Jump scares are ubiquitous these days. While technically a horror trope used to jolt an audience (a loud knock, a sudden figure in the mirror), the term has been snatched by the chronically online and now refers to any incident that might set your heart aflutter, from opening your email on a Monday morning to an impromptu check-in from your ex. A random text stating “Do you want to read something weird?” should, in theory, classify as a jump scare. For Jeremy Pope, it’s just another day in the Ryan Murphy universe.

“I was looking at the iPhone, watching the bubbles like, ‘Surely, he’s going to say something else,'” the Emmy-, Golden Globe-, Grammy-, and two-time Tony-nominated performer tells me on an icy January morning. Following a quick clapback (“Ryan, everything you do is weird”), he received—again, with zero context—a script for The Beauty, a body-horror sci-fi series based on the comic book of the same name. The premise: A biotech drug turned sexually transmitted virus called The Beauty transforms people into their hottest selves, only for them to spontaneously combust roughly two years in. Beauty is pain, as they say.

“There was a character named Jeremy, so initially, I was like, ‘I guess that’s me,'” he says. Pope didn’t know much about his arc (at the time, he and Evan Peters were the only actors on board, though stars such as Rebecca Hall, Isabella Rossellini, and Bella Hadid would eventually join the project), but he immediately got the sense it’d be his most sinister role to date. It’s certainly a departure from the confident, openly gay screenwriter he portrayed in Murphy’s Hollywood and the charming love interest, Christopher, in the director’s final season of Pose.

This go-around, Pope would assume the dangerous outsider, an incel (involuntary celibate) desperate for the physical transformation he believes will finally kick-start his love life. “It’s a color that I haven’t really messed with in my color box as an artist,” he says. “When you do something really well, people like to see it continue because it’s comforting. ‘We want to see you in the rom-com’ or ‘We want to see you play the queer characters.’ Sometimes, in the unsafe spaces you learn a lot.”

For Pope, it was important to highlight what made his character, the “bad guy,” agonizingly, utterly human: his desire to be seen. “Jeremy has been denied that for so many years of his life. It’s like the wires never got to touch,” he says. “The feeling of longing for that or needing that, that’s something I felt very connected to.” Pope made sure to imbue that nuance into every scene so it didn’t just feel like his story was a trope for murder. (Spoiler, there’s quite a lot of that.)

You can clearly see this longing in episode 3 when Jeremy kills the woman who infected him on behalf of The Assassin (portrayed by Anthony Ramos). He drops the cast-iron pan, a shy half-smile ghosting his lips. Did I make you proud? his eyes seem to say, as if he were a child begging for a parent’s approval. It’s no coincidence that The Assassin compares Jeremy to his own son before officially bringing him on as his protégé.

A commentary on Ozempic culture and the obsession with cosmetic tweakments, The Beauty holds up a magnifying mirror to the audience and asks them the following: How far would you go in the pursuit of perfection? “One shot that makes you hot” is the extreme scenario, but one could argue we’ve already started down the slippery slope. Nonsurgical nose jobs, electromagnetic stimulation from high-tech devices meant to simulate 20,000 crunches, injections of your own platelet-rich plasma to encourage collagen production—all these treatments, innovative as they are, might also belong in a campy sci-fi project if they weren’t so widely accepted in the skincare sphere. As Pope shared on his recent press tour, even braces are technically a cosmetic enhancement—a pricey one at that—to improve your public image.