Ella Beatty’s First Lead Role: Netflix’s Lizzie Borden Story

Ella Beatty is moving from supporting roles and stage work into the kind of part that can define an early career: Lizzie Borden, the acquitted suspect at the center of one of America’s most enduring crime stories. In Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, Beatty takes on her first lead role, with the series scheduled to premiere September 17.

The casting places a young performer with classical training and a growing film and theater résumé in front of a historical figure whose guilt, motives, and place in American mythology remain subjects of discussion. Beatty has described the project as an opportunity to investigate a complicated person and the questions her life continues to raise.

Why Ella Beatty’s Lizzie Borden casting matters

Lizzie Borden is not an ordinary first-lead assignment. The role requires Beatty to carry a production built around uncertainty, public judgment, and a story that has been retold through newspapers, novels, plays, films, and true-crime culture.

In comments to Netflix’s Tudum, Beatty emphasized the investigative quality of the project rather than presenting the role as a simple biographical portrait.

“I am so excited for viewers to experience our exploration of Lizzie Borden’s story and the questions that her life animates to this day.”

Her description suggests a performance centered on psychology, ambiguity, and the gap between the documented facts of Borden’s life and the mythology that followed her. That approach fits an actor whose early work has already leaned toward literary and historically grounded material.

Ella Beatty’s Hollywood family and upbringing

Ella Beatty, born on April 8, 2000, is the youngest child of actors Annette Bening and Warren Beatty. The Los Angeles native has three siblings and is also the niece of actress and filmmaker Shirley MacLaine.

Beatty has acknowledged that fame attached to her family can create both opportunity and scrutiny. In a 2024 interview with Vogue, she said she recognized “the inherent privilege and exposure” of having well-known actors as parents and hoped she could offer something meaningful through her own work.

That self-awareness has become an important part of Beatty’s public profile. Her career reflects the advantages of a Hollywood upbringing, but also a deliberate investment in training, theater, and collaboration rather than an immediate push into celebrity-driven roles.

From childhood make-believe to Juilliard

Beatty grew up around film sets, dressing rooms, and artistic conversations, environments that helped shape her interest in performance. She has said that she “always” wanted to act and that playing pretend was one of her earliest ways of understanding the world.

Her childhood involvement in community theater included productions of Annie, The Lion King, and The Little Mermaid. She also attended summer camp each year, where plays were staged regularly. Those early experiences provided a practical introduction to performance before she entered professional training.

Unlike many performers raised in Hollywood, Beatty did not become a professional child actor. She studied drama at The Juilliard School, appearing in productions such as Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. She graduated in 2022.

Her screen debut in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans

Shortly after graduating, Beatty landed her first professional screen role as Kerry O’Shea in the 2024 FX anthology series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. The series examined writer Truman Capote and his circle of influential female socialites.

Beatty told Women’s Wear Daily that she felt honored to be part of the production and singled out director Gus Van Sant as a particularly supportive collaborator on her first job. She also recalled trying to keep mementos from the set, ultimately retaining the notebook and pen associated with Capote’s character.

The role gave Beatty an introduction to a polished, ensemble-driven production and placed her alongside an established group of performers. It also marked the beginning of a career trajectory that moved quickly from classical training to television and then Broadway.

Broadway, Off-Broadway, and work with Sarah Paulson

Beatty made her Broadway debut in March 2024 in Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Appropriate. She played River Rayner, replacing Elle Fanning. It was during that run that Beatty met her close friend Sarah Paulson, who is also set to appear in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.

She later returned to the stage for the Off-Broadway productions of Ghosts and Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes. The combination of Broadway, Off-Broadway, television, and film experience gives Beatty a broader foundation than a conventional television debut would provide.

Recent films and the upcoming The Bell Jar adaptation

Beatty’s recent screen work includes the 2025 comedy-drama If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, starring Rose Byrne and nominated for an Oscar. Her next project is the film adaptation of The Bell Jar, based on Sylvia Plath’s novel. Production recently wrapped, with Beatty playing Joan, the college acquaintance of protagonist Esther Greenwood.

The film also stars Billie Eilish, Carey Mulligan, and Connor Storie. Eilish plays Esther Greenwood, while Mulligan takes on another significant role in the adaptation. The project gives Beatty another opportunity to work within psychologically complex literary material.

The Lizzie Borden case behind the Netflix role

Lizzie Borden was accused of killing her parents, Andrew and Abby Borden, in a brutal hatchet attack in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. She was found not guilty by an all-male jury the following year.

The case has remained culturally prominent because the evidence, motive, and social context have invited competing interpretations. That tension between historical record and folklore makes the Netflix role especially demanding: Beatty must work from documented events while acknowledging how much the story has been shaped by later retellings.

What audiences can expect from Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story

Based on the information currently available, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story will focus on Lizzie’s story and the questions that continue to surround her life. Beatty has called the investigation “a dream come true” and described the American crime at the center of the case as almost mythic in proportion.

Sarah Paulson is also set to appear in the series, though the available information does not specify her role. For Beatty, the production represents a major transition from ensemble work and supporting parts to the responsibility of carrying a Netflix series as its central performer.

Ella Beatty’s next chapter

Beatty’s early career combines family visibility, formal training, stage discipline, and work with respected filmmakers and performers. Her first lead role in Monster arrives alongside the upcoming The Bell Jar adaptation, suggesting an actor drawn to complicated women and stories that resist easy answers.

The coming months will offer the first sustained test of whether audiences respond to her interpretation of Lizzie Borden—and whether her transition from promising newcomer to leading screen actor is as swift as her résumé suggests.

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