Spoiler Alert: This post contains storylines from the two-part Season 1 finale of “The Beauty,” now streaming on FX on Hulu and Disney+.
Having spent years playing serial killers, ghosts, and deeply disturbed characters on various Ryan Murphy shows, Evan Peters is no stranger to blood and grime on his sets.
Peters most recently played FBI agent Cooper Madsen on Murphy’s FX series “The Beauty.” The series is a body horror show about a sexually transmitted virus that begins as an injectable drug that enhances people’s appearance, but with deadly consequences. Throughout the season, various characters fall victim to the virus, emerging from slimy skin-like sacs as glorified versions of themselves. In episode 9, Peters undergoes a transformation, but instead becomes a prepubescent teenager, much to Peters’ shock.
Although not the last transformation in the show, Peters’ bloody transformation is the last to be seen on screen, and each scene is tailored to be unique by The Beauty’s prosthetics team (prosthetics makeup designers Brett Schmidt, Greg Pikulski, Dave Presto, department head Phillip Hara, and lead prosthetics makeup artist Lindsey Gelfand). The team went through an extensive research and development process before assembling the bags that ultimately appeared on the show.
After experimenting with a combination of latex and plastic bags, they finally decided on silicone and sent Murphy tests and samples through the process, making tweaks at each stage based on feedback.
“The molds got bigger and bigger. They started out 3 or 4 feet, and now they’re 9 by 6 feet,” Presto said. “It’s this huge thing that we have to roll.”
The construction process didn’t end with the bag. Each transformation scene in “The Beauty” features copious amounts of blood and goo, as skin-like chrysalis sheaths cut away at the newly created glamorous characters.
The team tried different options and ended up creating their own slime from scratch. Appropriately covered in gunk and makeup, the actors stepped into “60 to 70 pound” silicone bags and used pre-designated sensitive areas to break through during filming, while specially designed vents on their backs allowed air to circulate and keep them comfortable. Murphy and the director communicated with the actors via radios strategically placed under the bags, but thick walls made it difficult to hear each other.
Presto helped coordinate the process on set, always keeping a bucket of slime on hand to toss into the bag when the director called “action.”
“In the shot, you could see the slime falling out of the bag. It’s all real. The only thing they added[in post-production]is a little bit of smoke and bubbling effects,” Presto said, adding that most of the show’s graphic effects were handmade and editing was kept to a minimum.
“We needed a lot of silicon,” Presto said. “We used about 200 gallons of silicone to make 25 to 30 bags. The bags are also very heavy, making them almost impossible to manage and move with slime.”
“Ryan came up with ideas as filming progressed, because he would see things and then change the direction he wanted to go in. Initially, we didn’t know if all the transformations were going to be the same. But in the end, they weren’t. Every transformation was its own animal,” adds Schmidt.
Peters’ transformation was perhaps the bloodiest, as he lost teeth and claws alike, and his chest burst open, exposing his ribs and the two overlapping, pulsating bladders the team had created. As the plot’s most important victim, Murphy and the prosthetics team decided to add to the suspense by creating a “tight, small” prosthesis that would fit over Peters’ nails to serve as a nail bed from which to remove the false nails.
“Two of the craziest and most intuitive things are nails and teeth. When you break a nail, it slides back, it peels off, the tooth falls out. Those are the two things that turn everyone away,” says Presto.
Much of the on-screen gore reminded the team of the 1986 sci-fi body horror film “The Fly.” This was a conscious decision driven by Murphy’s vision to create an 80s-themed horror aesthetic for the show, influenced by the 80s homage project “Slither” as well as the sci-fi horror film “Scanner.”
A particularly inspired piece comes in episode 11. There, a teenage girl named Bella (Emma Halleen) self-contaminates herself in hopes of transforming herself into the beauty of her dreams. The camera pans through her bloody room and finally focuses on the closet. Viewers expect to see a beautiful girl there, but instead they encounter grotesque, indecipherable creatures that the team calls “monsters.”
“The monster was probably the most complex thing we did,” Presto said, explaining that she was scheduled to emerge from the floor, but that plan had to be scrapped because of restrictions in place. The team planned to represent the monster with her upper body and use cable controls to control her additional appendages (an extra set of arms and legs) from below the floor.
“Typically, if you need to cable control something, everything is built internally,” Presto says. “We had to redesign everything in a non-traditional way. We had to take apart the core, figure out how to animate this, and get it done in a week and a half.”
Although the monster was on screen for less than a minute, her construction process was one of the longest on the show, starting with Presto sending Murphy pencil sketches and video samples of animation and potential skin textures, along with reference photos. The final look took hours of live-casting her entire body, and the application took another day.
Individual customizable elements created by the team include a working spinal prosthesis for Jeremy Pope’s transformation scene. In the series, he plays Jeremy, who at the end of the pilot transforms from his incel persona (played by Jaquel Spivey) to a post-serum version of himself, digitally altered with VFX to make it look like he’s rippling beneath his skin.
For Ben Platt, who plays the tainted victim and imprisoned Manny, the team created fake arms, legs, and skin strips in two days, along with another spinal prosthesis, for him to shed to escape the wrist handcuffs.
Another extremely complex process was the creation of the multi-layered prosthesis for Dr. Guy, played by Jon Jon Briones, which the prosthetics team said took about six hours to apply each day of filming.
“With Jon Jon in particular, Ryan kept saying, ‘Imagine you’re having your ninth or 10th facelift. It had to be aggressive and look really weird,'” Schmidt says. “I often see people go a little too aggressive with things like exaggerated eyebrow lifts, exaggerated nose jobs, and big cheek fillers.”
The team created several small prosthetics that overlapped each other, including parts of the upper lip, chin, nose, forehead, and cheeks. Describing the installation process as similar to surgery, Hara and Gelfand spent hours adjusting the color of the prosthesis to make sure it matched perfectly with real skin.
“This is a labor of love,” Schmidt said. Mr. Schmidt, along with Mr. Pikulski, was approached two months before principal photography began. Before and during the filming process, the team spent long hours handcrafting prosthetics for the show, some of which were last-minute requests, but they say they’re glad they overcame the challenge.
“I’m really grateful that a show like this is coming at a time when AI is such a huge threat to all of us,” says Hara. “To put on a show like this, they took hands-on makeup seriously and gave us the time, space and opportunity to do it. We owe it to our industry and our colleagues to provide the best products possible.”
