In the Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Trailer, Ella Beatty Sees Red

Hell hath no fury like a woman with an axe.

“There’s nothing wrong with blood,” Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan (Vicky Krieps) says over the opening moments of the new trailer for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. “Blood is power. Blood is freedom.”

It’s a lesson that Lizzie Borden (Ella Beatty) takes to heart. The latest season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology series centers on the 1892 axe murders of Lizzie’s parents, played in the series by Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall. You can catch a glimpse at their deaths — and the circumstances that led to them — in the new trailer above. The series strikes Netflix on Sept. 17.

In the decades since Borden was acquitted for the bloody massacre of her parents, debate has raged over whether the young woman could really have committed the crime. It’s an argument that even reached Beatty. “Immediately when the audition came up, I listened to every true crime podcast that I could find to learn the facts of the case,” she says. “My job was to explore the character that Ian and Ryan had created and take all the source material about the real person’s life and then translate that into the very fictionalized version of the woman that we created for the show.”

The series’ version of Lizzie is a frustrated young woman suffocated by the expectations of Andrew and Abby Borden — and intoxicated by her illicit affair with the family’s new maid, Maggie. “Vicky is unlike anyone I’ve ever met before, which I think is not dissimilar from how Lizzie feels about Maggie,” Beatty says. “She created such a joyful, fun, exploratory dynamic between our two characters that I just loved delving into with her.”

The trailer gives us a taste of that dynamic, with Maggie pushing Lizzie towards the crime we know will define the rest of her life. “Your parents, and the way they treat you… they deserve it,” Maggie tells her. 

The only question is what weapon will do the job. A knife? Too easy. A rifle? Too kind. Lizzie settles on an axe. 

The trailer comes to a close with Lizzie covered in blood, the crimson splatters making evocative patterns across her face and body. “Sometimes the blood on my face was hand-painted with makeup brushes,” Beatty says. “Sometimes it was literally poured onto me. Sometimes it came from what’s called a blood rig, so every time I would slam an axe onto the blood rig, fake blood would shoot out.” 

But, unlike Lady Macbeth or her own character, Beatty has a handy life hack for removing blood — at least when it’s fake. “It comes off with shaving cream,” she says. 

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story lands on Netflix on Sept. 17.

Via: Netflix