‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’: The Cast, and What Netflix Invented

• Ella Beatty, 26, plays Lizzie Borden in Season 4 of Netflix’s Monster, out in full since Sept. 17.
• Charlie Hunnam plays her father — his second season in a row as the anthology’s central man — and Vicky Krieps plays two characters.
• The trial and the verdict are real. The affair with the maid, the maid’s German accent and the Aileen Wuornos thread are not.

Eight episodes, one house, nine actors. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story landed on Netflix on Sept. 17 with the whole season at once, and viewers arrived with two questions: who is playing whom, and how much of this actually happened.

Here are both answers, with what each person really did in Fall River in 1892 and where the season leaves the record behind.

Who plays Lizzie Borden?

Ella Beatty, 26, the daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. She made her debut in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans in 2024 and appeared opposite Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You in 2025.

The real Lizzie was 32 when her father and stepmother were killed with a hatchet on the morning of Aug. 4, 1892. She was arrested, tried and acquitted by an all-male jury in June 1893, and she stayed in the same town for the rest of her life.

Who plays who in the Borden house?

Charlie Hunnam plays Andrew Borden, Lizzie’s father, killed on the sitting-room sofa. This is his second Monster in a row: he was Ed Gein in Season 3, which came out in October 2025.

Rebecca Hall plays Abby Borden, the stepmother, killed upstairs the same morning. Billie Lourd plays Emma Borden, Lizzie’s older sister, who was away visiting friends that week and stood by her through the trial.

Vicky Krieps plays Bridget Sullivan, the live-in maid the household called Maggie, who was washing windows that morning. Joey Pollari plays John Morse, the uncle who had been staying at the house the night before.

Why does Vicky Krieps play two people?

Because the season keeps leaving 1892. Krieps also plays Elizabeth Báthory, the 16th-century Hungarian countess, in fantasy sequences shot in Italy. Creator Ian Brennan has said the decision to hand her both parts came late in production.

Jessica Barden plays Nance O’Neill, the stage actress whose name has been tied to Lizzie’s for more than a century.

What does ‘Monster’ get right?

The spine. The date, the hatchet, the two victims, the arrest and the acquittal all come straight from the record.

Smaller details hold up too. Lizzie really did tell the inquest she had been out back looking for sinkers for a fishing trip. The household really did call Bridget Sullivan “Maggie.”

Emma really did stand by her sister through the trial. The two later lived together at a house called Maplecroft, and they did eventually fall out.

What does it get wrong?

Most of the motive. There is no evidence that Lizzie was abused by her parents, that she planned the killings, or that she conspired with anyone to carry them out. The prosecution’s case was circumstantial and financial.

Bridget Sullivan is the clearest change. The real Sullivan was never charged, was Irish rather than German, and testified for the prosecution.

There is no evidence that Andrew Borden was involved with her or fathered a child with her. The family physician testified that nothing suggested the Bordens’ marriage was anything but cordial.

The show also thins out the courtroom. Several witnesses took the stand at the real trial, including Sullivan and the neighbor Alice Russell, who said she saw Lizzie burn a dress days after the murders. On screen it comes down to Emma and Uncle John.

Two more: Andrew Borden sold coffins but never handled burials or mutilated bodies, and Lizzie was not a suffragette. And the relationship the season gives the maid belongs, in the record, to Nance O’Neill — whom Lizzie met in 1904, a decade after the trial, far too late to be anyone’s motive.

Why is Sarah Paulson playing Aileen Wuornos?

Sarah Paulson plays Aileen Wuornos, the Florida woman executed in 2002, a hundred and ten years after the Borden murders. The season puts the two women in the same frame and suggests a line runs between them.

No such line is documented. There is no record of Wuornos discussing the Borden case or citing it. The connection is the anthology’s argument, not history’s.

All eight episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story are streaming on Netflix. Reviews split hard: 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 47 on Metacritic.

It is the fourth season of the anthology created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, after the Jeffrey Dahmer season in 2022, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story in 2024 and The Ed Gein Story in 2025.

More from Movies & TV: Matthew Lillard on returning to ‘Scream’, the full ‘Traitors’ Season 6 roundtable, and why Netflix pulled the plug on ‘Sweet Magnolias’.

— Bruno Monteiro

Sources: trial and inquest record of Commonwealth v. Lizzie A. Borden, 1893; Netflix (series listing, Tudum cast guide and the official trailer); Ian Brennan in The Hollywood Reporter; Entertainment Tonight (cast interviews); Biography and TVInsider (historical fact-checks); the Fall River Herald News; Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (critic scores, Sept. 19, 2026). Photos: frames from the official trailer and from Lizzie Confronts Her Father (Netflix).