The Beauty FX Cast, Characters and Outfits: The Complete Guide to Ryan Murphy’s 2026 Series

Ryan Murphy has spent his career making television that unsettles people about the things they find most ordinary: the family home, the body, the pursuit of beauty. The Beauty, his 2026 FX series created with Matthew Hodgson, is perhaps the most direct statement he has ever made on that last subject. A sexually transmitted virus that grants physical attractiveness in exchange for eventual death is not a subtle metaphor, but Murphy has never been interested in subtle. What he is interested in is a cast that can carry that kind of material, and The Beauty assembled one of the most striking ensembles of the year: Evan Peters, Anthony Ramos, Rebecca Hall, Ashton Kutcher, Jeremy Pope, and a guest roster that includes Bella Hadid, Meghan Trainor, Ben Platt, and Isabella Rossellini. This is the complete guide to every character, every look, the comic book that started it all, and the full TVJackets collection inspired by the series.

What Is The Beauty on FX? Premise and Overview

The Beauty is a 2026 American science fiction body horror television series created by Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson for FX. It is based on the creator-owned comic book of the same name, written by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley and published by Image Comics. The series premiered on FX and Hulu on January 21, 2026, with the first three episodes dropping simultaneously and the remaining eight episodes released weekly. Internationally, the series streams on Disney Plus.

The premise follows FBI agents Cooper Madsen, played by Evan Peters, and Jordan Bennett, played by Rebecca Hall, as they investigate a series of unexplained deaths among international supermodels. Their inquiry leads to the discovery of a sexually transmitted virus called the Beauty, which grants the infected radical physical attractiveness but carries fatal consequences. As the agents trace its origins, they uncover a connection to a powerful and secretive tech figure known as the Corporation, operated by billionaire Byron Forst, played by Ashton Kutcher, who seeks to protect the drug and expand its global reach. Pursued by a hired operative known as the Assassin, played by Anthony Ramos, the agents continue their investigation across multiple international cities as the outbreak grows.

The series consists of 11 episodes running between 24 and 52 minutes each. It was produced by Ryan Murphy Productions and 20th Television, with music by Mac Quayle, a frequent Murphy collaborator. Executive producers include Ryan Murphy, Matthew Hodgson, Eric Kovtun, Scott Robertson, Nissa Diederich, Michael Uppendahl, Evan Peters, Anthony Ramos, Jeremy Pope, and Alexis Martin Woodall.

The Beauty Full Cast and Characters

One of the most distinctive structural choices in The Beauty is its dual casting system. Because the virus transforms the physical appearance of those it infects, many characters are played by two actors: one before the transformation and one after. This creates a layered cast that reflects the show’s central theme at the level of production design itself.

Main Cast

Recurring Cast

Notable Guest Cast

Evan Peters as Cooper Madsen: The Agent at the Centre

Evan Peters plays Cooper Madsen, a former Navy SEAL turned FBI agent assigned to investigate the deaths connected to the Beauty virus. Cooper is the show’s narrative engine, the character through whom the audience discovers the scope of the conspiracy and the depth of the institutional corruption protecting it. He is methodical, physically capable, and carries the quiet authority of someone who has operated in extreme environments before and recognises danger in ways that most people cannot.

What makes Cooper compelling as a character rather than simply a functional investigator is the romantic relationship with his partner Jordan Bennett, which the show develops carefully across the season. Cooper’s feelings for Jordan create a vulnerability that the plot exploits systematically. The scenes in Rome between the two characters, explored in flashback across several episodes, establish an emotional foundation that makes the later consequences of the Beauty’s spread hit considerably harder than they would otherwise.

Peters’ wardrobe as Cooper reflects the character’s military-to-federal transition: structured, practical, built for movement and authority. The black wool coat is the defining piece, carrying the weight and formality of someone operating in a world that is neither fully civilian nor quite as ordered as the institutions he represents. Episode nine marks the most significant wardrobe shift in Cooper’s arc, as the character undergoes the Beauty transformation himself, emerging as a healthy adolescent in one of the season’s most visually arresting sequences.

