Ryan Murphy making a grotesque satire about beauty standards and greed with tons of body horror? Likely place for him to be. The Nip/Tuck, Glee, and American Horror Story guru making an international action adventure series, however? That’s a little unexpected.
The Mary Sue had Chanel boots on the ground at the 2025 New York Comic-Con Panel for The Beauty, starring Ashton Kutcher, coming to FX in 2026. Here’s what else we learned, all while resisting the urge to yell RENEW DOCTOR ODYSSEY at Murphy from the second row, thank you very much!
The show is based on a graphic novel series by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley. The cast is “one of the homeliest ever assembled,” Murphy joked. Evan Peters, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Pope, and Anthony Ramos joined him and Kutcher on stage. While the teaser trailer and 2-3 scenes from The Beauty that Murphy, who moderated the panel in addition to creating the series, so graciously shared are not yet available for public consumption, he and the cast revealed a lot… from their own personal insecurities to a surprising musical moment and how much Kutcher knows about the cosmetic technology and the business world.
The premise will have you on the edge of your seat.
What if you could take a drug that acts as a “fountain of youth” and makes you look and feel younger? There are just, you know, several catches. Only the 1 percent can afford The Beauty. You can’t control how young The Beauty will make you, or what you’ll look like. (As we know, different cultures have different standards of beauty.) The transformation process involves “flesh sacks” and pink goop. Lovely.
Oh, and if you take the shot you will explode in 855 days. There are boosters you can take to prevent that from happening, but it’s still a major risk and costs additional money. Are good looks worth potentially ending your life in less than 2.5 years? The cast was somewhat split when Murphy polled them, mostly agreeing that feeling 25 might be worth it, regardless of how they looked then or now. At the start of the series, there’s a “rash of exploding supermodels all over the world,” according to Murphy. There’s also an assassin, played by Ramos, on the loose with Pope’s character and two detectives, played by Peters and Hall, who come in to investigate the intentional and unintentional deaths.
Murphy noted that they first started working on this series when Ozempic started to expand beyond its diabetes roots to more commercial use, making the premise more and more relevant. But he didn’t know the half of it. Kutcher plays the tech billionaire who owns this product and the company behind it. He’s a good fit for the role, not only because of his teen heart throb origin story but because he happens to know a lot about this industry. Murphy let him loose, allowing him to talk at length about how scientists are actually working to develop age reversing drugs that make you look and feel younger and drugs that modify designer babies (also known as eugenics…) with billions of dollars in funding. He speculated that if The Beauty existed IRL, it would be worth 10-20 trillion dollars.
Ramos has at least one Glee moment.
Well, kind of. Murphy had the Hamilton alum learn and memorize a Christopher Cross song (“Sailing”) for one scene where his character sings it in the car on a road trip and monologues about how Cross’ mediocre looks held him back in the MTV era. It’s actually the first thing he shot on the series with Pope. Luckily, the two of them have known each other since they were both studying musical theatre in college together. They’re besties!
The Death Becomes Her parallels are 100 percent intentional.
Finally, it probably comes as no surprise that the cult classic Meryl Streep comedy, recently adapted into a hit Broadway musical, is a favorite of Murphy’s. The film, about two frenemies that take an immortality + beauty potion that has some unexpectedly nasty side effects, obviously has a similar premise. Death Becomes Her and The Beauty also share a star in the iconic Isabella Rossellini, who played Lisle von Rhuman in the film and plays the wife of Kutcher’s character in the new series. Murphy described a childhood dream scenario in which he got to act out scenes from Death Becomes Her with Rossellini during some down time on set. “She remembered every line,” he said.
Intrigued? Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for more. While it’s not official yet, Murphy said in the room that The Beauty should hit FX with a three episode premiere on the third week of January 2026, according to Murphy. Try not to self-combust before then.
(featured image: Jason Mendez/Getty Images for ReedPop)
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