Anthony Ramos, Ashton Kutcher, and Jeremy Pope star as The Assassin, The Corporation, and Jeremy in The Beauty. The drama is based on the comic book series written by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley. I recently spoke with the actors about the show’s timely questions and the importance of focusing on the internal aspects of their characters.
The world of high fashion turns dark when international supermodels begin dying in gruesome and mysterious ways. FBI Agents “Cooper Madsen” and “Jordan Bennett” 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,” a shadowy tech billionaire who has secretly engineered a miracle drug dubbed “The Beauty,” who will do anything to protect his trillion-dollar empire—including unleashing his lethal enforcer, “The Assassin.” As the epidemic spreads, “Jeremy,” 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. The Beauty is a global thriller that asks: what would you sacrifice for perfection?
“I mean, the audience starts outside and moves in,” Kutcher explained. “When you’re portraying a character, you start inside and move out, and that’s what you learn to do. Either you go to school, learn how to do it, or you start working when you’re young, and you figure out how to do that, and you read some books. But really, it starts with like, what does this character want, and what are the tactics this character is using to get what they want? And then, why do they want it? Once you figure those things out from a character perspective, everything else kind of becomes the container that you’re doing it in, and that container will leak energy out this way, or that way, or this way. You try to kind of chip away at the rock — this is my approach — instead of trying to plug in little pieces of clay for arms and legs, I try to start with a rock and then chip away, and just leave behind environments to physically manifest that want desire through tactics.”
Ramos, who serves as an executive producer, continued, adding, “Who are they? Once you figure out who they are, then it’s like, alright, do I grow my hair out? Do I lose weight? Do I gain weight? What’s his physicality? Is he in good physical shape, and what kind of physical shape is he in, right? What does that even look like? How does he speak? So, I think it starts inward.”
“I think everything external comes from something internal, you know what I mean? Like he said, when we talk about the GLP-1s and why people choose to do that, that’s a feeling or an expression they feel like they need or they connect with, and that to me is on the inside,” Pope, who is also an EP, shared. “So, I think the more familiar I could get with my character, although his name is Jeremy, with the Jeremy that I’m portraying in this show, the nuance, the stakes, the things he needs, what his why is, you start to begin to understand his psyche and why, given the proposed question that Ryan has presented, what are you willing to do and lose or gain at the chance of perfection when that measure is constantly changing for different people in society? And to me, that question being proposed causes for some madness and some explosion.”
Watch my full interview below:
The Beauty premieres Wednesday, January 21, on FX and Hulu.
