What To Know
- The latest episode of The Beauty featured a trans woman taking the wonderdrug to have her body match her mind.
- Here, Rev. Yolanda reveals the personal connection she had to the character, Clara.
[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for The Beauty Episode 6, “Beautiful Patient Zero.”]
The Beauty took audiences inside the lab where the magic happens on Wednesday’s (February 11) new episode, and things got deeply personal for one character.
Clara (Rev. Yolanda), a trans woman in the midst of hormone replacement therapy who worked at the facility, was deeply frustrated by the treatment she was going through and confessed to her work partner and friend, Mike (Eddie Kaye Thomas), just how excruciating it was for her outside to continue not matching her inside.
“These hormones are hitting me like a sledgehammer. I’m so tired, and everything hurts. I’m tired of looking this way. I’m tired of feeling this way,” she said. “I don’t care about the idiots. I care about these stupid f***ing c*** and balls that I can feel every time I take a step, and I care about the hormones and the surgeries, doesn’t matter, whenever I look in the mirror, I see a dude. I’ve been misgendered three times today.”
Despite being comforted by Mike, who assured her she was beautiful, he empathized with her plight and stole two syringes of the serum for them. He took the shot first and was overjoyed to wake up with chiseled abs (this time, played by Joey Pollari) and ran right over to Clara’s to share.
Upon realizing she finally had the chance to take the Beauty, she said, with great emotion, “For once in my life, if I’ve been given a chance for the outside to look like what I feel like on the inside, I have to take it!”
For Rev. Yolanda, delivering that monologue was personal — for multiple reasons.
“That act, that moment, actually was filled with such deep emotion. And we did the take many times, but every time we did it, I was just filled with raw emotion. I really was. There was so much going on for me. My husband had recently passed away, and we were together for 20 years, and that week that we were filming was the actual first anniversary of his passing. So I was feeling his presence in the room. He cherished me. He was my soulmate and my biggest fan… When I was standing there with Joey, and we were having that monologue, I just felt Glenn there. Oh my god. It’s so hard to describe the emotions that happened there. So to have that opportunity to have that emotional inward life and to give it to this role was amazing. It really was,” she told TV Insider.
Rev. Yolanda also said it was a “dream come true” to get the call for a Ryan Murphy show and embraced her character’s emotions and ambitions right away.
“I didn’t have any hesitation at all as soon as I got the script. Even in the audition, the sides that they were giving me to work with, I felt so drawn… to Clara, because the way the script was written, it really reflected a lot of my own personal life, my own personal story, and it was incredible to me,” she explained. “Just to have that story in a body horror feature in the Ryan Murphy universe, there was just absolutely no hesitation. It was really from the moment I read the script, I was like, ‘Yeah, this was for me.’”
Yolanda identified with the plight of the character and her desire to have the outside match the inside and said that the result, with Clara taking a new form (this time, played by Lux Pascal) was a story of affirmation.
“To have the courage to step out in my everyday life, just being who I am, because I don’t necessarily, quote-unquote ‘pass’… So people are going to be funny and misgender me all the time and all that stuff, and for me, it’s an act of courage to just show up in everyday life, looking the way I look, and being who I am. And so, yeah, that was so beautifully written to me. I was like, ‘Yeah, if I am the woman that I know I am, I have to take this, and I know it will transform me into being who I know I am,’ which it did,” Yolanda said. “I felt like it was gender reaffirming and very much supportive of the trans experience. So I hope people read it that way, because I really feel like it was, for me, definitely.”
The Beauty, Wednesdays, 9/8c, FX
