Key Details the American Crime Story Cast and Creators Have Revealed About Season 2

The title may be about Versace's assassination, but the season is really about Andrew Cunanan, the murderer whose spree ended with Versace (and Cunanan's subsequent suicide). Criss is outstanding in the role, and it is quite a departure from his work on Glee, though he says he worked hard to not let the darkness of the material affect him too much.

"It didn't come home with me," Criss said, adding that the hardest part of the role were the real-life families who experienced these murders. "There are people — the family and friends, siblings, loved ones of the people — that were affected by this are still very much alive, and this is something that they've had to try and put to rest after 20 years. And all of a sudden, now it is being brought up again in a pop cultural affair, and that weighs heavily on me.

"I wanted to reach out to people, not for research purposes, but just to let them know that I care and I think about them and I do have this bizarre guilt in that I'm trying to find the best in this person that is conventionally a monster. Trying to find the good in somebody so difficult to find good in . . . was hard for me."

Executive producer Nina Jacobson explained that the show is about the juxtaposition between Cunanan and Versace, "the destroyer versus the creator." While Versace created things from the inside out, Cunanan was an "outside-in person," someone who wanted Versace's fame, wealth, and love without having to work for it.

When creator Ryan Murphy told Ricky Martin in confidence that Penélope Cruz was playing Donatella Versace, Martin joked that he "peed a little bit" with excitement.

Some people might balk at calling Versace's murder an assassination, but creator Ryan Murphy explained that he sees the murder as 100 percent political. "It was a political murder," he said. "It absolutely was. This was a person who targeted people specifically to shame them and to out them and to have a form of payback for a life he could not live."

One thing that was very important to the creators and Criss was to ensure they didn't turn Cunanan into a tragic figure. They wanted to explain his background without getting too sentimental about it. "We were careful to really spend time with the victims and the families and to humanize them," Murphy said.

Murphy said of the different seasons, "One of the joys about this show for me is that every season of this show will have a different tonality. The first season was very much a courtroom potboiler. The second season that you've seen, hopefully, is a manhunt thriller. The third season is set in [New Orleans] Memorial Hospital and really looks at, sort of, the medical conditions in our country and global warming, and is this going to happen again, which it is. And if it does, who has the right to decide who lives or dies in our country? So every different season of the show, unlike other things that we've done, is so different."

Edgar Ramirez said that in doing his research to portray the famous fashion designer, he learned that Gianni Versace was actually a very warm family man, and he strove to bring that to the performance. "[I discovered] how family-oriented he was, how strong those family ties were in his life . . . That was my own discovery of the character, according to all the accounts I had access to," Ramirez said, adding that he was "lucky to track down people" who were generous enough to share with him about their personal experiences with Versace.