The first trailer for FX’s American Horror Story: Delicate, starring Kim Kardashian and Emma Roberts has dropped—and, from the looks of it, Kim K is chock full of career advice for Roberts’s aspiring actress.
The show stars Kardashian as a woman named Siobhan Walsh—to the confusion of some on the internet—who kicks off the trailer by giving Anna Victoria Alcott, the rising starlet played by Roberts, a bit of career advice. “You’re an A-list star now,” she tells Anna on an NYC rooftop as a bone-chilling version of “Rock-a-Bye Baby” plays underneath. “Focus on the good.” But Anna is focused on having a “perfect baby” with husband Dexter Harding (Matt Czuchry). Things start to take a turn for the strange when Anna finds that she’s being stalked by a sunglass-wearing stranger.
According to the trailer, it seems that Anna and Dexter do in fact get their “perfect baby”—but at what cost? “Do you want an Oscar?” Kardashian’s Siobhan asks Anna. “Do you want it as much as a baby?” Anna Victoria answers with a resounding “Yes.” It gets creepier from there as an increasingly paranoid Anna goes from attending swanky A-list events to being strapped to a gynecologist table in a blood-red room. The trailer ends with an unhinged Anna shouting “get away from my baby!” at an unknown assailant.
AHS: Delicate, which premieres on Wednesday, September 20th, is based on Danielle Valentine’s novel Delicate Condition, touted in a blurb from author Andrea Bartz as “the feminist update to Rosemary’s Baby we all needed.” “The ways that we describe pregnancy—delicate condition, bun in the oven, she’s in a family way—it’s so infantilizing for something that is among the most dangerous, life-changing experiences that a human being can go through,” Valentine told VF earlier this summer. American Horror Story creator and executive producer Ryan Murphy stepped aside for this season, handing over the showrunning and writing reins to actress and playwright Halley Feiffer. The 12th installment of the American Horror Story franchise also includes familiar AHS faces like Dennis O’Hare, Billie Lourd, and Leslie Grossman, alongside new additions to the repertory cast including Cara Delevigne and Golden Globe winner Michaela Jae Rodriguez.
After watching the trailer, both Roberts and Kardashian seem to be playing roles that fall in their wheelhouses. Roberts, an actress and new mom to two-year old Rhodes Robert Hedlund, is playing an avatar of herself—a starlet and new mother with sky-high career ambitions. The book’s version of Siobhan is a middle-aged Oscar winner; Kardashian’s character seems more like a PR maven, which seems like a good fit. She has plenty of experience with the concept of celebrity and could even look to her mother, Kris Jenner**—**inventor of the word “momager”—for inspiration. Murphy apparently cast Kardashian after being impressed with her SNL episode, so perhaps Siobhan will get in a wisecrack or two as well. But whether she’ll act well enough to impress three Tony-award winner and AHS Patti LuPone is up for debate.