A new mini-series, “The Beauty,” has all the things we expect from an action- adventure tale.
There are fierce fights, wild chases and intense sex scenes. There are beautiful places — Paris, Venice, Rome — and beautiful people who sometimes explode.
But underneath that, the opener (9-11:45 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 21, on FX, and then on Hulu) has strong themes.
People keep “trying to create the fountain of youth,” Ashton Kutcher (shown here) said in a Zoom press coference.
It’s an age-old obsession, Rebecca Hall added. “There’s a lot to be said about the chase for perfection.”
Previous projects from producer-director-writer Ryan Murphy have been partly linked to beauty — creating it (films about Halston and Versace), altering it (“Nip/Tuck”), flaunting it (“Pose”).
But now Murphy pushes this to the extreme. A fictional drug can create immense beauty — but knock-off versions go explosively bad. That sets up the action-adventure part:
Evan Peters has been in many of the Murphy projects (especially “American Horror Story”), often as a psychopath. This time, he’s a good guy.
“(Murphy) said he just wanted me to be normal, just to try to be myself,” Murphy said, “which was difficult.”
He and Hall play FBI partners (and sometimes lovers), given a complicated mission. “First off,” he said, “to figure out why people are exploding.”
They probe a scheming billionaire (Kutcher) and an eloquent and sadistic assassin (Anthony Ramos), who soon adds a colleague (Jeremy Pope).
Along the way, the assassin lectures on such subjects as the career of Christopher Cross — who won five Grammys for his debut album, then faded away, an ordinary-looking chap in the age of music videos.
The characters here are desperate to be beautiful, not ordinary.
Kutcher has seen that close-up. After winning a modeling contest, he dropped out of college, did commercials for Calvin Klein and modeled in Paris and Milan … all before “That ’70s Show” made him a TV star at 20.
“I met what I thought were the most beautiful people in the world,” Kutcher said. “And every single one of those people, if you ask them to look in the mirror, could find that one thing they wish they could change.”
At some points, their main tools were amphetamines, steroids, pain and deprivation. Now — amid higher expectations, due to social media — the choices expand. Kutcher points to:
— “The demand for Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro and all of these drugs. Some are for health complications, others are just for aesthetics.”
— “The increasing demand for cosmetic surgery — people augmenting themselves in order to achieve a look or a feel or a vibe.
— “And then you add on top of it, gene-editing.”
Now comes a fictional step His character has the ultimate injection … and others have dangerous variations. The FBI agents are on the hunt.
For Peters, the role has fierce demands. “He speaks like 18 languages in the show,” Ramos said, possibly exaggerating. “And he just switches on and off.”
He also does elaborate chases and fight scenes, often in gorgeous places. A key scene was filmed at the towering (86-foot-high) Trevi Fountain that has been a Roman monolith for 264 years. Just watching that being filmed was “probably one of the more memorable days for me,” Pope said.
Those settings sort of made up for any other demands, Hall said.
She was “a little grumpy that I had a 4:30 a.m. call. But then leaving my hotel to get into a water taxi, (I could) see all of Venice as the sun was coming up …. It was just like, ‘Well, this isn’t a usual going-to-work experience.'”
“The Beauty”
— 9 p.m. Wednesdays on FX, reaching Hulu on Thursdays
— 10 parts; the first three are 9-11:45 p.m. Jan. 21; others are weekly