Anthony Ramos as The Assassin: Beauty’s Most Dangerous Variable

Anthony Ramos plays Antonio, better known throughout the series as the Assassin, an enforcer working for the Corporation. The character’s specific situation is one of the show’s most elegant pieces of world-building: Antonio is a 65-year-old man in a 30-something body, having taken the Beauty drug shortly after it was developed. He has been living with the transformation long enough to understand its internal logic in ways that most characters cannot, which makes him the show’s most unpredictable figure and one of its most psychologically complex.

The relationship between the Assassin and Jeremy Pope’s character Jeremy, which begins as a predatory recruitment and gradually complicates into something stranger and more human, is one of the season’s most consistently compelling threads. As Jeremy and the Assassin spend more time together, the show explores what it means to exist in a body that was not originally yours, and whether identity follows the body or precedes it. Ramos brings a physical precision to the role that makes the character’s violence legible and his moments of unexpected tenderness all the more disorienting for it.

Ashton Kutcher as Byron Forst: The Villain Who Owns the Drug

Ashton Kutcher’s casting as Byron Forst is one of the season’s most deliberately provocative choices, and Murphy made it work precisely because the provocation is the point. Byron is a tech billionaire who took the Beauty drug three years before the events of the series to prevent himself from aging. He is effectively the story’s originating villain: the man who identified the drug’s commercial potential, built a corporation around it, and then spent three years suppressing its side effects while expanding its reach.

The character operates with the logic of Silicon Valley disruption applied to biology: move fast, suppress the countervailing evidence, control the narrative. When the drug’s fatal consequences begin surfacing publicly, Byron’s response is not to halt distribution but to manage the optics and eliminate the scientists who might expose him. Kutcher plays this with a particular kind of polished menace, the charm of someone who genuinely believes their own justifications and has never been seriously challenged on them.

Vincent D’Onofrio plays Byron before the transformation, in flashback sequences that establish the character’s history with the drug and the specific calculation that led him to take it. The contrast between D’Onofrio’s Byron and Kutcher’s Byron is one of the show’s more unsettling visual arguments: what a person becomes when they are allowed to design themselves according to their own ideal.

Rebecca Hall as Jordan Bennett: Three Coats, One Character Arc

Rebecca Hall plays Jordan Bennett, FBI agent and Cooper Madsen’s partner, who becomes infected by the Beauty virus during the course of the investigation. Her transformation, played by Jessica Alexander after it occurs, marks one of the season’s major structural turning points and reframes the entire final act of the series around questions of identity, authenticity, and what it means to be the same person in a different body.

Hall brings intellectual precision to Jordan that makes the character the show’s most credible investigator. Where Cooper operates on instinct and military training, Jordan operates on pattern recognition and the kind of lateral thinking that repeatedly gets closer to the truth faster. The romantic dimension of her relationship with Cooper is handled with genuine restraint, using the Rome flashbacks to establish what was between them before the investigation placed them both in danger.

Jordan Bennett’s wardrobe across the season is one of the most coherent character clothing arcs in the show. Her coats are the consistent visual signature: structured, professional, and chosen with the quiet authority of someone who understands that how you dress in a federal investigation communicates as much as what you say. TVJackets carries three distinct Rebecca Hall coats from the series, each representing a different register of the character.

Bella Hadid and the Guest Cast: When Fashion Meets Body Horror

The guest casting in The Beauty is where the show makes its cultural commentary most explicit. Ryan Murphy’s decision to cast actual supermodels, pop stars, and public figures in roles that literalise the consequences of beauty culture is not subtle, but it is precise. Each guest character is positioned to illuminate a specific angle of the show’s central argument about appearance, desire, and the cost of transformation.

