‘The Beauty‘ | A tale of narcissism and misery

Master of the populist high-camp, super-stylised horror series, Ryan Murphy’s new FX show The Beauty follows a pair of cops played by Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall as they embark on a globetrotting race against time in the glamourous world of high fashion. A mysterious wonder drug that allows its users to achieve physical perfection is wreaking havoc on the world and making its nefarious developer (Ashton Kutcher) rich on human imperfection, narcissism and misery. Tymon Smith spoke to the cast about how they feel the show taps into the current Ozempic, plastic surgery, and image-obsessed zeitgeist.

What were the themes that attracted you to the show?

Rebecca Hall (Jordan Bennett): Ryan Murphy has a nose for the zeitgeist of the day. He takes current issues and makes them subversive and provocative. He’s interested in the pursuit of perfection and the commodification of beauty. Human beauty is a conceptually complicated thing. It’s not like beauty in nature, like looking at a sunrise, something that’s objective. Human beauty is subjective. The idea that you can pay for perfection, and present a doctor with an image of what you want to achieve, and that you might want to improve on even more, is complicated. What does that kind of beauty mean? How does it shift? What does it change? Keeping people feeling aesthetically inadequate is more profitable."

Ashton Kutcher (Byron Frost): When I first decided to get involved, I thought a lot about beauty. This show doesn’t try to define beauty. It lets the audience work out what it is. I started to ask myself the question, ‘What do you consider to be beautiful?’ It’s hard to answer because people have different definitions of it. For me, imperfection is beautiful because it’s the representation of the potential of something. Everyone is imperfect. When I was young and working as a model in the fashion industry, I met what I thought were the most beautiful people in the world — and all of them could find things about themselves they wished they could change: the way they look physically, the choices they’ve made, how they behaved. We’re fabulous, beautiful works in progress, learning and changing over time. I think that’s beautiful.

Evan Peters (Cooper Madsen): There’s a theme that runs through Ryan’s projects: what makes you, “you”? Your uniqueness makes you interesting and should be celebrated. There are some episodes that hammer that in.

‘The Beauty’ is streaming on Disney+.