Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Cast Break Down Female Rage, Vomiting, and the Making of Season 4

In the latest installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan‘s Monster, Netflix’s divisive true-crime anthology series resurrects one of America’s most infamous unsolved mysteries — a bloody 19th-century double homicide best immortalized by a grim schoolyard rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And gave her mother 40 whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father 41.
Andrew Borden now is dead,
Lizzie hit him on the head.
Up in heaven he will sing,
On the gallows she will swing.

Across its first three seasons, Monster used Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, and the Menendez brothers to explore male isolation, toxic masculinity, and intergenerational trauma and abuse. But with The Lizzie Borden Story, the show shifts from a dark fascination with male depravity to a sharp — but no less controversial — examination of female rage and agency, specifically focusing on how society has historically treated women who refuse to conform to the expectations placed upon them.

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Written entirely by Brennan, the new eight-episode series takes significant creative liberties in revisiting the story of Lizzie Borden (played by Ella Beatty). Though the real-life Sunday school teacher was acquitted of the 1892 axe murders of her father, Andrew (Charlie Hunnam), and stepmother, Abby (Rebecca Hall), in Fall River, Massachusetts, this iteration leaves no room for mystery — positing upfront that Lizzie did indeed commit both killings.

While advancing the theory that Lizzie’s household — including her intimate bond with her housemaid Bridget Sullivan (Vicky Krieps) — sparked the violence against the elder Bordens, the miniseries also weaves in two other notorious female killers across history: Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory (also played by Krieps) and Aileen Wuornos (Sarah Paulson).

“Men have been — and I’m sure women as well, but it’s less documented — killing and expressing their rage since the beginning of time,” executive producer Max Winkler, who also directed six episodes of Lizzie Borden, told TV Guide. “We don’t see women in that light. It makes us uncomfortable; it makes us scared.” For Winkler, that discomfort speaks to society’s ongoing refusal to dismantle traditional gender roles, preferring instead to view women strictly as caregivers and homemakers. “Women could only start to vote in 1920,” he noted. “That’s a little more than a hundred years ago, which I think people take for granted.”

Unlike previous Monster installments, Lizzie Borden plays faster and looser with historical facts, taking advantage of the sparse record surrounding the infamous family. In this zippy (and unexpectedly darkly comedic) retelling, the show imagines that Lizzie was pushed to commit murder after enduring years of abuse from her sharp-tongued stepmother — who ruthlessly slaughtered Lizzie’s beloved doves and then blamed her for failing to keep them quiet — and having a father who refused to protect her.

“I think it’s important as an actress to also remember that you’re meeting someone at one point in their life,” Beatty explained to TV Guide about understanding Lizzie’s motivations. “It was very important for me to also internally color in all of the first half of her life that you haven’t seen. So there’s the story of the show; there’s the chain of events that you’re watching. But I had her all filled up with an entire sort of life lived. So by the time you watch her on camera, you feel like she’s a person.”

The opening episodes establish Abby’s history of taunting her stepdaughter, whom she is quick to cut down to size at every turn. “I saw her as a narcissistic sociopath, but she could have done better, had she had a better beginning and a better life,” Hall told TV Guide of her “awful” character. “I think she really is the sort of character that thinks of herself as the star of her own movie. If she’d gone to somewhere more cosmopolitan, or had a life where she could have been the star of something or a society lady and had a lot of power, then she probably would’ve been less of a raging, evil sadist.”

Hall drew a parallel between Lizzie and her stepmother, viewing Abby as “a really powerful personality who’s utterly constrained” by stifling Victorian-era expectations. After a bleak childhood, Abby “enters a completely awful marriage to a man that’s still very much in love with his first wife,” Hall explained. “She’s looking after his children and she’s very young — and that’s all she has. She’s not the type of person that is good at looking after children.”

Trapped in an unfulfilling home life, Abby’s frustration turns inward and then outward. “I think she turns to drink, and everything festers. [She] gets more and more caged and repressed until she explodes in horrifically violent and evil ways constantly,” Hall added. Above all else, though, Hall saw Abby’s comedic potential and understood that she needed to fit into the “cultural archetype” of an evil stepmother for the purposes of this story. “I really wanted to make her as out there, as strange, as I could. So I spent a lot of time working on idiosyncratic things like her voice and her accent, the way she laughs and the way she moves.”

Hall believes that Abby becomes “endlessly cruel” as a means of entertaining herself — a sadism laid bare in the premiere. In one of many outrageous moments of domestic humiliation, Abby casually details Lizzie’s menstrual cycle to Bridget, whom Abby spitefully insists on calling “Maggie” after a previous housemaid: “This one has heavy menses. Actually, heavy doesn’t quite describe it. Diluvian is a more apt descriptor. She’s a true freak of nature. Now when the last time comes, we keep her upstairs on a bed of wooden planks and muslin sheets she’s free to be befoul with her putrid clots.”

“If you look at Ian Brennan’s dialogue, she has this incredible way of turning a put-down, which, in a different time [or] place, probably could have turned her into a TV personality or a writer,” Hall, who clearly relished delivering such absurd dialogue, said with a laugh. “But in this era, she’s just locked up and has no power whatsoever, and [that] festers and turns nasty.”

Fresh off playing Ed Gein in the third season of Monster, Hunnam received a call from Murphy sometime last year offering him the role of the Borden patriarch. “I just sent you three scripts,” Murphy had told him. “Take a read and let me know if you want to come back and play.” The decision was an easy one. “As I was opening the PDFs and seeing the Monster logo flash up on my screen, I just knew,” Hunnam recalled to TV Guide with a smile. “I was like, ‘Who am I kidding? Without even reading this, I’m going back because I just love this creative team.'”

