Anthony Ramos, Jeremy Pope React to Cliffhanger

[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from The Beauty season one finale, “Beautiful Betrayal”]

For Anthony Ramos and Jeremy Pope, portraying their characters’ growing bond wasn’t much of a stretch. The two have been friends in real life for years, even attending college together at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.

Their dynamic in the FX series, however, takes an unexpected turn. The Assassin (Ramos) is initially ordered by Byron — aka The Corporation (Ashton Kutcher) — to kill Jeremy (Pope). But as the season progresses, the pair begin to connect over their shared loneliness. The Assassin opens up about taking “The Beauty” after being severely injured, a decision that forced him to leave his family behind. Jeremy, meanwhile, is a “damaged incel desperate to feel seen and loved,” Pope explains below.

“What’s wild about watching [their relationship] is that, you know how you meet those people in your life where you feel like you’ve known them your whole life — you have that instant thing, right?” Kutcher tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Them having that and the influence it had on your character decisions — the way they masked it and then unveiled it — was a really pretty thing to watch.”

In the season’s later episodes, Dr. Diana (Ari Graynor) reveals her plan to stop Byron from expanding access to “The Beauty.” After realizing Byron doesn’t truly have his back, The Assassin joins her effort. Cooper (Evan Peters) then contracts the drug and transforms into a young boy. And in the finale that released Wednesday night, Diana and Byron’s sons reveal there is a reverse drug, and Cooper agrees to try it. But whether it worked is still to be known, since the episode and the season ends after Jeremy, The Assassin and Jordan (Jessica Alexander) stare in shock at whatever is the result.

Below, Ramos and Pope discuss the season finale cliffhanger and the biggest questions facing their characters in a potential season two.

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I’m aware that you two went to college together and have been friends for more than a decade. Did your friendship offscreen influence your unexpected friendship in the show?

ANTHONY RAMOS Yes. It made it tough in the beginning, because we’re supposed to act like we don’t know each other. It was very hard to do that at the top, but it made it really easy once when we get deeper into the season, especially in episode seven. We have that scene in the hotel where we both have these moments opening up about our backstories, and you get to know our characters on a deeper level with the monologue that Jeremy gives when he’s sitting down and talking about his dad, and then I give him the monologue when I talk about my son.

We get to unlock a new level of vulnerability between these two guys. Those scenes felt seamless, going from these guys who don’t know each other to getting vulnerable with one another because of how long we’ve known each other. And then there are the scenes where I’m singing to him in the car and we get to mess around. Then, the scene where we got the guy tied up and I’m hitting them and Jeremy’s there jamming out and we get to have that rapport while we’re also interrogating this guy — all of our relationship before made it a lot easier.

JEREMY POPE It’s a dream to work with family in anything. The things that came up towards the end for me, because there was a foundation and nuance of knowing each other, as artists, as friends, as boys — we were able to shatter a little bit of toxic masculinity. There’s a dynamic at play. [Anthony’s] playing a 60-plus-year-old man. I’m playing this incel, insecure, damaged person that’s needing to be seen and loved. We can be hardened when it comes to men on men, and how much we’re willing to open up and share. But I think we were able to really excavate and bring a layer of transparency and comfortability, and we have that in real life because we’ve seen each other through different seasons of our life and actually showing up for each other in real moments off camera.

So to have this moment where it is a lot of laughter and improv and singing and jokes, but then to lock into scenes that were about excavating the truth and the vulnerability of what’s at stake in this wild world that Ryan has created… I really pray and hope that people will be able to see themselves through these complex characters and find a moment of connection and truth. It made it a lot easier to look across the room at someone I really respect and love and care for, and open up myself.

Jeremy, you’ve worked with Ryan Murphy several times before, and many of the actors he works with tend to stick around in his work. What about you two make a great collaboration?

POPE Ryan is a friend first, and a collaborator and creative second. Ryan really champions artists; our nuance as artists and as humans. He sees us for what other collaborators maybe can’t see yet, whether it’s the type of character we want to play or world we’d love to explore. I remember he texted me, “You want to do something weird?” I was like, “Well, Ryan, everything you do is kind of weird, so how weird are we talking?” I meant that with love, and he knew it. When he sent this show, it was a bit darker than anything I’ve been asked to play. I thought that was interesting to bring the juxtaposition of how people perceive me and what this energy that I can possess or bring into this character. I have so much respect for someone who is willing to bet. He gave me my first TV show. He bet on me when I didn’t have any TV credits. Hollywood was my first Emmy nomination.

You both also executive-produced, so I wanted to know if it was always the plan to end the season on a cliffhanger with young Cooper trying to reverse “The Beauty” but not revealing if it worked. Did you ever shoot alternative versions of that final scene?

POPE We didn’t shoot an alternative. With Ryan, it’s really about the collaboration; he has a vision. As you’ve seen in a lot of his work, you can almost identify a Ryan show just based on the way it’s shot and looks. So there are always open conversations about where we want the story to go, where we hope the story will go. But with Ryan, it’s about trusting and soaring. You have to trust the visionary and the vision at hand, and know that he’s going to take you to the promised land. A lot of these scripts we were getting in real time as we were shooting and things were being revealed to us. I remember at one point we got episode 10, and we were like, “Is that the end?” Because we didn’t know, or we hadn’t heard about episode 11.

RAMOS Yeah, we didn’t know until the end.

POPE So we were on the journey of trusting and knowing that he has a vision: he’s going to take this series to the place he wants to take it, ultimately, at the care of what these characters need and what makes the most sense. So that is collaborating with Ryan on The Beauty. He’s going to allow you to imbue all that you can into these complex characters. But at the end of the day, you’re going to read the script and be on the edge of the page, just like, hopefully, the audience is when they’re watching the series.

In a potential season two, do you think your characters would take the reserve “Beauty” shot? Or do you think they’re too comfortable enjoying the benefits it’s given them?

RAMOS That’s a good question. I don’t know if he’d go back. I think he’s too far down the road.

POPE We might have lost my man, Jeremy, on this one. I think he is feeling it in new ways. So I don’t know if he would want to reverse it. I want to believe there’s a turn in him, but my man is loving the highlights, the private jets, the double-breasted blazers. It’s hard to come back from that.

Since many of Ryan Murphy’s shows are anthologies or limited series, but this one seems ongoing, were there early conversations about how many seasons this show might have? And was there an overall arc planned for your characters?

POPE When Ryan called me, he just told me scale. He’s like, “This is a very big show — we’re going international.” He hadn’t done anything this expensive or big in a minute and he hadn’t been international since Eat Pray Love. So he was just talking about the scale and the world-building of it all, that there would be all these side characters and main characters coming together. Ashton and I didn’t really even work together in this season, so it leads you to, well, that surely has to happen. I think, if anything, it was less about the number of seasons, but how large this vision was. I think he knows when it’s a limited series and it’s a beginning, middle and end, but this one wasn’t a period, it was a comma.

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All episodes of The Beauty are currently streaming on Hulu. Check out all of The Hollywood Reporter‘s The Beauty coverage here, including our premiere interviews with Ashton Kutcher, Bella Hadid, Rebecca Hall and finale interviews with Kutcher, Evan Peters and a full cast and characters list.