Ricky Martin was living in Miami when Gianni Versace was murdered in 1997.
And Martin — who plays Versace’s partner, Antonio D’Amico, in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” — says he’s shocked by how long it took local police and the FBI to find Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss).
“Miami’s a very small town. It’s very easy to find people,” says Martin, 46. “And [Cunanan] wasn’t even hiding.” In documenting Versace’s murder, Ryan Murphy’s FX miniseries exposes the many mistakes made as the police and FBI pursued Cunanan, who killed four men in 12 days before gunning down Versace on the steps of his South Beach mansion.
“He went to a pawn shop and sold something and showed his ID. And he signed the paper as Andrew P. Cunanan,” says Martin. “There’s a moment [in the miniseries] where the FBI agent opens the [car] trunk and you see all the [10 Most Wanted] fliers. And the other agent asks, ‘How come all these flyers are in your trunk?’”
D’Amico cradled Versace (Édgar Ramírez) on the steps of his villa after Cunanan shot him on July 14, 1997. Martin says he’d been invited “many times” to the villa, Casa Casuarina, while he lived in Miami, but that he never went — until the morning he filmed the brutal murder scene. He remained secluded inside the ornate home, “just finding the emotions and everything. And there was a moment where I said, ‘Please, say Action. I’m ready, I’m ready.’”
Martin says D’Amico spoke to him before production started about his relationship with Versace — a source of conflict with Versace’s sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz). “He told me, ‘My relationship with Gianni was beautiful and full of respect.’ He said, ‘We were free. We were open.’ If someone talked bad about Antonio, Gianni would become a lion and defend him. After 15 years, it’s not a game. It’s a real relationship.”
In the series, Donatella doesn’t see it that way, blaming D’Amico for bringing strangers into the house for threesomes. Although Martin and Cruz are friends, Martin says, “Penelope told me, ‘Ricky, you can’t be good to me because I’m not supposed to like you.’ And I would try. I would try for [Donatella] to like me. But it wasn’t happening.”
In his will, Versace left D’Amico approximately $30,000 a month, “inflation proof,” for life. According to Maureen Orth’s book, “Vulgar Favors” — the series’ source material — Donatella and her brother Santo Versace negotiated with D’Amico to take those payments in one lump sum.
“The sad thing is back then [Versace and D’Amico] couldn’t marry,” says Martin, who married his partner, Jwan Yusuf, in 2017. “If they were married, the laws would protect Antonio. And that was not the case.”
Martin dismisses the Versace company’s criticism that the series is a “work of fiction,” citing Orth’s book, including sources who say that Versace and Cunanan met seven years earlier in a San Francisco club called Colossus.
[D’Amico, who lives in Italy, has said Versace never met Cunanan.]
Martin is asked why he thinks Cunanan perpetrated his crimes, but has no concrete answer.
“No one knows. And no one will ever know,” he says. “It makes me really angry. It’s not that [Versace is] dead. It’s why did we allow it to happen.”
“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” 10 p.m. Wednesday on FX