[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for The Beauty Episode 2, “Beautiful Jordan.”]
The second episode in The Beauty‘s premiere package features quite a surprise in its final moments: One of the biggest stars of the series is unexpectedly replaced.
Yes, Rebecca Hall, who’s a bona fide scream queen on the big screen by now, is gone by the end of the second episode after her character, Jordan Bennett, accidentally gets the Beauty STD during a night of romance and transforms into another body (belonging to Jess Alexander).
The concept of the show is that when a person is infected with this disease, they become the apotheotic version of themselves.
So how did Hall feel about being tossed out of the show when her character got “the Beauty” disease? Perhaps surprisingly, the actress “loved” it.
“She didn’t choose to be transformed like the other characters. So there’s a sort of interesting situation of, ‘Is that something that you want? Or does that just turn into a sort of nightmare because you just wake up to somebody else?’ And I think it would be kind of a nightmare, actually,” she told TV Insider of the development. “But I loved it as an idea that I would be a bit of a bait and switch, as it were, in the role. There’s a tradition of that, with Janet Leigh and Psycho. I guess it’s kind of the kind of idea that you’re going to be the star of something, then you’re gone. It’s fun.”
Hall wasn’t the only star of the show who came and went from the screen after a Beauty-led transformation. Jaquel Spivey‘s Jeremy was also swapped out for a different model (that of Jeremy Pope), and the actor also loved it — but for different reasons.
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“It’s fun for me, because I love everything. I’ve never had prosthetics or anything before, and I had a beautiful makeup team of six-plus people who made sure that I changed and shifted into different versions of this character,” he told us on the red carpet of the series’ New York premiere.
Plus, despite the title, he thinks the overall message of The Beauty is, “You can’t judge your beauty on somebody else’s standards. What may be beautiful to somebody else may be hideous to you, and vice versa. So your idea of beauty is your idea of beauty. Don’t press it on nobody else.”
The Beauty, Wednesdays, 9/8c, FX & Hulu
– Additional reporting by Meaghan Darwish
