‘The Beauty’ Star Evan Peters Is Just as Curious About What’s Next After Finale Cliffhanger: ‘This Is an Origin Story’

Note: This story contains spoilers from “The Beauty” Episodes 10 and 11.

“The Beauty” left fans with a monstrous cliffhanger after Wednesday’s finale, one that even star Evan Peters doesn’t know how it will resolve.

The FX sci-fi drama wrapped up its first season with a two-episode extravaganza that saw as the titular treatment for eternal youth became available to the public, just as FBI agent Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters), Jordan (Jessica Alexander) and their two nemeses-turned-associates reeled from him transforming into a teenage boy after his own experience with the infection.

After the finale flashed forward to the collapse of The Beauty as an FDA-approved treatment, Cooper and the team are recruited to help take down Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher). The first step of the plan involves him being the first test subject of a newly produced antidote, without knowing the potential side effects. The episode ends with Jordan and crew looking in awe as a hand steps out of one of the transformation cocoons, fading to black before we learn if Cooper returned to his Evan Peters former self.

“What’s happening next? I don’t know either. I’m curious to see,” Peters told TheWrap. “The comic book series [that the show is based on] takes place after The Beauty has been out in the world for a while, so this is kind of an origin story.”

“I’m very excited for Cooper, whether it’s me or somebody else [in the role], to go out there and see how the world has changed with a lot of population getting it,” he added.

Indeed, “The Beauty” creative team always intended for the first season to end on this Cooper-centric cliffhanger, as the world settled into a new order of extremely beautiful people — and the occasional little kid or monster transformation for the unlucky ones who got dealt a bad side effect. Executive producer Michael Uppendahl, who directed five of 11 episodes of “The Beauty,” said the finale brought all the bold stylistic and narrative choices together while “everything’s falling apart all at once.”

Byron faced the consequences of giving his sons The Beauty after they injected their mother Franny (Isabella Rossellini) against her will. After transforming into her beautiful new form (played by Nicola Peltz-Beckham), Franny gave her husband one final epic takedown before slitting her throat in an attempt to end her life. We learn later that she did not die, but ended up in a coma — and Byron is determined to find a way to bring her back to him.

The episode then followed up with a teenage girl who felt the societal pressure to get the drug, but had to resort to a black-market deal having no resources to pay for the fancy spa treatment one of her friends had gotten. One of the spa attendants agreed to sleep with her after taking a double dose of a Beauty booster in order to give her the treatment for a better price. But the high dosage led to a terrible side effect that instead turned her into a horrible monster — the closest nod to “The Substance” the series delivered yet.

Back at Byron’s headquarters, the CEO faced growing lawsuits from people impacted with side effects, including President Trump’s cabinet — who quickly pulled FDA approval and forced him to retreat. But Byron faced his own crisis of conscience after what happened with Franny, deciding to shut down the Beauty clinics and settling the lawsuits whatever the price.

That didn’t sit well with his son Tig (Ray Nicholson), who believed he was the heir apparent to his father’s empire. This led him to defect and seek a new ally in Diana (Ari Graynor), who was happy to join forces to take the tech magnate down. Then they recruited Cooper, Jordan, The Assassin (Anthony Ramos) and Jeremy (Jeremy Pope) in their fight.

Whether we’ll get to see how the story continues from here remains to be seen, as “The Beauty” has not yet been renewed for Season 2 at FX.

“Ryan [Murphy] knows how to set up a pyrotechnic environment, just on the page. So if you’re in tune with him, which I like to think I am, you get to really participate in lighting up the sky when you’re lucky,” Uppendahl said, adding that he relished in the challenge of directing the standalone stories that decorated the show’s main narrative across Episodes 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11.

Indeed, Uppendahl has been a frequent collaborator of Murphy’s long before “The Beauty.” He directed two episodes of “Glee” in 2012 and directed episodes on five seasons of “American Horror Story.” He also directed episodes from Murphy’s “Scream Queens,” “Ratched,” “American Crime Story,” “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” and “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez.” And currently, he’s directing episodes from the upcoming Murphy series “The Shards,” an adaptation of the novel by Bret Easton Ellis.

“My wife likes to say that I’m happiest when I work with Ryan,” Uppendahl said. “I always push my filmmaking abilities when I’m with him, because he invites it in the scripts. I feel like I’ve become a better filmmaker because of my experience with him and the casts and crews I get to work with … he is unafraid to push boundaries. I’m always excited to work with Ryan and hope to keep doing it.”

“The Beauty” is now streaming on Hulu.

The post ‘The Beauty’ Star Evan Peters Is Just as Curious About What’s Next After Finale Cliffhanger: ‘This Is an Origin Story’ appeared first on TheWrap.