Bella’s Transformation, Nicola Peltz Beckham’s Role Revealed

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains stories from the two-part Season 1 finale of “The Beauty,” now streaming on FX on Hulu and Disney+.

FX’s body-horror odyssey “The Beauty” spent its first season reveling in the gooey, revolting transformations born from taking a drug that can turn a hum-drum existence into a sculpted manifestation of perfection. Average people cocooned in their own veiny skin sacks, rip open a whole new lease on life with chiseled abs, symmetrical faces and enough confidence to take on the world.

Over and over again, the series from co-creators Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson showed why people would want to take The Beauty, side effects be damned. But the Season 1 finale offered up the most compelling reason yet why they shouldn’t. In the first part of the two-episode finale, audiences are introduced to Bella (Emma Halleen), a perfectly normal high school student who watches as The Beauty craze sweeps through her world. Her privileged best friend, coming off an unsatisfying nose job, takes the drug and shows up the next day blonde, tanned and ready for the runway. It makes Emma crave the same instantaneous achievement of supposed perfection, even though her parents refuse to consider it, and they don’t have the money even if they did.

Director Michael Uppendahl says the decision to shift the focus of the series in the eleventh hour to a teenage girl the audience had never met came down to who among us would be the best commentator on a global sensation.

“A litmus test for a population at any given time is a 16-year-old girl,” Uppendahl tells Variety. “They’re up on everything. They’re in a major transitional stage in their life. They’re smarter than the boys, especially at that age. I mean, they remain smarter, but I think they are a measure of what any society is experiencing. This is an uncomfortable thing to confront, and that’s why it makes them the best vessel for this story.”

With no other options to get The Beauty, Bella takes matters into her own hands. One of the technicians who injected her friend offers Emma an alternative: pay him what cash she can get from pawning her mother’s jewelry and he will give her The Beauty as a sexually transmitted disease. All season, The Beauty’s dealer, callous billionaire Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher), has pushed to release the drug while fearing the one thing he can’t control –– this secondhand means of distribution. Bella validates Byron’s fears.

Despite her knight in shining Beauty revealing he took a second shot without knowing the consequences, Bella proceeds not only with losing her virginity, but taking the STD dosage. What she gets is a nightmare scenario, one her mother (Maria Dizzia) unfortunately comes home to discover. In her rebirth, Bella is deformed beyond recognition or repair, a fleshy mass of bleeding orifices, mutated limbs and contorted bone. It’s hard to look at, and that’s exactly what Uppendahl wanted. The team was adamant that Halleen wear Bella’s post-Beauty monstrous suit, and they kept her hidden from Dizzia until the moment she finds her in a closet at the end of a trail of blood and goo.

“Maria is a wonderful actor, so you’ve got to really put it on her to make sure that she’s carrying the audience through it,” he says. “I just tried to think of what would be the worst thing to see. Part of that is anything happening to your child is terrible, but a full compromise of your bodily architecture and skeleton added a whole extra degree of awfulness and horror.”

To achieve the visual anguish and revulsion of Bella’s transformation, they built a set specifically to house the practical suit created by special effects makeup designer David Presto and his team.

“We actually raised the set and then dug it out, so that Emma could be lowered into it, because her spine had been compromised,” Uppendahl says. “She was mostly in a full suit, but there was a team of people in the closet with her. Emma was the root of the performance, and that is her voice, but there were puppeteers — I think we had six — that were manipulating aspects of her. I worked with Emma quite a bit on how to try and make it make sense to us what she was physically, and then the puppeteers augmented the rest in incredible ways.”

The reason Halleen had to be in the suit came down to one thing. “The eyes were important to me and to Ryan and to Dave Presto. To make sure that the real Emma was in there, and that was the true connection she had with Maria,” Uppendahl says. “They had done such great work as a believable mother and daughter, and to cap it off that way was horrible and wonderful all at once.”

