Episode 5 of The Beauty was a hand-in-hand collaboration between Ashton Kutcher and Vincent D’Onofrio… specifically the left hand. But before we explain the southpaw of it all, here’s the set-up for the cheekily titled “Beautiful Billionaires.” The flashback-heavy hour revealed that before Byron Frost — the Elon Musk-esque billionaire behind the titular sexually transmitted disease that gives its carriers extremely beautiful makeovers — looked like Kutcher, he had the face and form of the Full Metal Jacket star.
But that changes after Frost makes himself a willing guinea pig in a Beauty trial run and emerges from one of those gross, gooey cocoons with the model-ready looks of That ’70s Show’s resident heartthrob. It’s a surprise reveal that even caught Kutcher off-guard.
“When I got cast, I didn’t know who the other Byron was going to be,” the actor tells Gold Derby. “Maybe three weeks before , Ryan [Murphy, the show cocreator] called me and said: “It’s Vincent D’Onofrio.” Eager to prepare his portrayal accordingly, Kutcher reached out to D’Onofrio through their mutual friend, actor and podcast host, Dax Shepard. (Shepard and Kutcher, of course, were partners in prank crime for the early-aughts MTV hidden camera series, Punk’d.)
“I asked Dax, ‘Hey can you connect me with Vincent?’” Kutcher remembers. “But he was busy shooting something else and I couldn’t get ahold of him for a couple of weeks.” While waiting for his phone to ring, Kutcher embarked on his own D’Onofrio watch party. “I started watching his entire body of work thinking like, ‘Are there things across characters that consistent Vincent D’Onforio things that I could pull into this,” he says, before rattling off his viewing stats. “I watched 100 episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, I watched Daredevil and I went back and watched Full Metal Jacket. Such an unbelievable film!”
In a separate interview about the pivotal episode, D’Onofrio confirms that Shepard was his and Kutcher’s go-between and ensured that the two of them eventually got on the phone. “We had a couple of conversations about Byron, and basically what came of them was the understanding that my job was to go in there and be the horrorshow that he once was,” the Emmy-nominated actor says, adding that he filmed all of his Episode 5 material before Kutcher took over the role. “Ashton’s job was to make him even worse, but in a different way.”
There was one crucial detail left out of those conversations — and it was something that Kutcher only picked up on during his personal D’Onofrio marathon. “I was watching Law & Order and I realized, ‘Oh man, he’s left-handed!’” the actor recalls. “I called him up and said, ‘Vincent, how much have you shot?’ He told me he was done filming, and I said, ‘Wait… did you do it all left-handed?’ And he said ‘Well, yeah … I’m left-handed.’”
“So now I’m playing Byron left-handed,” Kutcher continues, laughing. “Every time I have a gun in my hand, it’s my left hand; every time I have a drink or open a door, it’s with my left hand. It was one of those Vincent D’Onofrio things.”
Informed of Kutcher’s commitment to the left-handed bit, D’Onofrio just grins. “I was lucky to be able to go first,” he says wryly.
D’Onofrio also counts himself lucky to have filmed his scenes alongside a roster of killer guest stars playing Frost’s wealthy friends and fellow guinea pigs, including Peter Gallagher and Billy Eichner. They’re collectively exposed to an early strain of the Beauty in a specially built chamber housed in one of Byron’s mansions and de-age into younger, hotter versions of themselves. But first, they have to suffer through the side effects, including intense body-writhing. That’s why Frost covers himself in stuffed animals to potentially mitigate some of the pain. It doesn’t work, but it gives D’Onofrio a memorable look for his last scene on the show.
“That stuffed animal thing was in the costume designer’s dressing room when I showed up one day,” the actor remembers. “The minute I put it on, I was like, ‘We have to use this. It was a great way to go out in the most ridiculous and pathetic way possible.”
For his actual “death” scene, D’Onofrio says that no special body contortionists were required like they were for Rebecca Miller during her Episode 2 transformation. “I just approached it as, ‘My muscles and organs are deteriorating as I’m being reborn,’” the actor explains. “It’s an extraordinary amount of pain, so it had to look and feel intense. We all knew that, and everyone squirmed and screamed on the floor, which was our job in that room. It was so much fun to do that alongside such great actors who are so committed to their roles.”
