Ella Beatty opens up about the romance at the center of Netflix’s new season of Monster.
More than 130 years after Lizzie Borden was accused of killing her father and stepmother, Ryan Murphy’s Monster is returning to the case, with a queer love story at its center.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, now streaming on Netflix, stars Ella Beatty as the Massachusetts woman whose 1893 murder trial became one of the most sensational criminal cases in American history.
“When the repressed daughter of a wealthy New England family and her rebellious maid Bridgette find themselves trapped in a house built on humiliation and cruelty, they escape into a fantasy of sex, power, and revenge,” reads the Netflix synopsis. “The gruesome unsolved murders that follow don’t just shock the world — they give birth to an icon who refuses to live imprisoned in a cage, choosing instead to forge her own legend: shocking, monstrous, and gloriously free.”
As the schoolyard rhyme goes:
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And gave her mother 40 whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father 41.
The romance between Lizzie and Bridgette (Vicky Krieps) is a tenderness and freedom missing from the rest of her life. It also becomes inseparable from the increasingly dark path she takes as the season moves toward the murders that made her name infamous.
Beatty told Gayety that the relationship isn’t simply a side story added to the true-crime drama. It is fundamental to the character viewers meet onscreen.
“It was everything,” she said. “That relationship is so integral to her journey as a character across the whole season.”
What Is ‘The Lizzie Borden Story’ About?
Lizzie Borden was 32 when her father, Andrew Borden, and stepmother, Abby Borden, were found killed with an ax inside their Fall River, Massachusetts, home on Aug. 4, 1892.
Lizzie was arrested and charged with both murders, but an all-male jury acquitted her the following year. No one else was convicted, and the killings remain officially unsolved. Still, the violence of the crime and the spectacle of a seemingly respectable woman standing trial for murder transformed Lizzie into a true crime legend.
Murphy and Ian Brennan’s series builds its own interpretation around the questions the real case left behind. Bridget was a real Irish immigrant who worked for the Borden family and was inside the house around the time of the murders. However, no documented evidence shows that she and Lizzie were lovers or committed the crimes together.
That romance belongs to the series, which uses it to explore what could happen when a woman constrained by her family, class, and the expectations of the late 1800s finally experiences love and the possibility of another life.
Meet the Borden Family and the Rest of the Cast
Beatty leads the cast as Lizzie, with Krieps playing Bridget and taking on a second role as Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory. Charlie Hunnam plays Lizzie’s father, Andrew, while Rebecca Hall plays her stepmother, Abby. Billie Lourd appears as Lizzie’s older sister, Emma Borden.
Jessica Barden plays stage actor Nance O’Neil, whose closeness with Lizzie later creates tension between the sisters, while Joey Pollari portrays Lizzie’s maternal uncle, John Morse. Oliver Spenceman plays Stephen, a fictional apprentice created for the series.
The season also expands beyond the Borden household through other women whose names became associated with violence. Sarah Paulson appears as serial killer Aileen Wuornos, allowing the series to draw connections between women separated by time but shaped by public ideas about gender, anger and criminality.
It is a notable change for the fourth installment of an anthology that previously focused on Jeffrey Dahmer, brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, and Ed Gein. For the first time, Monster is placing a woman accused of murder at the center of an entire season.
Queer Love Opens Lizzie’s World
When viewers first meet this version of Lizzie, Beatty said she is sheltered and confined by nearly every part of her life.
“She’s someone who’s incredibly sheltered and is really confined by her circumstances, both physically by a corset, but also literally by society and her family and her circumstance,” Beatty explained.
Her connection with Bridget offers something she has never experienced: the chance to be loved and seen outside those limitations.
“This relationship for her really opens up her eyes to the world and to herself,” Beatty said. “I think we can all relate to a person that we met in our lives that sort of changed everything.”
For Lizzie, discovering that the world could be larger than the life selected for her is both liberating and destabilizing. The romance becomes what Beatty called “the foundation of her emergence into her personhood,” influencing the woman she becomes and the choices she makes.
“There is no Lizzie in this season without that relationship,” she added. “It’s everything.”
Ella Beatty Found the Story’s Tenderness
With its famous killings and interest in female rage, The Lizzie Borden Story has no shortage of darkness. What surprised Beatty while reading the scripts, however, was the softness of Lizzie and Bridget’s relationship.
“For a person in really painful circumstances, being loved and being seen in a soft way is transformative,” she said. “I think it can make you re-interrogate your entire self-knowledge when someone loves you and sees you.”
Beatty believes Lizzie had never been seen that way before. Creating that bond onscreen came naturally with Krieps, whom she described as playful, collaborative and deeply committed to honesty in her work.
“Everything was detailed, but also spontaneous, which is the best in a scene partner,” Beatty said. “She has a really strong commitment to the truth and to authenticity, which just makes you better. She makes everybody better.”
Their connection extended beyond the scene work. “We just loved each other immediately,” Beatty added.
‘Monster’ Turns Its Attention to Female Rage
Murphy’s work has frequently explored people pushed outside society’s narrow expectations, and this season gives that lens to women whose anger has often been treated differently from men’s.
Beatty said Murphy and Brennan were interested in “exploring feminine rage and the female experience” after earlier Monster stories centered on men. That includes looking at the forces surrounding Lizzie rather than reducing her to an ax, a rhyme or a verdict.
Beatty did not approach the role by trying to decide the guilt of the real Lizzie Borden. Instead, she focused on the human being imagined by the series: a sheltered woman capable of rage but also desperate for freedom, intimacy, and the ability to determine her own life.
“I felt like my job was to play the human being,” she said. “I hope interesting questions come out of it, but I just felt my job as the actress was to love and advocate for the person and hope that something beautiful and interesting could come from that.
“Her sensibility as a person is vulnerable and soft, and those are things that I resonated with, but also I love,” Beatty said. “She taught me that it’s OK to also be soft and vulnerable.”
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is now streaming on Netflix.