Evan Peters has an unprecedented role in the new Ryan Murphy series “The Beauty.”
“I jumped at the opportunity to play somebody who is more normal. It was very hard,” he quipped to The Post.
In past Murphy shows, Peters has won a Golden Globe for playing serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (in “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”). He’s also played various disturbed characters in the “American Horror Story” franchise, such as a gimp suit wearing killer or a boy with “lobster” hands.
Peters, 39, and Rebecca Hall, 43, star as FBI agents in “The Beauty.” Compared to his past roles, Peters’ character, Cooper Madson, is downright subdued.
“It’s always something new and different and a challenge, which is the beauty of working with Ryan Murphy. It’s always something that’s going to be incredibly difficult,” said Peters, adding that he was told that Cooper has “Steve McQueen energy.”
Premiering on FX (9 p.m.) and Hulu on Disney+ on Wed. Jan. 21, the show was created by Murphy and Matt Hodgso. “The Beauty” is a sci-fi body horror series about FBI agents investigating gruesome, mysterious deaths linked to a sexually transmitted virus that transforms people into supermodels – only to have lethal (and gory) side effects. The star-studded cast also includes Jeremy Pope, Ashton Kutcher, Anthony Ramos, Isabella Rossellini, Ben Platt, and Bella Hadid.
Hall, 43, told The Post, “The whole thing is metaphorically an exaggerated version of the cost or the dangers of playing around with the notion of what beauty is – which is obviously a very powerful thing, but it’s something that is essentially socially constructed.”
“The Town” actress added that beauty standards have varied “enormously” through various historical eras.
“So, do what you need to do, to make you feel like you. But if you start trying to conform to a standard, I think there are dangers there. It will eventually backfire, because we change and we shift. No amount of money is going to really change that.”
For her own FBI agent character, Jordan Bennett, Hall said that Murphy asked her to essentially just be herself.
“One of the things that Ryan said to me was, ‘Can you just do [the performance] as you? Can you just be British and funny and a bit irreverent?’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Yes, I can definitely do that!’”
On the show, the FBI agents’ investigation sends them running to various European locales.
“We got to go to a lot of very amazing tourist destinations, and be there without anyone around. It’s kind of an insane privilege filming at the Trevi Fountain at 3 a.m. with nobody there,” she said, referring to the famous fountain in Rome.
“It was kind of hard not to want to just jump in and wade around, and do a full Fellini. I held myself back,” the “Prestige” actress added, referring to a famous scene from the 1960 film “La Dolce Vita,” where Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg take a midnight jaunt in the fountain.
Peters joked, “We should have done it. We pitched it, they didn’t want to do it.”
