Ella Beatty had plenty of history to work with when she stepped into the title role of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. The tricky part was figuring out how much of that history should actually make it onto the screen.
After seasons focused on Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein, Monster turns its attention to one of America’s oldest and most famous true crime mysteries. Authorities accused Lizzie Borden of murdering her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. A jury ultimately acquitted her, but the case never really went away. More than a century later, people are still debating what happened inside the Borden home.
That left Beatty with an interesting challenge. She could research the real woman extensively, but eventually she still had to play the Lizzie who existed on the page.
Ella Beatty researched the real Lizzie Borden
Taking on somebody who actually lived is always a little different from playing a completely fictional character. Photographs, newspaper accounts, books and court records all remain, along with generations of theories about what really happened.
Beatty dug into that history as she prepared to play Lizzie. She researched Borden and tried to understand the woman behind a story that has been repeated, debated and turned into pop culture for well over 100 years. But research can only take an actor so far.
The scripts gave Ella Beatty another version of Lizzie
Once Beatty started reading the Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story scripts, she realized she wasn’t simply trying to recreate the historical Lizzie Borden. She had to find her own version of her.
Monster gave Ella Beatty room to create her own Lizzie
That became a balancing act. Beatty had everything she learned about the real Lizzie in the back of her mind, but she also had the character created for the series and her own instincts as an actor. In a way, the performance became a hybrid of all three.
That makes sense for a story like this because there are still enormous gaps surrounding the real case. A jury acquitted Lizzie, and nobody can say with certainty what she was thinking or feeling during some of the most important moments of her life. The series can imagine those things, while an actor has to make them feel like they belong to an actual person.
Click on the media bar below to hear Ella Beatty talk about researching Lizzie Borden and how she combined that history with the character in the scripts and her own instincts as an actor.
Lizzie Borden remains a true crime mystery
Part of what makes Lizzie’s story so enduring is that there has never been a completely satisfying ending to it. She went to trial, and a jury found her not guilty. Yet her name became permanently attached to the murders through books, movies, television and even that infamous rhyme generations of people grew up hearing.
That also gives Monster a different kind of subject than some of its previous seasons. Audiences know what Jeffrey Dahmer did and what Ed Gein did. With Lizzie Borden, the mystery itself is part of the story.
For Beatty, that uncertainty meant there wasn’t one definitive version of Lizzie waiting for her to copy. She had history, the scripts and her own instincts to work with. Then she had to fill in the rest herself. And sometimes that is where a performance gets interesting.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is currently streaming on Netflix.
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