Once he was done screaming and squirming, D’Onofrio didn’t stick around The Beauty set to see Kutcher emerge from his cocoon as the new Bryon Frost. In fact, when we spoke, he still hadn’t seen the episode and had no idea what happened next — which meant we got to be the first to fill him in on Kutcher’s nod to Pvd. Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence, the picked-upon, pushed-to-his limit cadet that D’Onofrio so memorably played for Stanley Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket.
Having determined that the effects Beauty are very real and very spectacular, Frost makes the calculating decision that all of his similarly transformed friends are very expendable. Pulling a conveniently-hidden machine gun out of his bag, Byron proceeds to murder everyone else in that chamber before burning down the mansion to hide any and all evidence. If the chilling smile on Kutcher’s face as he’s gunning everyone down puts you in mind of the final moments in Pyle’s life, let’s just say that’s not a major malfunction. “I’m looking forward to that, then,” D’Onofrio remarks when informed of the homage.
“Byron’s just doing what he had to do,” Kutcher says of his Full Metal moment. “Right after that, there’s a moment where I’m walking out of the chamber and I kind of skip. There’s two things happening there: One is that this guy is taking out all these people, which is awful, but he’s justified in his head why he’s doing it. And the second thing is that he’s just gone from being a 70-year-old man to having a 35-year-old body and can move without pain. So it’s a celebration of that while while also wiping these people out. It was a fun juxtaposition to play.”
Both Kutcher and D’Onofrio are careful to stress that their partnership wasn’t some kind of grand imitation game. “I didn’t want to do a Vincent D’Onofrio [impression],” Kutcher emphasizes. “It was about getting just enough of him where the audience goes, ‘That’s the same individual.’”
“It’s not about one guy playing another guy in a different body,” adds D’Onofrio. “It was more about what’s servicing the story best. Ashton is Byron’s overall story, and I’m just one piece of it, so we had to figure out the most dynamic way to make that work.”
Crossing Jordan
Jessica Alexander at the U.K. premiere of ‘The Beauty’Kate Green/Getty Images
Besides revealing the D’Onofrio/Kutcher connection, “Beautiful Billionaires” also brings FBI agent, Jordan Bennett, back into the mix. But with Rebecca Hall‘s version of the character going the way of Janet Leigh in Psycho, Jordan is now played by Jessica Alexander, who fills her professional and personal partner, Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters), in on what she’s been up to since her own cocoon-enabled transformation. And it turns out being beautiful isn’t all its cracked up to be.
“I approached it from the idea that Jordan feels like a different person now, but necessarily because of what she feels on the inside, but because of what the world is showing her in response to her looks and her youth,” Alexander says of her early-episode monologue that outlines the way the admiration for Jordan’s beauty inevitably turns towards harassment.
“To be honest, I relate to that,” the actress continues. “Before I filmed that scene, I glammed myself up a little bit and went out in nice outfits and I realized that I can choose whether or not I want to be seen by the male gaze. If I got outside in a tracksuit with not makeup, I’m not going to get approached or stared at. But if I present myself in a certain way to the world, of course I will. And that’s kind of bittersweet — you can enjoy it at first, but then it becomes uncomfortable, and that’s what Jordan is going through.”
Alexander credits The Beauty cast and crew with ensuring that the experience of replacing Hall mid-shoot wouldn’t be uncomfortable. “I can’t be Rebecca — no one can be Rebecca,” she says, laughing. “But in my screen test, I do remember both Rebecca and Evan saying that my mannerisms and way of speaking were similar. And I was very lucky to be able to talk to her as she was leaving the show and pick her brain about the character and the industry as a whole.”
“It’s always weird to join a show that’s already up and running, because everyone’s already in their groove,” Alexander adds. “But it actually worked out quite well for that scene that Evan and I were unfamiliar with each other, because both Cooper and Jordan were feeling each other out and that’s part of the chemistry of the scene.”
And Alexander already has a pitch for a potential Season 2 storyline. “Is there a way that the Beauty can reverse itself so both Rebecca and I can be in the show?” she says, laughing. Ryan Murphy, take note.
