Billie Lourd, Jessica Barden, Vicky Krieps, Charlie Hunnam, Ella Beatty and Joey Pollari at the N.Y. premiere of 'Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story' on Sept. 16. Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Netflix Logo text Monster: The Ed Gein Story actor Joey Pollari was in the gazebo at his mother’s Minnesota home when Ryan Murphy called to invite him back for the newest season of the Netflix anthology series. “I got a call, from Ryan who said, ‘I have a project for you. I wrote this role,’” the actor recalled during the show’s red carpet premiere in New York on Wednesday night. “Then he went into it: ‘This character, John Morse, is obsessed with his knives. He was a really uncanny figure.'”
Pollari’s character, the knife-wielding uncle of Lizzie Borden, and an overlooked murder suspect, is not the only sharply unsettling thing in the show’s latest season, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. Uncanny is pretty much how you’d describe the whole tale of the Massachusetts woman who, in 1892 at the age of 32, was tried and acquitted for the still unsolved, gruesome axe murders of her father and stepmother, Andrew (played by Charlie Hunnam) and Abby (played by Rebecca Hall), respectively.
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Executive producer Murphy and showrunner Ian Brennan’s version of Lizzie Borden (played in their series by Ella Beatty) is just the latest take on the true crime case that has become its own legend, and it’s one that the show’s team took real creative liberties on, given how little confirmed information surrounds the case — which is one among several things that makes this season different than its predecessors.
“There’s a lot of information, but there’s not a lot of information,” Billie Lourde, who portrays Lizzie’s sister Emma, told The Hollywood Reporter at the show’s New York premeire about the challenges of tackling the Borden story. “Researching this character was really difficult because there wasn’t all this media that we have now in the 1800s. It’s not like today, when we have TikTok and documentaries and books. So what was so fun about that is we got to create our own version. We’ve been talking about it being more like a painting than a documentary. It’s an interesting way of doing this because most of the other seasons have been by the book, down-to-the-word true.”
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’s depiction, as Lourde described, centers on “a person who has never felt seen, a person who has never felt loved, who is really eager to experience the world.” Part of how the show explores that is by leaning on a theory that the never-married Borden was a lesbian. “In the context of the really repressive northeastern WASP-y Victorian mores, it’s an interesting thing to play with dramatically. So even if we didn’t think it was true, I’d still do it. But I actually happen to think that was true,” said Brennan.
“The question of, why would you do a story about different serial killers? and, why would you do it about a man or a woman? is about exploring what is in between — the black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. The truth is usually in the middle, and I think the same goes with sexuality,” added star Vicky Krieps, who portrays the Borden family’s maid, Bridget, and one of the women theorized that Lizzie had a relationship with (as is portrayed in the series). “We have a very simple way of seeing stories, and I think in this case, it is really breaking that pattern. Why not a woman? Why wouldn’t a woman also be killer? Why wouldn’t women be able to have that complexity? Paradox is very important for the human experience. We need the paradox because we carry paradox.”
This kind of dramatization of killers is not an unfamiliar take in the Monster universe. But in another way, Borden’s story differentiates itself from past iterations. This season focuses on a woman and alleged murderer who is ultimately never found guilty of any crime. “It’s interesting that she’s ultimately acquitted, and was something that I didn’t know. I just assumed she had been found guilty. So when I actually approached the story, the reasons why were such a great thread to pull on,” said Brennan.
“No one could believe that a woman could do something like this. Women didn’t even have the right to vote. How could they kill someone?” noted Lourde. “So it’s interesting to look at this through this lens of 1800s men who didn’t think women were capable of this, even though women are capable of anything — in good ways and bad ways. To see this in the court case and how that all shook out with a jury that was all men.”
The tension around women’s potential rests at heart of the series, which Beatty told THR “is not about if Lizzie did or didn’t do it. It’s about if she did it, why?”
With that as the series’ chosen course, Monster season four gets to paint a portrait of Lizzie that explores what’s behind female rage. “When Ryan and Ian pitched me what their overarching vision was from episode one to episode eight, we knew the story we wanted to tell, which is not just about Lizzie, but the symbol of what she represents,” said series director and executive producer Max Winkler. “Everything we told was through that lens of making sure we could land the final episode, and, according to our research, do the best version of our story of Lizzie.”
For star Charlie Hunnam, who played last season’s serial killer subject Ed Gein, it’s an image of violence not all that different from the men who came before in the series. “It’s about exploring the human condition and what drives people to do extraordinary things. We all feel the same things,” he explained. “Obviously, there are some really important and relevant gender issues that are explored in the show in terms of the oppression of women during this period of time, which we still have not fully escaped 100 years later. But in terms of the capacity for violence or the capacity for rage, they share that because we’re all made in the same place.”
The show also illustrates Borden’s own capacities with the help of two other convicted serial killers, Elizabeth Báthory (also played by Krieps) — a Hungarian noblewoman from the 1500s who was found guilty of capturing and killing hundreds of girls and women with the help of her servants — and Aileen Wuornos (played by Murphy muse Sarah Paulson), who got her own Hollywood dramatization in the 2003 Patty Jenkins-directed Monster. Wuornos was of particular interest to Brennan in terms of how she related to Borden and existed as “a spectacle.”
“She knew about and liked Lizzie. That story was fascinating to her,” the Monster creator continues. “It’s also a different kind of female rage, which is what we’re really digging into this season. Different responses, different eras, the way they respond to similar but different kinds of male and societal aggression.”
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is now streaming on Netflix.
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