Ultimately, the scene becomes the cautionary cornerstone of a sea change in Byron’s world. In the opening moments of the second episode of the two-part finale, Byron’s wife Franny (Isabella Rossellini) is forcibly given The Beauty by her sons, Tig (Ray Nicholson) and Gunther (Brandon Gillard). She had refused to relinquish the battle scars of her life and age, but she wakes up (as guest star Nicola Peltz Beckham) to learn her sons had decided to overrule that wish against her will. In protest to her transformation, she digs a piece of broken pottery into her neck, attempting to take her life instead of living with unwanted rejuvenation. Now, she’s being kept on life support in a gilded ballroom, once again against her wishes.

The moment causes Byron, a selfish and braggadocious villain, to have a change of heart, stopping shipments of The Beauty and paying off the families ravaged by its gruesome side effects, like Bella’s. His lawyers suggest nearly half a million have suffered severe complications. But given his track record, would Byron really revert course just because his wife denies what he, up to this point, saw as a gift to humanity?

“I think he does change,” Uppendahl says. “I think he truly loves Franny, and who wouldn’t if it’s Isabella Rossellini? She always sees through him, and it was the fuel for really fun banter between them. He loves that tension with her. It’s great that we can finally dig into something really profound between them. This is the only thing that could change a guy like that.”

Or perhaps Byron was just hypnotized by the series’ clever nod to Rossellini’s “Death Becomes Her” character as a temptress offering the elixir of eternal life. Post-transformation, Beckham introduces the new Franny while wearing a barely-there top of strung-together chunky jewels, a clever reproduction of the iconic costume worn by Rossellini in the 1992 film. Uppendahl isn’t even sure Rossellini knew about the fashionable allusion to her role, given she wasn’t in that scene. But he leapt at the chance to pay homage to her.

“It was Ryan’s idea, and as soon as I heard it, I thought it was spectacular,” he says. “Someone recently started making that jeweled top again. It is kind of coming back in fashion, on a very high, rather exclusive level that Franny could afford.”

As the season comes to a close, “The Beauty” tees up plenty of complications for future seasons, although FX hasn’t renewed it yet. Uppendahl says he would like to see Lux Pascal return as Carla, the transgender science technician originally played by Rev Yolanda, who took a dose stolen from Bryon. Carla’s friend Mike (played in Beauty form by Joey Pollari) was already assassinated for lifting their shots, so audiences have good reason to worry for Carla.

“She’s worth fearing for,” Uppendahl says. “Reverend Yolanda was so wonderful, and so was Lux. She didn’t have a lot of screen time, but she was transcendent, and I feel there’s room for her in my ideas for Season 2.”

Coming into the two-episode finale, Evan Peters’ detective Cooper also accepted the drug –– through STD transmission with his partner, Jordan (Jessica Alexander) –– only to learn his perfect self is a 12-year-old boy. Soon, Cooper, Jordan and their reluctant new associates, Byron’s assassins Antonio (Anthony Ramos) and Jeremy (Jeremy Pope), find themselves in the crosshairs of a brewing war within the Forst family. Just because Bryon wants to curb the spread of The Beauty doesn’t mean those reaping the financial benefits, including his son Tig, are similarly eager to throw in the towel. Tig teams up with disgruntled robot designer Dr. Diana Sterling (Ari Graynor) to issue a deal to Cooper, Jordan, Antonio and Jeremy. Sterling has synthesized a cure, albeit an untested one, that could return Cooper to his original form –– or create more issues. Cooper accepts the blind bargain, but the others reject it, having to admit to themselves they prefer their younger, tighter bodies.

“They’ve been given a lot, and they don’t want to give it up,” Uppendahl says. “For different reasons, the idea of going back to what you were when you’ve turned into something you perceive as better is very unattractive to people. It’s not necessarily the smartest move, but it is interesting when faced with the choice that they all decline it. It is a deep question given they know the horrors of this.”

The audience doesn’t yet learn what comes of the so-called cure. Cooper’s dose encases him in yet another cocoon, but the series fades to black before he is reborn again. The season ends on Jordan, Antonio and Jeremy watching him emerge, and Uppendahl says he wanted to make sure he captured a reaction for anything that might spring from that chrysalis, even a few unlikely scenarios.

“When we were shooting the scene, I would be walking them through it and I told the actors that he comes out and he appears as different people to get their reactions,” Uppendahl says. “At one point, I told him it was Shaquille O’Neal. I don’t think that’s probably the case, but you never know!”