Fans watching American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace will have noticed that the episode running times tend to fluctuate in length. This week’s episode, “Ascent,” clocked in at around 77 minutes with commercial breaks. Next week’s installment will be even longer. But in a wide-ranging interview with Richard Lawson on Vanity Fair’s weekly podcast Still Watching: Versace, series star Darren Criss reveals that, as is often the case, the first cut of each episode was initially much, much longer and entire subplots and characters wound up on the cutting-room floor. “I’d be curious to see the director’s cut because a lot of episodes ended up at 90, 100 minutes,” Criss explained. Whether or not viewers will ever see a director’s cut of the series, Criss shared a few of the gems audiences might be missing.
For one thing, there was an entire sequence involving Riverdale and Scream star Skeet Ulrich as a porn czar who rejected Andrew Cunanan’s attempts to find work in the industry. (According to Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, Cunanan was obsessed with pornography.) Criss explains:
There was this really interesting scene in the second episode where [Andrew’s] already on the lam. He hasn’t killed Gianni yet, but Andrew goes into—this happened, apparently—a small boutique porn studio . . . looking for work. Shout out to Skeet Ulrich, who got cut out of it. I really, really enjoyed his performance. He played this . . . porn Ziegfeld guy, producer-dude, with his cigarette, sort-of-skeezy dude.
For more of what that Ulrich plot entailed—including Andrew going into a “berserk” rage that caused Criss to injure himself on set—you can listen to the complete interview. Though Ulrich mentioned having a part in American Crime Story in interviews last year, the actor was snipped out of the marketing material for the show entirely. But Criss points out that you can see vestigial remains of some of the other cut storylines in trailers and promotional photos. Take, for example, this character portrait of Orange is the New Black star Dascha Polanco, who played a Miami investigator in the first two episodes of the series and will likely return for the finale.
Though she’s captured here in a club scene, American Crime Story never reveals any information about Detective Lori Wieder outside of work. But according to Criss, there were lengthy scenes of Polanco’s character “going to the gay clubs, and she was really kind of connecting the dots,” in pursuit of Cunanan. “There’s huge sequences that we shot, huge parties [with] a lot of people, that took a long time, that are just gone.” In the lengthier versions of the episodes, Polanco’s character’s familiarity with the gay scene in Miami came first hand: this more “prominent” version of her character was openly gay.
Critics and fans alike have noted the way The Assassination of Gianni Versace has broadened its scope far beyond the lives of slain designer Gianni Versace and his murderer Andrew Cunanan, to engage in a number of other themes and issues concerning the homosexual community in 90s America, including gays in the military, midwestern conservatism, the drug scene, H.I.V. survival guilt, and more. But for all the various male gay experiences represented in the series, American Crime Story is awfully light on any engagement with the lesbian community, despite the fact that several gay women orbited Cunanan’s social circle, and gave interviews to Maureen Orth.
As Criss laments, the dynamic between Polanco’s Detective Wieder and Will Chase’s Detective Paul Scrimshaw added a few more layers to those earlier episodes. Chase plays the “hardened straight bro who is not necessarily homophobic, but just doesn’t really get it” while Polanco “had this whole thing of being this lesbian investigator that understood what was going on a little more.” Detectives Wieder and Scrimshaw are both characters named for real people who spoke to Orth, for her book, but in the context of the show act as composite characters.
Most of all, though, Criss says he misses a certain vulnerable scene between his character and Cody Fern’s David Madson. “You see [Andrew] with the phone in his hand and he’s saying, ‘David, I’m not the person that I said I was,’ and there’s this real brutal, vulnerable moment of honesty, of unadulterated honesty that, as a viewer, you‘re like, ‘Oh. Oh, thank God. Oh, great,’ ” Criss recalls. “Then, it’s not real. He finally calls David and just says, like, ‘Hi. I had a great time. Bye,’ and that’s it. It’s all those moments where you go, ‘Goddammit, no, man, you’re really. . . . You were so close.’ ”
These little missing scenes and characters are really just the tip of the iceberg of what Criss covered in nearly an hour of discussion with Still Watching: Versace. To find out more about the true story of Versace, Cunanan, and more, you can listen to the full interview with Criss—as well as past guests Maureen Orth, Ricky Martin, Max Greenfield, Judith Light, Cody Fern, Finn Wittrock, and more—by subscribing to Still Watching: Versace on Apple Podcasts or your podcast app of choice. New episodes of the podcast air every Wednesday night.
Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Joanna RobinsonJoanna Robinson is a Hollywood writer covering TV and film for VanityFair.com.
[contf] [contfnew] 
Vanity Fair
[contfnewc] [contfnewc]
