Ella Beatty Takes On Lizzie Borden as First Female Lead in 'Monster' Series
Ella Beatty stars as Lizzie Borden in Netflix's 'Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story,' the first season of Ryan Murphy's anthology to feature a woman as its central figure.
Ella Beatty has stepped into the role of Lizzie Borden for the latest instalment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's "Monster" anthology, marking the first time the Netflix series has built a season around a female protagonist.
"Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story" is now streaming, with Rebecca Hall and Charlie Hunnam also among the cast.
Borden was accused of killing her father and stepmother with an axe in 1892. She was tried and acquitted the following year, and the case was never solved. The crime entered American folklore largely through a nursery rhyme that has kept her name in circulation for more than a century.
Beatty said she came to the project with only a passing familiarity with Borden. "I knew the nursery rhyme and I had a vague understanding of her culturally," she said, recalling that the figure had surfaced in a reference on the comedy series "The Office." Once cast, she threw herself into research, working through podcasts, videos and books. "I was kind of voracious after I got the part, but I didn't initially know very much about her," she said.
Taking on the role carried weight for the actor, who described herself as a fan of the performers who have led previous seasons. "I was really excited. I felt very lucky," she said, adding that she also felt "a big responsibility to the person, to the story, and of course, most primarily to what Ian and Ryan created and wrote." Her approach, she said, was to make her performance as specific as possible, while leaving room for ambiguity.
According to Beatty, the series is less concerned with delivering a verdict than with probing broader questions. She credited Murphy and Brennan with building the show around an inquiry into who the monsters are and why people commit terrible acts — a question she said extends beyond Borden and the leads of earlier seasons to many of the supporting characters as well. "I think it's a larger interrogation of that part of humanity that they're trying to look at," she said.