For Hunnam, the overarching theme of Lizzie Borden is oppression — a weight that falls on the family patriarch as much as anyone else, even though he is obviously a man. “Andrew feels the same way in that he’s deeply unhappy in his life. He’s sort of oppressed and imprisoned by a cage of his own making,” Hunnam explained, pointing to the tragic loss of Andrew’s first wife, Sarah Morse, and their young daughter, Alice. “He just wasn’t able to put together a new life for himself that offered any sort of happiness. So he’s trapped in his own grief and his own unhappiness, and that manifests into rage, spite, and drunken delinquency.”

Hunnam is quick to note that historical records on Andrew Borden are thin, leaving him uncertain about whether his portrayal mirrors the real man. But on the page, the character struck him as deeply tragic. “It felt like he was somebody who had sort of forsaken himself,” Hunnam explained. “He wasn’t able to do the work to get over his grief, and [he] let it metastasize into self-hatred. It’s hard to love anybody if you hate yourself. I think the person Andrew hates most is himself, but he maybe isn’t courageous enough to admit that, so he takes it out on those closest to him.”

The only respite Lizzie gets in the house arrives in the form of Bridget a.k.a. Maggie, a new, well-traveled domestic worker who Beatty said is unlike anyone Lizzie has ever met before. Unlike previous screen depictions or historical accounts — where Bridget is typically framed as a mere bystander or faithful housemaid — this series explicitly reimagines their bond as a forbidden romance. “[Lizzie’s] a person who’s very hungry to feel seen. She’s very hungry to feel connected to another human being,” Beatty said. “So meeting a person with a softer touch, meeting with a person who has seen the world, I think absolutely changes her life and her worldview.”

In this version, Bridget is the person who plants the idea of double parricide in Lizzie’s mind. Shortly before Lizzie picks up an axe, the two attempt (unsuccessfully) to poison Andrew and Abby in Episode 2 by lacing an oyster soup with spoiled May oysters. (The poison is somewhat grounded in historical fact.) The resulting dinner scene becomes one of the year’s most stomach-churning sequences on television — a messy spectacle Winkler noted was executed using strictly practical effects.

“The best version of [vomiting on camera] of all time was Triangle of Sadness. We watched Triangle of Sadness and said, ‘How can we do this practically like they did?'” Winkler recalled. “I knew early on I wanted it to feel like a symphony, kind of like when you go to the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. So our editor, Jack Price, was very, very instrumental in building out this sequence. Our special effects team was incredible. We had multiple cameras — Michael Bauman, our DP; Greg Pollack, our assistant director. We all had to be very, very specific on how we did it because we couldn’t keep redressing [the set] once we started to vomit.”

Winkler acknowledged that the dinner scene was “probably our most difficult day of shooting” — mostly for the technical orchestration, but also for the actors’ real-life stomach sensitivities. “Rebecca really does not like to be around vomit or else she vomits. So that proved to be challenging, but she was a champion,” the director said. “Charlie is a very specific, healthy eater, and he did not want to eat the oysters, but he did.”

Hunnam almost shuddered at the memory of having to eat “these giant, fat, fishy oysters” on camera. “Nobody else wanted to eat them, but Max wanted at least one shot of an oyster going into someone’s mouth and being chewed up,” he recalled. “So I ended up getting the short straw, and Max said, ‘I know you’ll eat a couple of oysters for me.’ But they were cold oysters in this warm seafood broth. I think I ate three or four of those, which was pretty unpleasant.”

The actor quipped that the act of “eating the soup” that makes the character vomit “almost did the trick without having to synthesize the vomiting.” “I’m also a huge germophobe,” Hunnam admitted. “So just having that vomit rig in my mouth — I don’t know what it was that we were projectile vomiting out, but the whole thing was very unpleasant.”

While Hall was initially “really, really nervous” about the sequence, the absurdity of the setup quickly won her over. “The rig that we had to do this projectile vomiting was so preposterous and so far away from reality that… I enjoyed every second of it,” she recalled. “It was so silly. It was so funny. And watching Charlie just going for it — I thought it was going to be very unpleasant, but my memory of it was just crying with laughter all day long.”

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In another interview, Winkler recalled, another journalist drew parallels between the vomiting sequence in Monster and the crude humor of South Park. “I’m grateful for that [comparison] because I think South Park is one of the most brilliant pieces of art — along with the Beatles — of all time,” Winkler said. “Something I thought about early on was how South Park played jokes and for the length of time in which they do. It’s like this chemical, mathematical reaction to make it land the way we wanted it to land. I’m hoping that it worked [on Lizzie Borden].”

Of course, no retelling of Lizzie Borden’s story would be complete without the iconic axe murders, which the series captures in visceral detail. Filming those gruesome moments presented a unique challenge for Beatty, who admits to being a total “scaredy-cat” in real life. “I don’t even like to watch videos of people falling down on TikTok; I seriously don’t like watching people be hurt,” she admitted sheepishly. Instead of dwelling on the blood, she locked into her character’s deep-seated motivations, using the moment to unleash a sense of “freedom from repression and that kind of feminine rage.”

When Murphy and Brennan first told him about their plans for the first female-centric season of Monster, Winkler was particularly fascinated by how someone “so unassuming” — and deemed “unmarry-able” by her parents — could be driven to such extreme violence. “Her parents could not sell her off to a suitor, as hard as they tried, to relieve them of her presence. She was treated like oxen, basically,” Winkler said. “She was quiet, and she was introverted. That’s exactly how she got away and was exonerated on the trial. No one could believe a woman was capable of doing something [like that]. We don’t want to believe that women can do these things.”

As Hall aptly put it, each season of Monster has never been defined by just the titular killer. “There’s always other monsters in the show, who are also not necessarily born but created,” she said.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is now streaming on Netflix.