Wednesday’s episode of American Crime Story: Versace marks the directorial debut of actor Matt Bomer, who — at the risk of sounding “so 2018” — says he was “truly blessed” to get to work on the FX drama.
“When Ryan Murphy called and asked me to do this — after I passed out, regained consciousness and said yes — I knew that it was a serious responsibility,” the actor tells TVLine. “I’d been offered directing jobs before, but they were jobs I was also acting in, and I wanted my first directing experience to be the full-meal deal. I wanted to really do it, to be on the location scouts and design meetings and castings and really have the full experience.”
“I wanted the producers to know I was taking this seriously, that they weren’t just putting the camera in the hands of somebody who was just hoping to cruise by,” he says. “I called my representatives who were talking about acting jobs, and I told them, ‘Put everything on hold. This is what I’m doing, this is it.’”
Bomer’s episode — which airs tonight at 10/9c — chronicles Gianni Versace and Andrew Cunanan’s radically different upbringings, showing how “success brought out the worst in Andrew and the best in Gianni.”
“We want to see [Andrew] as a three-dimensional human being,” Bomer says, “but the real challenge of this episode is: Can we sympathize with a monster and see that he was also a victim? We’re all ultimately responsible for the decisions we make and the actions we take, but this is someone who was near to violence at a very young age, who was treated like a spouse by both his mother and his father. The central question of this episode is: What makes one person a creator and one person a killer?”