criss says. “I constantly thought of those people because they weren’t involved in the making of this — our story is from Maureen Orth’s book [Vulgar Favors]. For those families, that level of trauma and tragedy is something so beyond something I can deign to say I have felt or can understand.

“I wonder if any of them were fans of the O.J. series and to suddenly find out, ‘oh man, the second season is about my pain’, that’s a thing I can recognise. I hope they know this was an opportunity for us to shed some light on their lives and give justice to them. In the past, a lot those people’s stories haven’t been told. If I ever meet any of those folks, I’d love to chat with them.”

When Criss talks about how Cunanan’s non-Versace victims’ stories weren’t really told, he’s touching on the DNA that courses through the show. Murphy has said that American Crime Story isn’t about an individual crime but a national crime. In O.J., that was race, here it’s about the shame and homophobia surrounding and within the gay community in the nineties.

Criss will reunite with Glee co-star Lea Michele on tour this year

Cunanan’s victims didn’t receive real attention until Versace’s death, almost three months since his first victim Jeff Trail’s slaying, despite the fact that the FBI had Cunanan’s name and photo. Because three of his four earlier victims were gay, as was Cunanan himself, law enforcement either didn’t devote the resources necessary or didn’t think they could penetrate a subculture they didn’t want to understand.

“The ‘villain’ here is not just in the things that Andrew has done, but in the things around him that have enabled this person — societal things, things in his personal life, in his family life, the people around him, the city, the climate of American society in the nineties,” says Criss.

“It’s this bait-and-switch. We centralise it with a crime we tell our story around, but we investigate the crimes that allowed it to happen. I try not to say ‘villainous’ because that makes things too simple, but these factors have a negative contribution to someone who is already on shaky ground.

“There are similarities between where our society was in the nineties with where we are now and how fear and prejudice always seem to be in fashion. How do we avoid this kind of prejudice yielding such destruction?”

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace starts on Showcase on Foxtel tonight at 8.30pm. It will also be available on iTunes after the broadcast.

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