[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers forThe BeautyEpisode 4, “Beautiful Chimp Face.”]
The gorgeous oddity that is FX’s latest Ryan Murphy creation continued to find new ways to grip us and gross us out in this week’s episode, as Evan Peters‘ FBI agent Cooper Madsen tangles with another victim of the injectable youth serum from hell.
“That was one of the main reasons I signed on to do this,” Peters tells TV Insider of his characters’ man-of-action fight sequences. “I thought it was going to be so fun to do all those.” Fun, yes, and, like most Murphy shows, also entirely TVMA.
Picking up his investigation into last week’s Beauty-triggered explosion of a Conde Nast editor following her murderous cafeteria rampage (R.I.P. Meghan Trainor), Cooper’s search for info leads him to a pair of the victims’ lab-sequestered coworkers who’ve had the bad luck of being in her blast radius. Both are splattered with her flying innards, and one — Manny, the b**chy Vogue employee played by Ben Platt — is showing serious, sweaty signs of being infected, what we should be calling Blo-zempic.
As his condition worsens and the change begins to take over, Manny breaks free of his restraints and makes a run for it, leading Cooper into a series of cleverly choreographed fights staged in often-tight spaces within the mysterious medical facility. Soon, Manny’s spine is playing Jenga with itself, his eyes are bleeding like they’d just watched Michael Rapaport eat, and that slimy cocoon thing is starting to swallow him whole. By the time Coop corners him, Manny is buck naked and fully bodied into his new form, courtesy of shredded Broadway actor Isaac Powell (an absolute standout on HBO’s wrongfully canceled The Franchise).
Eric Liebowitz / FX
But as good as he looks, the younger, more muscular NewManny is in an even worse mood than before his metamorphosis and attacks Cooper for “doing this to me!” The ensuing battle sees Cooper having to basically Roman-Greco his way through multiple take-downs of a feral madman wearing nothing but rage and a thin coat of goo.
“Mark Fichera and Jason Mello, the stunts team, developed these amazing sequences that I was thrilled to be able to go learn and get all the moves down,” raves Peters. “And I had a blast doing them.”
When asked if there was an intimacy coordinator on set, seeing how he and the unclothed Powell were giving us the most male-on-male business we’ve seen since Heated Rivalry, Peters laughs and says, “I don’t know that we did, but there were some weird hands accidentally going in strange places.”
On the topic of strange places, Peters’ costar and on-screen FBI partner-slash-lover Rebecca Hall had her own unusual journey, which culminated in last week’s big twist: Her Agent Jordan Bennett has been Beauty-fied against her consent after a one-nighter with a stranger who’d taken the shot. And the STD-related transformation is harrowing to say the least.
“It was like in three parts,” she says of the intricate and unsettling scene. “There was a bit on the bed, a bit on the floor, then a bit sort of bouncing between the walls. And each bit was sort of choreographed out, but a lot of it was also like, ‘Throw yourself around!’ And in such a high-pitched fever state, you don’t want it to be too neat. So there was a certain amount of throwing myself around and hoping that it looks authentic.”
As for the bone-bending, back-cracking moments, Hall happily admits she had some professional help. “There was also a body double who was a contortionist involved [in those], so I will let her take some of the more extreme circus-level stuff credit!”
Philippe Antonello/FX
And while The Beauty itself is soaked in sci-fi, Hall points out that the business of impossible beauty standards, particularly for women, is a grim fact of life. “The series going forward felt to me very real,” she offers. “I mean, I think women struggle with this, and it’s a super-complex thing. We’re all susceptible to vanity and beauty. It’s a commodified concept, and it’s sort of really unobtainable… and certainly if you’re paying for it, then you’re putting the notion of what ‘perfection’ is into the hands of somebody who wants to keep taking your money. So I don’t know that they’re particularly invested in you feeling satisfied with the end product.”
She also acknowledges that her own character has fallen into that “perpetual cycle” of chasing youth and beauty, having admitted in the series premiere that she’d had her breasts done. “I think that the notion that someone like Jordan, who is feminist and self-possessed and really independent — very self-assured, actually — also is susceptible to insecurity is just honest. I mean, that is true for everybody.”
Whether Jordan’s change sticks remains to be seen (remember, none of us read the fine print, so we have no idea what the side effects are!), but for the time being, we’ll be seeing Primate‘s Jess Alexander taking over the role. Which begs the question: Was there any discussion behind the scenes about Hall being replaced by an actress 17 years younger than her?
“No,” she says with a sly smile. “But the irony was not lost on me.”
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