Ella Beatty will play Lizzie Borden in Netflix’s ‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’, the fourth season of Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology, with all eight episodes arriving on Thursday, 17 September 2026.
Beatty’s casting was confirmed alongside the release date, as reported by Variety, and she shared the news herself on Instagram, with a caption that read like someone who could not quite believe the company she was about to keep.
Beatty wrote on Instagram:
“Cannot believe I get to work with geniuses such as these.”
What Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden means for ‘Monster’
Borden was tried and acquitted of the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, a case that has never stopped generating theories.
The acquittal is the part that keeps the story alive, because no one else was ever convicted for the killings.
Beatty is the daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, and this is by some distance the largest role of her career so far. Playing an acquitted woman rather than a convicted one gives her more room to work with than the anthology usually allows.
Monster has built its reputation on unsettled cases and unsettling performances, and it has taken heat every time for how closely it hews to real victims.
Borden is far enough back in history that the ethical pressure eases, giving the writers more latitude than earlier seasons had.
Who else joins Ella Beatty in the Lizzie Borden season
The cast around her is stacked, taking in Vicky Krieps, Charlie Hunnam, Rebecca Hall, Jessica Barden, Joey Pollari, Billie Lourd and Sarah Paulson. Ian Brennan created the season, keeping the writing in the same hands that have shaped the series since it started.
Paulson’s involvement is the detail long-time viewers will clock first, given how much of the creator’s television output she has carried over the past 15 years.
Krieps and Hunnam bring a different kind of weight, both better known for film work than for streaming anthologies.
When the season lands on Netflix
All eight episodes drop at once on Thursday, 17 September 2026, which is the format the anthology has always used. There is no weekly rollout, no staggered international window, so South African viewers get it at the same time as everyone else.
Netflix has done well out of true-crime dramatisation before. Elize: Shadows of a Woman, the Brazilian dramatisation that landed in July 2026, climbed to number two on the platform’s global chart within days of its premiere.
Whether the season sticks the landing is a question for Friday morning timelines, once eight hours of it have been consumed in a sitting.
Beatty, meanwhile, walks into the week with the kind of role that decides what the next five years of her career look like.
