Ryan Murphy’s latest psychological thriller takes the idea of beauty being skin-deep to pretty disturbing levels.
Posing the question of how far one will go in the name of perfection, FX’s The Beauty is a new series based on the namesake comic book by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley.
According to an official description, in FX’s The Beauty, the world of high fashion turns dark when international supermodels begin dying in gruesome and mysterious ways. FBI agents Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall) are sent to Paris to uncover the truth. As they delve deeper into the case, they uncover a sexually transmitted virus that transforms ordinary people into visions of physical perfection—but with terrifying consequences.
Their path leads them directly into the crosshairs of “The Corporation” (Ashton Kutcher), a shadowy tech billionaire who has secretly engineered a miracle drug dubbed “The Beauty,” and will do anything to protect his trillion-dollar empire—including unleashing his lethal enforcer, “The Assassin” (Anthony Ramos). As the epidemic spreads, Jeremy (Jeremy Pope), a desperate outsider, is caught in the chaos, searching for purpose as the agents race across Paris, Venice, Rome, and New York to stop a threat that could alter the future of humanity.
Exploring the psychology of perfection
For Pope, it was quite interesting to enter the psyche of his character.
“I was able to do some research and find old YouTube videos and Twitter accounts of Black men that consider themselves incel, which is an involuntary celibate, and try to get into the heart and the mind of what these people were seeking,” Pope told Blavity’s Shadow and Act during our cast interview.
“A lot of times it was to be seen, to be recognized, to be heard, to be understood, to be valued,” he continued. “They felt like what they presented, being a Black person, was a strike, being what they thought was unattractive was a strike, and then the fact that people would not look in their direction. So it began to bring up corrupt feelings, incorrect, just values on what really mattered.”
Pope added, “We’re meeting Jeremy at the top of this episode, conflicted with that conversation of what he is willing to do. How far is he willing to take it, to just feel something? To feel loved or appreciated for what it is he has to bring. So I was very excited to work with Ryan again, and to play a character that was a little bit more nuanced in color and vibration and how he presents himself. And the trick for me was to get outside of just the physical, but really begin to do the work to try to understand the nuance of what was happening inside of this character.”
A villain who thinks he’s saving the world
For Kutcher, the No. 1 rule of portraying a character like The Corporation—who has a very questionable moral compass—is to remove any judgment.
“Some of the most awful people on this planet really think they’re doing the right thing. They really, really genuinely do, and so the biggest challenge from the jump with this thing was how do I rationalize and reason myself into believing that these choices he’s making are better for humanity,” Kutcher shared.
“So, my approach to it from the get-go was, well, instead of it just being about superficial beauty, it’s also about this fountain of youth drug that makes you young and makes you have the bloodwork of a 25-year-old professional athlete, and all of these things, and I started to ask myself, like, ‘Well, that’d be really nice to wake up in the morning and not have that little ache that just showed up because of the way I slept on my pillow.’ And so you go, ‘OK, now you’re offering something to people that is a wonderful thing.’ Or, if you have somebody who is born with a birth defect that is a health issue that will shorten their life, is there an augmentation to that that is beneficial? And so if you start from that perspective, it’s pretty easy to rationalize yourself into, ‘Wait, no, this guy’s doing a good thing for people.'”
“You just have to overlook a couple of killings and other things,” Kutcher added. “I was saying earlier today: In government, this happens all the time. Governments go, ‘Oh no, we had to do that because it was better for everybody else.’ And so what are the knock-on effects that reduce the amount of harm the most? In some way, shape, or form, sometimes people will rationalize themselves into doing awful things.”
Beauty as sacrifice—and control
Ramos is “The Assassin,” known for implementing violence while also being a product of the same system he is created to protect.
“I think what frightened me about him was what he sacrificed to be ‘The Assassin,'” Ramos said. “And you get deeper into the show, and you’re like, ‘Man, he gave that up to work for this guy,’ and I think that explains a lot of, you know, his relationship with Jeremy’s character, and why I think they become so close and why they create this bond pretty quickly,” adding, “He has this empathy for Jeremy’s character, especially when Jeremy starts to open up.”
He continued, “Jeremy’s basically saying, ‘Yo, you might as well just kill me. All I ever wanted to do was feel,’ and who doesn’t want to just feel, right, feel something, especially a guy who has not maybe felt anything for a while—has trained himself not to do that because of what he had to sacrifice to be what he is.”
The Beauty is now streaming on Hulu and airing on FX.