Ella Beatty tends to avoid movies and TV shows that feature a lot of violence. “I’m a huge scaredy-cat,” she says. “I don’t even like watching TikToks of people falling down!” 

You’d never know this after seeing Beatty in her starring role as Lizzie Borden, the infamous woman at the center of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth installation of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Emmy-winning anthology series. While in real life, the actor describes herself as “incredibly squeamish,” she lights up the screen as Lizzie with an axe in her hand. She glows almost beatifically, face covered in Jackson Pollock–esque splatters of blood.  

Like Beatty, many of us are only familiar with Borden through the nursery rhyme: “Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks …” The series offers an introduction to and interpretation of Borden’s life. She was tried and acquitted for the murders of her stepmother and father in 1893, before living out the rest of her days under a cloud of suspicion. 

“It’s a very disputed case,” says Beatty. “A lot of people have a lot of really different points of view on what could have happened — and even have different points of view about Lizzie herself. That was a really interesting entry point for me as an actor, but mainly I felt my job was to explore the character that Ian and Ryan had created and take all of the source material about the real person’s life, and then translate that into the very fictionalized version of the woman.”

Beatty, who’s also appeared in the film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, was intrigued by playing the first female Monster. She spent a lot of time thinking about what it was like not only to be Lizzie, but to be any young woman at that point in history. “[Lizzie] is the perfect example of a creature of her time,” says Beatty. “I think to be a woman — a young woman, but a woman at all — at that time period in America was to feel confined sexually, spiritually, and emotionally. Your role was pretty small.”

Beatty is joined by Monster alums Charlie Hunnam, who plays Lizzie’s father, and Vicky Krieps, who plays the Bordens’ live-in maid, Bridget, who gives Lizzie a glimpse into a world of womanhood beyond patriarchal expectations. “I knew that Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan were really interested in exploring the reasons why women kill. They were interested in exploring what brings a woman to the point of violence,” says Beatty. 

While Beatty knows that viewers will come to their own conclusions, she feels strongly that the series is an “exercise in empathy and an exercise in trying to understand complicated people’s brains and their trauma.” That was certainly a helpful takeaway for her — especially on the days when she had to shoot the murder scenes. 

“I really don’t like to see people hurt. It upsets me viscerally. And so I definitely felt, going into this project, ‘How am I going to do this?’” she recalls. “But the team of people involved in creating those moments was so incredible — the makeup involved, the costumes, the sets, the body doubles, the stunt doubles. I mean, there’s so much work and love that gets poured into creating moments like that in the show that I felt really lucky and excited to step up to the plate of my little piece of it.”

Even if that little piece is covered in blood.