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By H. Alan Scott
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The legend of Lizzie Borden has been a story Hollywood has milked for years, so it was only a matter of time before Ryan Murphy put his singular treatment on it. Acquitted of the 1892 murders of her father and stepmother, the case received national attention, and the allegations followed Borden for the rest of her life. (The description alone makes it shocking that it's taken Murphy this long to cover it.)
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In this dramatized version of the case for Murphy’s Monster anthology series on Netflix, Charlie Hunnam plays Andrew Borden, Lizzie's father, and Rebecca Hall plays Abby, her stepmother. In a scene-stealing performance, Hall gives Cinderella's evil stepmother a run for her money. Newcomer Ella Beatty plays Lizzie.
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Both Hunnam and Hall are becoming staples in the Murphy universe with Hunnam appearing in the last season of Monster and Hall most recently appearing in The Beauty. For Hunnam, the connective tissue runs even deeper. "I love working with Ryan [and]working with Ian [Brennan, the writer] on both seasons of Monster that I did," he told Newsweek. He went on to add that he loved working with frequent collaborator Max Winkler on this season of Monster as well. "We made a film together actually in Fall River,where Lizzie Borden was from, called Jungleland. We've developed a couple scripts together as writers and producers. So, it's really lovely to have that relationship, and the fact that he's part of the Ryan universe just sort of makes it feel like a real family."
Hall feels similarly welcomed into the fold for her own reasons. "I love that I don't really know what I'm going to be asked to do with him," she said of working with Murphy. "I like doing character. I like really mixing it up in quite extreme ways and getting an opportunity to do that is not that often, but I know when Ryan calls that is likely. And that's super exciting."
That range is on full display in Abby Borden, a role Hall describes with delight. "You get delicious lines, delicious words, like the most cutting insults imaginable," she said. "It's a dream."
Balancing camp with reality was delicate, and both actors approached it their own way. For Hall, the key was refusing to treat camp and truth as opposites. "The camp is real, too," she said. "There are people that embody all of these things and it's real and everything is real to them, so I had to approach it like that. I really thought of her as someone who's like the star of her own life in such a big way."
That main character energy she said comes from a woman who never got to live the life she wanted. "She's not been able to do anything with her life," Hall said. "In a different timeline she would have been a celebrity of some kind or at least running society dinner parties. Instead, she's in a nowhere town living in misery with no one to talk to her. She's bored out of her mind." As for the marriage, Hall does not fault her onscreen husband for the coldness between them. "He's in love with his previous wife," she said. "And she [Abby] needs a lot of attention and she's getting really very little."
Hunnam brings a similar complexity to Andrew, a character he calls "kind of bonkers." "It's a multi-faceted role with real tragedy and pathos, but he's also a victim that by the end of it you feel like is he really a victim or is he just getting his just desserts because he's pretty monstrous," Hunnam said. "The show's primarily about oppression, and he felt to me like a tragic character who endured real tragedy but had not done the work to move past it. He became a prisoner of his own life and was deeply unhappy. He hated himself more than anybody but didn't necessarily have the self-awareness to point that eye at himself and so unfortunately pointed at everyone around him."
Much of that tonal tightrope Hunnam credits to the writing. "Ian Brennan is one of the most talented and inspired writers working intelevision," he said. "He's able to shape-shift and genre-bend seamlessly where things can feel deeply tragic and incredibly earnest and then the next scene wild and absurdist and completely irreverent and theatrical. It's just a joy to be able to shape-shift within that and lean into all those tonal shifts."
Considering this is one of Beatty's first major roles, both actors praise the young talent for carrying a show this big. "She's a marvel,really," Hall said. "This is her second job. It's still a huge responsibility and undertaking to be the center of a show like this. Every day she's on set by 4:30 a.m. with no break and she had nothing but composure and grace throughout. She's a brilliant scene partner, and I love working with her."
Hunnam, who spent the season in a supporting role to Beatty's lead, said the shift in position came as something of a relief. "It was sort of a relief to be a supporting character," he said. "It requires an enormous amount to carry one of these shows, and I just thought Ella had such grace and poise and obviously an abundance of talent to be able to pull that off."
For two actors well into accomplished careers, the appeal of Monster comes back to the same thing Ryan Murphy has always offered his collaborators: room to go somewhere new. It is that appetite paired with Murphy's eye for actors who can hold tragedy and camp in the same breath that makes the Lizzie Borden season of Monster one of the most anticipated entries in the anthology yet.
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