The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Judith Light on her devastating performance as Marilyn Miglin

The third episode of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story focused on the brutal murder of Chicago businessman Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell) by Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). But it also told the story of Miglin’s marriage to his wife, Marilyn, played by Judith Light in a bravura performance.

Almost unrecognizable, Light is haunting as a woman who tries to hold in all her emotions until finally she cracks. EW talked to the actress about the performance and what she hopes the world can learn from this story.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you get involved in this?
JUDITH LIGHT: I have wanted to work with Ryan [Murphy] forever. I just think he’s really extraordinary. This literally came out of the blue through a friend of mine who is a brilliant writer who’s working with Ryan. He said, “There is this part and I think you would be amazing in it.” And it was my friend Jon Robin Baitz who wrote Other Desert Cities and because of him and Joe Mantello, I got the Tony! [Baitz is working with Murphy on the second season of Feud] So when Robby wrote to me, he said the script Tom Robb Smith wrote is amazing and it’s Ryan and they’re such incredible people and I want you to know them and I want you to work with them. I come from reparatory theater and so when people have their rep companies wherever they are, their teams that work together beautifully, to do the kind of work that Ryan has done, you wanna get an opportunity to work with them.

It was crazy because it was last minute and I had to change my entire schedule around. They were so incredible with me. I said to them, “Look, I have to give a speech at the opening of the AIDS conference in Washington D.C. as part of the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.” They all said, “Got it. Go do it, girl, and just fly to us after that.” They were really extraordinary in making this all work. My agents said, “You HAVE to make this work!” I had all these people supporting me to have this come to fruition and I’m so excited. It was a most special experience.

Were you aware of the Miglins and this part of the story?
No! No! No! I knew the story about Gianni Versace because I’ve been an advocate for the LGBTQ community for so long. I knew the Gianni Versace part of the story and I knew about Andrew Cunanan. My parents lived in Ft. Lauderdale so I knew about all of that and I knew about the level of homophobia and the discounting of the gay community particularly at the height of the AIDS pandemic. I knew all about that but I didn’t know in detail what had preceded this killing spree and this rampage and then really didn’t know about it till I read this script and I read the book.

So you read Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors. What other research did you do?
Yeah. You look at that script and it’s the map and it’s the landscape. I didn’t need to be searching for anything else. It was all given to me.

That final moment where you remove your make-up and finally crack is so emotional. What was that like to shoot?
There are all kinds of adjectives you can give to all of that stuff. It was challenging. I was concerned. It was interesting because when we shot it, I had been nominated for an Emmy and I think I had flown back and the next day I had that scene on that next morning. Lemme put it this way: To a person, there was this outpouring of support and generosity and Gwyneth Horder-Payton, who was the director, was taking me through all of it and all the steps and how we did the pieces of it. She allowed for me to figure out where I was going to be emotionally and how I was needed to move throughout the scene. It was just this kind of generous dance of everyone doing their work to support everyone else’s work. That’s all I can tell you. It took a long time to do it and we did it over and over and over again. There was a lot of dialogue that had to be memorized and that was a lot to deal with. But, as you can see, it’s written so beautifully. It was there and by the end of the time every one of us felt incredibly satisfied with what we had done and how we had worked together.