SPOILER ALERT: This post contains stories from the two-part Season 1 finale of “The Beauty,” now streaming on FX on Hulu and Disney+.
After years of portraying serial killers, ghosts, and deeply disturbed individuals on various Ryan Murphy shows, Evan Peters is no stranger to the gore and grime of his sets.
Peters most recently played FBI agent Cooper Madsen in Murphy’s FX series, “The Beauty,” a body-horror show about a sexually transmitted virus that begins as an injectable drug, elevating people’s physical appearances but resulting in lethal consequences. Throughout the season, various characters fall victim to the virus, emerging as beautified versions of themselves from a slimy skin-like sack. In Episode 9, Peters undergoes the transformation, but instead turns into a pre-pubescent teenager, much to his shock.
Although not the final transformation in the show, Peters’ bloody metamorphosis is the last to be shown on-screen, each scene tailored to be distinctive by “The Beauty’s” prosthetics team (prosthetic makeup designers Brett Schmidt, Greg Pikulski, and Dave Presto, department head Philip Harrah, and key prosthetic makeup artist Lindsay Gelfand). The team went through an extensive research and development process before finally constructing the sacks that appear on the show.
Playing with combinations of latex and plastic bags, they eventually decided on silicone, sending Murphy tests and examples through the process, making tweaks at each stage based on his feedback.
“The mould just kept getting bigger and bigger. It started at three or four feet and is now nine by six feet,” says Presto. “It’s this massive thing that we have to roll around.”
The construction process didn’t end with the sacks. Each transformation scene in “The Beauty” features extensive amounts of blood and slime, as the skin-like chrysalis pods sluice off the newly-made-attractive characters.
The team tried a variety of options, eventually creating their own slime from scratch. Once appropriately covered in goop and makeup, the actors would step into the “60 to 70 pound” silicone sacks, using a pre-designated delicate area to break through when filming, while a specially designed vent in the back allowed air to circulate and keep them comfortable. Murphy and directors communicated with the actors through a strategically placed radio under the sack, the thick walls making it difficult to hear each other.
Presto helped coordinate the process on set, waiting on hand with buckets of slime to toss upon the sack once the directors called “action.”
“In the shots, you could see slime falling off the sacks; that’s all real. The only thing they added [in post-production] was a little smoke and the bubbling effect,” says Presto, who added that most of the show’s graphic effects were handmade, with minimal editing involved.
“It took a lot of silicone,” says Presto. “We used around 200 gallons of silicone to make 25 to 30 sacks. The sacks are very heavy too, and with the slime, they’re almost impossible to manage and move around.”
“Ryan was coming up with things as filming went [on], because he was seeing things, and then changing the direction he wanted to go in. Originally, we weren’t sure if all the transformations were going to be the same. But that’s not how it ended up being. Every transformation was its own animal,” adds Schmidt.
Peters’ transformation is arguably the bloodiest one, losing teeth and nails alike, as his chest explodes to reveal his ribs and two overlapping, pulsating bladders created by the team. The most pivotal victim for plot purposes, Murphy and the prosthetics team decided to ramp up how visceral the scene was, by creating “tight and tiny” prosthetics to place atop Peters’ fingernails, which served as the nail bed for the fake nails to be pulled off.
“Two of the craziest and most visceral things are nails and teeth. When you break a nail, and it goes backwards and or lifts off, or a tooth comes loose — those are two things where everyone looks away,” says Presto.
Much of the on-screen gore reminded the team of the 1986 science fiction body horror film “The Fly,” a conscious decision brought on by Murphy’s vision to create an 80’s-themed horror aesthetic for the show, drawing influence from the sci-fi horror movie “Scanners” and fellow 80’s-homage project “Slither.”
A particularly inspired creation comes about in Episode 11, where a teenage girl named Bella (Emma Halleen) self-contaminates in the hopes it will transform her into the beauty of her dreams. The camera pans through her bloodied-up room, eventually honing in on the closet, where viewers expect to see a beautiful girl – and instead are met with a grotesque, indecipherable creature, that the team refers to as “the monster.”
“The monster was probably the most complex thing we did,” says Presto, who explained that she was supposed to emerge from the floor, a plan that had to be scrapped due to set restrictions. The team planned to have her upper body portray the monster and control her additional appendages (an extra set of arms and legs) from under the floor using cable control.
“Usually when you have to cable control something, everything is built inside,” says Presto. “We had to re-engineer everything, going the opposite way that you normally would. We had to take the core apart and figure out how to animate this and do it in a week and a half.”
Although the monster was on-screen for less than a minute, her construction process was one of the most time consuming in the show, beginning with Presto sending Murphy pencil sketches and video samples of animation and potential skin textures, alongside reference photos. The final look involved hours of live-casting her entire body, and a separate day for application.
Separate and customizable elements the team created include practical spine prosthetics for Jeremy Pope’s transformation scene. In the series, he plays Jeremy, who at the end of the pilot goes from his incel persona (portrayed by Jaquel Spivey) to the post-serum version of himself, which was digitally altered with VFX to look like it was rippling under his skin.
For Ben Platt who plays Manny, a contaminated victim placed in confinement, the team whipped up a fake arm, leg, and flaps of skin in two days for him to pull off his body as he fought his way out of wrist cuffs, in addition to a different spine prosthetic.
Another deeply intricate process was the creation of the multi-layerered prosthetics for Jon Jon Briones’ character Dr. Guy, which the prosthetics team says took approximately six hours to apply each day of shooting.
“For Jon Jon specifically, Ryan kept saying ‘imagine he’s on his ninth or 10th facelift. It had to be aggressive and look very, very odd,” says Schmidt. “An exaggerated brow lift, an exaggerated nose job, big filler cheeks — things you do see people get a little too aggressive with.”
The team created several smaller prosthetics to overlap with each other, including upper lip, chin, nose, forehead, and cheek pieces. Describing the application process to be akin to surgery, Harrah and Gelfand spent hours working on the color of the prosthetics, ensuring they were a perfect match to his real skin.
“It’s a labor of love,” says Schmidt, who was approached two months before principal photography began, along with Pikulski. Before and during the filming process, the team worked extensive hours handcrafting the prosthetics for the show, several of them being last minute requests, a challenge they say they were glad to rise to.
“I really appreciate a show like this coming at the time that it did, when A.I. is so threatening to all of us,” says Harrah. “To have a show like this, where they really went for practical makeup and allowed us the time and space and opportunity to do it, we owed it to our industry and our fellow colleagues to deliver the best possible product that we can.”
variety.com
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