Everyone wants to be hot. On Ryan Murphy’s new FX project The Beauty, that’s a fatal contagion. Set inside the rarefied, image-obsessed world of high fashion, the show opens as international supermodels begin dying in grotesque, unexplained ways. What initially appears to be a series of isolated incidents quickly pulls FBI agents Cooper Madsen and Jordan Bennett into a globe-spanning investigation that moves from Paris to Venice, Rome, and New York.
The story quickly spins into a body-horror morality plot, following a sexually transmitted virus that grants impossible physical beauty at an unspeakable cost, bankrolled by a shadowy tech billionaire and enforced by his own personal assassin.
As the virus spreads and the fallout widens, The Beauty becomes less about the science of the disease than the psychology around it: image as currency, beauty as power, and self-destruction as collateral damage. The question driving every character is blunt and unmistakably Ryan Murphy-coded. How much of yourself would you sacrifice to look perfect?
Let's meet the players at the heart of the outbreak. From the truth-seeking investigators, to the power players reminding us that billionaire's should not exist.
Evan Peters as Cooper Madsen
Ryan Murphy’s favorite leading man plays an FBI agent pulled into the first wave of unexplained deaths linked to the Beauty drug. The pilot opens with Cooper already embedded in Europe, waking up in Paris alongside his partner Jordan Bennett. They've been dispatched to investigate the Paris fashion-week catastrophe, which sets the entire narrative in motion.
Instagram: N/A
Rebecca Hall as Jordan Bennett
Jordan is introduced in parallel with Cooper, immediately positioned as his equal, both professionally and emotionally. Their relationship is established before the case, not as a twist, but as a given.
Instagram: @rebeccahall
Bella Hadid as Ruby
The Beauty’s official opening character, Ruby is a high fashion model who steps onto the runway looking beautiful, but unwell. Her body betrays her mid-show, she turns violently erratic, and the carefully controlled spectacle collapses into chaos, introducing the consequences of the titular “Beauty.”
Instagram: @bellahadid
Jeremy Pope as Jeremy
Jeremy is introduced with a quiet desperation for transformation. He is the civilian reality of the pathogen, removed from the fashion and corporate worlds. Ruby is destroyed by beauty’s excess, Jeremy is seduced by its promise.
Instagram: @jeremypope
Ashton Kutcher as Byron Forst
The creator of the Beauty pathogen, Byron Frost, is whispered about, hinted at, and gradually framed as the connective tissue between outbreaks. A billionaire tech founder and public-facing visionary, Forst is a PR girly gone dark. He uses corporate language, spin, and innovation rhetoric to obscure responsibility, refusing to accept responsibility as evidence of its deadly consequences accumulates around him.
Instagram: @aplusk
Isabella Rossellini as Franny Forst
Byron Forst’s estranged wife, Franny occupies a morally fraught position inside the empire Beauty has built. As the human cost becomes impossible to ignore, she begins to reckon with her proximity to the damage, and whether silence makes her complicit.
Instagram: @isabellarossellini
Anthony Ramos as The Assassin
A precision operative hired to protect the Beauty’s continued rollout, the Assassin enters once the investigation threatens to expose Byron’s involvement. Played by the ever beautiful Anthony Ramos, his beauty is weaponized and implies a certain "patient zero" backstory.
Instagram: @anthonyramosofficial
