Three-years after making her acting debut in Hulu’s Ramy, Bella Hadid is coming back to the big screen. The part-Palestinian model is set to star in a hotly anticipated Ryan Murphy and FX project called The Beauty, premiering exclusively on Disney+ on January 22.
Of course, Murphy is known for recruiting some pretty big names—both experienced and otherwise—for his projects. Hadid will be starring alongside Evan Peters, Amelia Gray, Ashton Kutcher, Jeremy Pope, Anthony Ramos, Rebecca Hall, Isabella Rossellini, Ben Platt, Lux Pascal, Meghan Trainor, Nicola Peltz Beckham, Peter Gallagher, and Vincent D’Onofrio.
Last April, the 29-year-old model was spotted on set in Paris, wearing a skintight red leather outfit, and at one point, emerging with a bloody gash on her leg.
This week, FX unveiled a series of striking promotional posters for the upcoming thriller, offering the first proper visual taste of the show’s unsettling premise. In one of the standout images, Hadid appears slicked in sweat against a red-and-black backdrop, holding a syringe poised at her face. A transparent panel slices her reflection in two—one side youthful and polished, the other visibly aged—turning the promise of enhancement into something grotesque. The tagline, “One shot makes you hot,” leans into the show’s central obsession with instant transformation, while echoing the bodily horror bubbling beneath its glossy surface.
According to Disney+, the story unfolds within the fashion world, so the casting of real-life models alongside its actors makes perfect sense.
Co-created with Matthew Hodgson, The Beauty opens on a deeply unsettling idea: a sexually transmitted disease emerges that doesn’t ravage the body, but perfects it. Beauty becomes contagious, and, inevitably, costly. As two partners begin to investigate the phenomenon, their search pulls them into a shadowy web of power, desire, and government corruption. At its core, the series poses a familiar but unsettling question: how much are you willing to sacrifice for perfection?
The dystopian thriller, which is an adaptation of adaptation of Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley’s comic book series, calls to mind It Follows (2014) by David Robert Mitchell and Coralie Fargeat’s award-winning The Substance, particularly in its fusion of desire, decay, and moral consequence.
Before The Beauty, Hadid had already flexed her acting chops with a cameo in Yellowstone in 2024. She also notably guest-starred in season three of Ramy, which marked her official acting debut.