Model Amelia Gray in The Beauty and Mom Lisa Rinna in The Traitors
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details about Episode 3 of “The Beauty,” now streaming on Hulu.
Amelia Gray, the 24-year-old model and daughter of Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin, isn’t surprised to be making her acting debut in a Ryan Murphy project, “The Beauty.”
“My household was a real Ryan Murphy household,” Gray says. “Growing up between ‘Glee’ and ‘American Horror Story,’ it was like every Tuesday night everyone would pile into my parents’ bed and we’d watch one of the Ryan Murphy shows. So it was just really crazy to have that be my first experience. It’s not just a Ryan Murphy show, but a Ryan Murphy show that he directed.”
Although her performance on “The Beauty” lasts only a few minutes, it is – literally – an explosive performance.
Gray plays a model who is having lunch in the Conde Nast cafeteria when she suddenly starts vomiting and violently attacks people (including characters played by Ben Platt and Megan Trainor) before finally exploding. She is another victim of The Beauty, a sexually transmitted fountain-of-youth treatment that can also cause fatal side effects.
Gray almost didn’t audition for the role. When her mother told her she had received an email from producers asking for a self-shot, Amelia was in Paris working despite having a fever. “I didn’t feel like doing anything other than what I had to do, which was get up and walk down a runway that day,” she recalls.
But then she read the email. “The description said, ‘Supermodel, extremely sick, but still looking good,’” Gray says, laughing. “I thought, ‘Oh, fuck, I have to do that. I don’t know if I look good, but I’m absolutely sick to death.’ I had never done a self-recording before in my life and didn’t know how to do it, but it was one of those things where I thought, ‘You know what universe, if it’s meant to be, it’s going to be.’ I set up my iPad in my Parisian hotel room, so sick, and just read the lines. I sent it once and forgot.”
Four months later she was offered the role. Gray says her acting agent told her not to take acting lessons. “He said they wanted me,” she explains, before adding that she will take acting classes when more substantial work comes along. “I’ve talked to Kaia Gerber every time I’ve seen her at Pilates because she went from modeling to acting. The amount of respect I have for actors, people don’t understand. It took me sixteen hours and two days to film a three-minute scene. Honey, it takes me one day to film an entire campaign, you know? So I don’t know. I’m very grateful for my work and I have a lot of respect for actors. I’m just not sure yet if this is my life.”
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 showed up to set up, and there’s real glass,” she says. “They say, ‘The glass can come over you.’ I was like, ‘Ah, no, I’m going to go.'”
‘The Beauty’ hadn’t even premiered yet and it was already sparking conversations about beauty standards and the lengths people will go to 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 misuses a youth serum after being fired from hosting her aerobics television show.
Gray has her own experiences with cosmetic surgery and treatments. Based on the speculation that she uses lip fillers, she explains, “I’ve always had these lips,” and have never used fillers. “I now do something called SkinVive, which is a moisturizing injection, no filler.”
She has been open about the fact that she underwent a rhinoplasty and a medically necessary breast reduction to avoid a case of sepsis due to an infection caused by a nipple ring. She also says she later got breast implants, but the procedure went horribly wrong. “I was dating someone older than me when I was younger, and I let his perception of beauty influence my choices, and I decided to get another breast augmentation because I wasn’t necessarily happy with the scars I was left with from the reduction,” says Gray. “I woke up in a state that I didn’t agree with. We can just say that.”
But then she continues, “That also turned into emergency medical surgery because my breasts literally couldn’t handle what was being put into me. It got to the point where I couldn’t even pump soap anymore because the implants were pressing on the nerves. I ended up having to have 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 on her parents’ reality series “Harry Loves Lisa” on TV Land in 2010 and then with her mother on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” “It never happens,” Gray says. “You can tell people to stop approaching me about them. I’ve had enough.”
She wouldn’t follow her mother with a twist on “The Traitors,” either. “It’s fun when there’s a game to be played, but I also saw what that does to a person… to have to lie and cheat for 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 definitely needed some healing time,” Gray says. “But that’s her own journey to explore and tell when she’s ready.”
