Ella Beatty is not the person you would expect to volunteer for an axe-murder story. “I’m a huge scaredy-cat,” she told Netflix in a new interview about Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. She even said she avoids videos of people falling down. Now she is the face of a season filled with staged blood and violence.
Beatty plays Lizzie Borden in the fourth Monster story, which is streaming with eight episodes. Her performance is not another ordinary casting detail: she is the anthology’s first female lead, stepping into one of the most argued-over cases in American crime history.
How did she handle the violent scenes?
The actor described herself as squeamish and said watching people get hurt upsets her. That made the murder scenes intimidating before filming began. What helped was seeing the work behind them: makeup artists, costume makers, body doubles and stunt performers building each moment safely for the camera. The finished scene may look frightening, but on set it was a team effort.
That does not make her fear a gimmick. It is a reminder that an actor playing a violent character does not have to enjoy violence. Beatty’s interest was in the person beneath the legend, and the crew helped her take part in scenes she would rather not watch as a viewer.
She did not play the real case as a verdict
The real Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted in 1893 after her father and stepmother were murdered. Nobody was convicted. Monster chooses a dramatic version of events, but Beatty told Netflix she approached the part as a “very fictionalized version” of the historical woman. That distinction matters when a series gives private conversations and motives to people whose story still has unanswered questions.
Beatty said she thought about the limits placed on a young woman in the nineteenth century. She wanted to understand a character who feels confined and angry, not ask the audience to accept every moment of the drama as fact. Vicky Krieps plays Bridget, the household maid who becomes central to Netflix’s version of Lizzie’s life, while Charlie Hunnam plays her father, Andrew.
The role is a career step with a very different kind of pressure
Beatty previously appeared in the film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and the series Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. Monster puts her in the center of a much larger cast. The part asks her to carry intimate scenes, period drama and the show’s most shocking moments while viewers bring their own ideas about Lizzie into every episode.
She sees the season as an attempt to understand a complicated person. That does not excuse the violence the show depicts, and it does not solve the historical murders. It tells us what Beatty was working toward on set: a character with a human face before the axe and the old rhyme take over.
For the cast, eight-episode release and series background, see our Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story page.
