Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the next season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series, is the first installment to focus on a famous murderess (following seasons about convicted male killers Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, and the Menendez brothers), who is also the show’s only alleged perpetrator to get away with her crimes in a court of law.
Those milestones are intertwined, says series cocreator Ian Brennan, and at the heart of what he hoped to explore with this iteration of Monster. “They literally thought that a woman was too weak to pick up an axe. To be a woman in that period was to be almost a completely different species. You were treated like you were incapable of not only actions, but thoughts that a man was capable of,” he tells Vanity Fair in his first interview about the series.
In 1893, Sunday school teacher Lizzie Borden was accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe inside the family home. After deliberating for just over an hour, the all-male, white, Protestant jury unanimously decided that 32-year-old spinster Borden didn’t commit a brazen daytime double homicide. They venture that someone else must have delivered the 40 whacks that killed her father, 69-year-old Andrew Borden (played by Charlie Hunnam), one of the richest businessmen in Fall River, Massachusetts, and his 64-year-old second wife, Abby Borden (portrayed by The Beauty’s Rebecca Hall). The crime was never solved, but its sordid details have lodged themselves into the American psyche, spawning multiple screen adaptations, including a 2015 Lifetime series with Christina Ricci and 2018 film starring Kristen Stewart. “Lizzie Borden is a famous story that everyone knows and nobody knows,” says Brennan. “It feels very Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but is real.”
Buyer beware: this isn’t your great-great grandmother’s version of the Victorian-era mystery. The eight-episode series, debuting on Netflix September 17, has a darkly comic tilt and features modern needle drops from Kate Bush, Wet Leg, and UK riot-grrrl/electro-punk duo Lambrini Girls, whose song “Cuntology 101” plays during a sequence involving an attempted poisoning at the Borden household. As in seasons’ past, episodes will explore the motives that may lie behind Borden’s madness. “It was a tough time to be a rudderless young woman, and in a house that didn’t seem happy,” says Brennan. “The big question the anthology always asks is are monsters made or born? With Lizzie, if she’s a monster, she wasn’t born that way.”
In the titular role is Ella Beatty, who made her TV debut last year in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans as Kerry O’Shea, the daughter of Truman Capote’s lover. “I was familiar with the nursery rhyme,” she says. “Truthfully, I like true crime because of the tea element, but in real-life I’m kind of a scarredy cat.”
But her nerves weren’t evident to director Max Winkler, who was in the middle of shooting the first episode of the Murphy-produced Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette when he began work on Lizzie Borden. Instead, Winkler felt from Beatty “an incredible amount of vulnerability, only second to an incredible amount of strength” in her audition. “You knew that she could play both parts: the Lizzie that we’d meet in the pilot. And then [the one] you see in the second episode.”
A flip gets switched when the repressed and reviled Lizzie, labeled an old maid by society and her rotten family, has her life’s one joy—the birds she tends to in the backyard—slaughtered by her evil stepmother. “It’s Ryan Murphy does Cinderella,” says Hall, whose Abby Borden is a cross between “Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest and Vivian Pickles in Harold and Maude,” she says with a sly grin. “There’s something truly liberating about playing someone who’s off-the-wall crazy, and behaves without any care for human frailty.”
To bring the character to life, Beatty relied on her weathered copy of The Trial of Lizzie Borden, plus the example of her famous parents, Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, who fell in love on the set of Oscar-winning 1991 biopic Bugsy. “I’m so lucky because my mom is such a brilliant artist. My dad as well, of course,” she says. “From when I was a very little girl, I watched their artistry,” says the younger Beatty, “the side that happens at home when it’s not necessarily visible to the world. I absolutely have many memories of being sidled up to my mom, watching her go over material.”
As for her first leading role onscreen, “I was equally intimidated every day, but also the pursuit of it is a good place to be in as an actor, ” Beatty tells me. “I hope I stay feeling challenged forever, and I felt challenged in the best, most satisfying way on Monster.”
If Lizzie is Cinderella, then Bridget Sullivan, the Bordens’ live-in maid played by actor Vicky Krieps, is her Fairy Godmother. But instead of a ball gown, glass slippers, and a grand carriage made from a pumpkin; the renegade maid comes to her damsel in distress armed with a different kind of escape plan—involving an axe-wielding double patricide. “The way Ryan thought of it, she’s almost like a Mary Poppins that comes out of nowhere,” Krieps says “who can be anyone from any time. Ryan said, ‘It’s women-driven, feminist, lesbian, dirty, unapologetic.’ You immediately felt like a psychedelic, Courtney Love kind of vibe in the whole thing.”
Krieps likens Bridget’s arrival at Lizzie’s doorstep to a visit from the future—one where women can wear wolf cuts (an on-trend cross between the shag and mullet hairstyles) and forego heeled shoes. “In the beginning, her look was really almost punk. I refused a corset,” she explains. “Because if she’s the future, I want her to move like the future. You can’t just be stiff like a candle.”
In the series, Bridget and Lizzie bond over their outsider status; which leads her to educate the younger woman about everything from societal movements to sex. (In this warped fable, Fairy Godmother’s magic wand is an early wooden prototype of a dildo.) “For a person who’s been so sheltered, it feels so liberating to meet someone who has a more evolved modern sensibility,” says Beatty. “Vicky was the perfect person to play that part because she’s so magnetic and compelling. She’s different from anyone I’d ever really met before.”
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story isa female-focused season of TV that is largely written and directed by men. “I was afraid because it wasn’t written by a woman,” Krieps admits. “And, yes, I could tell—to be honest with you.” The actor says she often became “the advisor for feminist questions” during filming. “I always told them, ‘Okay, guys, from the women’s perspective, this cannot really work. Or a woman, in order to be, let’s say, sexually aroused, they have certain things that need to happen.”
Winkler, the director son of actor Henry Winkler who has helped helm multiple Murphy projects, is the first to admit his gender’s shortcomings. “Men are idiots. Our understanding of hymens and periods and ovulation is so deeply limited to how it affects us,” he tells VF when asked about Krieps’ remarks in a separate interview. “My secret weapon was being surrounded by really, really smart women, both in front of and behind the camera, and trusting them. Vicky is my North Star,” Winkler adds. “She can immediately feel if something feels fake or inauthentic or male-skewed. And she has a lot of opinions, but every single one of them is right.”
For example, Krieps insisting that “some Christian book written by a man” on Bridget’s nightstand was swapped for something the progressive woman might actually read. “I could feel the frustration of everyone, ‘We all want to go home, and now she questions the whole scene,’” Krieps recalls. “But at the end of the show, everyone loved me for it. So that was a beautiful experience, and showed me we should speak up for ourselves.”
After all, it was Bridget and Lizzie’s ability to successfully rage against the machine that first drew Krieps into this season’s tangled w