Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty has revealed how the show’s deadly glow-up drug works on trans characters.
The FX and Hulu drama follows characters scrambling to access an experimental treatment that enhances their looks before ultimately causing their bodies to explode. Until now, early recipients have largely been portrayed as looksmaxing incels and leering billionaires, serving as exaggerated stand-ins for a culture obsessed with perfection.
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But episode six, ‘Beautiful Patient Zero’, shifts the tone through Clara, played by Rev. Yolanda before Lux Pascal takes over the role post-transformation.
“Horror, particularly body horror, has a way of putting light on the issues that trans folks and queer folks go through in our culture” – Rev. Yolanda
Working inside a secretive pharmaceutical lab with her friend Mikey (Eddie Kaye Thomas), Clara is offered an early prototype of the drug. Her motivation, however, is not vanity. “I have to believe that if I’m the woman I know I am, that’s what I’ll become,” she says before taking it.
Lux Pascal in The Beauty (Image: FX)
Rather than a grotesque body-horror metamorphosis, Clara wakes up in a serene, sunlit room transformed into her dream self – a striking contrast to the bone-snapping and goo-heavy scenes seen elsewhere in the series.
For Rev. Yolanda, the storyline taps into a long history of queer-coded horror. “Horror, particularly body horror, has a way of putting light on the issues that trans folks and queer folks go through in our culture,” she told Them. “[It] really reflects the outsider, the queer.” Both actors arrived on set as genre fans, with Pascal declaring: “Huge horror fan,” and Yolanda adding that she has spent the past decade working on queer, fat-positive horror projects, joking she has been preparing for an “elder scream queen” era.
“When I look at some of my high-school pictures, we have a similar look” – Yolanda praising the casting continuity between Clara’s two forms
The actors also connected to Clara’s relationship with beauty standards. “Clara was written so beautifully, and it was so personal to me,” Yolanda explained. “She just felt like my alter ego. I was just like, ‘Oh, I’m embodying Clara.’” Pascal, meanwhile, focused on the excitement of joining the Murphyverse, saying: “I was so stoked being there, and [my] dream of being in a Ryan Murphy show was coming true… Some people will find me beautiful, some people won’t, and that’s okay.”
Yolanda also praised the casting continuity between Clara’s two forms, adding: “When I look at some of my high-school pictures, we have a similar look. My hair was your color.”
The Beauty is currently airing on FX and Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ in the UK.
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