Bella Hadid as Ruby Rossdale

Bella Hadid plays Ruby Rossdale, a supermodel who combusts from the side effects of the Beauty virus during a Balenciaga fashion show in Paris. Ruby’s combustion is the inciting incident of the series: the event that draws Cooper and Jordan into the investigation and establishes for the audience exactly how dangerous and how spectacular the virus’s consequences can be. The choice to cast Hadid, whose own public narrative has included extensive discussion of cosmetic procedures and beauty standards, in the role of the virus’s most visible early casualty is the kind of casting decision that only Murphy would make, and it lands with exactly the weight he intended.

Hadid’s wardrobe as Ruby reflects the world the character inhabited before the combustion: the high-fashion register of runway and editorial, clothes that exist at the furthest extreme of the beauty industry the show is critiquing. The red leather jacket, hooded coat, and leather jacket from the series are pieces that carry that editorial energy into wearable form.

The Conde Nast Arc: Ben Platt, Meghan Trainor, and Amelia Gray Hamlin

The show’s most sustained satirical sequence runs through the Conde Nast arc, which traces how the virus spreads through the fashion and media industry via Harper Rose, a Vogue assistant editor played by Amelia Gray Hamlin. Hamlin’s Harper goes on a rampage at Conde Nast in New York, infecting numerous employees including Manny, played by Ben Platt, and Brittany, played by Meghan Trainor. Isaac Powell plays Manny after the transformation.

The casting of Meghan Trainor, whose public persona has been built around messages of body acceptance and self-worth, in a show about the fatal consequences of a drug that grants physical attractiveness is exactly the kind of meta-commentary Murphy is known for. Trainor has spoken in interviews about the weight and significance of the role for her personally, which adds a layer of real-world resonance to the character’s position in the narrative.

The Billionaire Guests

Episodes five and six introduce a group of billionaires who participated in the early Beauty trials, played by Billy Eichner as crypto billionaire Waylen Lemming, Peter Gallagher as fossil fuels billionaire Axel Zufo, and David Pittu as banking billionaire Ronan Wylde. Julie Halston plays Kitty Munson, a multinational retail billionaire. Together they function as a compressed portrait of the kind of power that backs pharmaceutical experimentation when the rewards are sufficiently personal.

The Supporting Cast: Gunther, Jeremy, and the Wider World

Beyond the five main cast members, The Beauty populates its world with a supporting ensemble that gives the season’s conspiracy its structural complexity. Jeremy Pope’s Jeremy is the season’s emotional wildcard: an outsider who begins the series as a lonely young man seeking transformation and ends it as one of the most consequential figures in the Beauty’s spread. Pope plays the character’s journey from directionlessness to complicity with a genuinely unsettling precision.

Isabella Rossellini as Franny Forst, Byron’s estranged wife, brings the season’s clearest moral perspective: a woman who understands exactly what her husband is and has spent years at a calculated distance from it. Nicola Peltz Beckham plays Franny after her transformation in later episodes. Their shared presence in the show creates an interesting generational dialogue about the price of proximity to power.

The Forst sons, Tiger Tig played by Kevin Cahoon and Gunther played by Eric Petersen, become increasingly central to the season’s final episodes as Byron uses the Beauty procedure on them to save them from drug overdose, triggering Franny’s decision to pursue vengeance. Ray Nicholson plays Tig and Brandon Gillard plays Gunther after their transformations.

The show’s gender-affirming narrative thread runs through Clara Gardner, played by Rev Yolanda before the transformation and Lux Pascal after it. Clara, a transgender scientist and Mike McGuinn’s best friend, uses the Beauty to gain the female body she has always desired. The show handles this thread with more care than its body-horror framework might suggest, allowing Clara’s transformation to carry genuine emotional weight rather than functioning purely as genre plot.

The Beauty Outfits Decoded: Style in a Show About Appearance

A show about a virus that transforms physical appearance has an unusual relationship with its own wardrobe. In most television, clothes signal character identity. In The Beauty, they signal the identity a character had before the transformation arrived and, in the second half of the season, the identity they are constructing afterward. This gives the show’s wardrobe department a narrative function that goes beyond the usual visual characterisation.

