SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details about “The Beauty” Episode 3, now streaming on Hulu.
Amelia Gray, the 24-year old model and daughter of Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin, isn’t surprised she’s making her acting debut in a Ryan Murphy project, “The Beauty.”
“My household was a real Ryan Murphy household,” Gray tells me. “Growing up between ‘Glee’ and ‘American Horror Story,’ it was like every Tuesday night, everybody gets in my parents’ bed and we’re watching one of the Ryan Murphy shows. So it was just really crazy to have that be my first experience. It’s not only a Ryan Murphy show, but a Ryan Murphy show that he was directing.”
While her appearance on “The Beauty” lasts just a few minutes, it’s an explosive performance – literally.
Gray plays a model having lunch in the Conde Nast cafeteria when she suddenly starts throwing up and violently attacking people (including characters played by Ben Platt and Megan Trainor) before she eventually explodes. She’s another victim of The Beauty, a sexually transmitted fountain-of-youth treatment that also can produce lethal side effects.
Gray almost didn’t audition for the role. When her mom told her that she had an email from producers asking for a self-tape, Amelia was in Paris working despite being sick with a fever. “I was not down to do anything other than what I had to do, which was to get up and walk a runway that day,” she recalls.
But then she read the email. “The description said, ‘Supermodel, extremely ill, but still looks good,’” Gray says, laughing. “I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, I gotta do that. I don’t know if I look good, but I’m definitely sick as fuck.’ I’d never shot a self-tape before in my life, did not know how to do it, but it was one of those things where I was like, ‘You know what universe, if it’s meant to be, it’s gonna be.’ I set my iPad up in my Parisian hotel room, so sick, and just read the lines. I did one take sent it in and forgot about it.”
She was offered the part four months later. Gray says her acting agent told her not to taking acting lessons. “He said that they wanted me,” she explains, before adding she will enroll in acting classes if more substantial work comes along. “I’ve been talking to Kaia Gerber every time I see her at Pilates because she went from modeling to acting. The amount of respect that I have for actors, people don’t understand. It took me 16 hours and two plus days to shoot a three-minute scene. Babe, it takes me one day to shoot a whole campaign, you know? So I don’t know. I’m very grateful for my job, and I have a lot of respect for actors. I’m just not sure it’s my life yet.”
Gray did her own stunts, except for one – when she had to throw Trainor’s character out of a building through a window: “I had the Met Gala two days later, and I show up to set, and there’s like, real glass,” she says. “They’re like, ‘The glass might get all over you.’ I was just like, ‘Ah, no, I’m gonna go.’”
“The Beauty” hadn’t even premiered yet and it was already sparking conversations about beauty standards and the lengths people will go to achieve so-called perfection with the series quickly being compared to “The Substance,” the Oscar-nominated thriller about an aging actress (played by Demi Moore) who abuses a youth serum after she is fired from hosting her aerobics television show.
Gray has had her own experiences with cosmetic surgery and treatments. On speculation that she uses lip filler, she explains, “I’ve always had these lips,” and has never used fillers. “I’m doing this thing right now called SkinVive, which is a moisturizer injection, not a filler.”
She’s been open about having had a nose job as well as a medically necessary breast reduction to prevent a case of sepsis from an infection caused by a nipple ring. She also tells me that she got breast implants later on, but the procedure went horribly wrong. “I was dating somebody who was older than me when I was younger, and I sort of allowed his beauty perception to affect my choices, and I decided to get another breast augmentation because I wasn’t necessarily happy with the scarring that I was left with from the reduction,” Gray says. “I woke up in a state that I didn’t agree to. We can just say that.”
But then she continues, “That also turned into a medical emergency surgery, because my breasts literally could not handle what were put in me. It got to the point where I couldn’t even pump soap because the implants were pushing on the nerves. I ended up having to get a 14-hour reconstruction surgery.”
While Gray may seem like an open book, she says she has no desire to return to reality TV after first appearing one her parents’ reality series “Harry Loves Lisa” on TV Land in 2010 and then with her mom on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” “It’s never happening,” Gray says. “You can tell people to stop approaching me about them. I’ve had enough.”
She also wouldn’t follow her mom with a turn on “The Traitors.” “It’s fun when there’s a game to be played, but I also saw what that also does to a human being…having to lie and deceive for however many weeks or months,” Gray says. “That does something to your brain.”
I ask if Rinna was different when she returned from the reality competition show. “She needed some healing time, for sure,” Gray says. “But that’s her own journey to explore and tell when she’s ready.”