The five main characters each inhabit a distinct visual register that reflects both their professional role and their specific relationship to the Beauty drug. Cooper’s heavy wool coat signals the gravity of someone operating at the edge of institutional authority. Jordan’s structured coats carry the clean precision of an investigator who understands that credibility in federal work is partly visual. Byron’s peacoat and polished casual layers reflect tech-billionaire aesthetics applied to someone who took a transformation drug to preserve his own appearance. The Assassin’s dark leather signals operational capability and the kind of presence that does not require announcement.

What makes these wardrobe choices interesting beyond the show is their rootedness in real garment traditions. Cooper’s wool coat is not a television costume: it is a genuinely wearable piece that functions as outerwear independently of any character context. The same is true of Jordan Bennett’s coats, Byron’s peacoat, and the Assassin’s leather jacket. These are clothes that read as characters on screen and as clothing off it, which is why they translate so cleanly into a TVJackets collection.

The Comic Book Origins and Ryan Murphy’s Ozempic Commentary

The Beauty began as a creator-owned comic book written by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley and published by Image Comics. The original comic follows two detectives investigating a sexually transmitted disease that makes those infected physically beautiful but ultimately proves fatal. FX ordered the series on September 30, 2024 with an 11-episode commitment, and filming began in New York City on December 2, 2024, with additional production in Pearl River, New York in late January 2025.

The FX premiere triggered an immediate resurgence of interest in the source material. The Beauty comic number 1 entered Key Collector Comics’ Trending 20 list, appeared on YouTube channel ComicTom101’s Hot 10 rankings over multiple consecutive weeks, and secondary market activity increased significantly, with raw copies reportedly selling for up to $64 on eBay and near-mint CGC 9.8 copies reaching a near-mint fair market value of approximately $53. The week of the series premiere, The Beauty number 1 placed seventh among trending comics in the United States.

Ryan Murphy has been explicit about the thematic frame he brought to the adaptation. In promotional interviews, he described The Beauty as a commentary on Ozempic culture and the broader social fixation on rapid, drug-assisted physical transformation, positioning the series as an extension of themes he explored in Nip/Tuck. The Beauty virus functions as a satirical amplification of the cultural logic around cosmetic enhancement: something that promises immediate visible results, requires ongoing maintenance, carries consequences the industry prefers not to discuss, and is distributed by powerful interests whose primary concern is commercial rather than medical.

The series received a mixed but predominantly positive critical reception. It holds a 72% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 64 reviews and a score of 64 out of 100 on Metacritic from 31 critics, which the site categorises as generally favorable. Several individual critics drew comparisons to Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 film The Substance, which explored similar body horror and beauty industry themes. On streaming, the show ranked number one on Hulu’s Top 15 Today list on January 23, 2026, and remained on the chart through March 6.

Murphy’s track record with FX horror, from American Horror Story through American Horror Stories, gave audiences a clear framework for what kind of experience to expect from The Beauty. The show sits squarely in that tradition of prestige cable horror with a social critique running underneath the genre mechanics, which is exactly where Murphy’s most consistent work has lived for the past fifteen years. The keyword cluster around “ryan murphy new show” and “new fx series” confirms that his name alone was driving audience discovery independent of the show’s specific premise.

Where to Watch The Beauty

The Beauty is available to stream on FX and Hulu in the United States. The series premiered on January 21, 2026 with the first three episodes released simultaneously. The remaining eight episodes were released on a weekly schedule through March 4, 2026, when the final two episodes of the season dropped together. All 11 episodes are currently available to stream in full.

Internationally, The Beauty is available on Disney Plus in regions where Disney Plus carries FX programming. The trailer, released January 5, 2026, amassed nearly 190 million views across social media platforms in its first seven days, making it the most-viewed trailer in FX history and establishing significant audience awareness ahead of the premiere.

For viewers who have completed the season and want to explore the source material, the original The Beauty comic book by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley is available through Image Comics and comic book retailers. The renewed interest generated by the FX premiere has made early issues collector’s items, with prices reflecting the show’s cultural impact.