The legend of Lizzie Borden has been a story Hollywood has milked for years, so it was only a matter of time before Ryan Murphy put his singular treatment on it. Acquitted of the 1892 murders of her father and stepmother, the case received national attention, and the allegations followed Borden for the rest of her life. (The description alone makes it shocking that it's taken Murphy this long to cover it.) In this dramatized version of the case for Murphy’s Monster anthology series on Netflix, Charlie Hunnam plays Andrew Borden, Lizzie's father, and Rebecca Hall plays Abby, her stepmother. In a scene-stealing performance, Hall gives Cinderella's evil stepmother a run for her money.
Newcomer Ella Beatty plays Lizzie. Both Hunnam and Hall are becoming staples in the Murphy universe with Hunnam appearing in the last season of Monster and Hall most recently appearing in The Beauty. For Hunnam, the connective tissue runs even deeper.
"I love working with Ryan [and]working with Ian [Brennan, the writer] on both seasons of Monster that I did," he told Newsweek. He went on to add that he loved working with frequent collaborator Max Winkler on this season of Monster as well. "We made a film together actually in Fall River,where Lizzie Borden was from, called Jungleland.
We've developed a couple scripts together as writers and producers. So, it's really lovely to have that relationship, and the fact that he's part of the Ryan universe just sort of makes it feel like a real family." Hall feels similarly welcomed into the fold for her own reasons. "I love that I don't really know what I'm going to be asked to do with him," she said of working with Murphy.
I like really mixing it up in quite extreme ways and getting an opportunity to do that is not that often, but I know when Ryan calls that is likely. And that's super exciting." That range is on full display in Abby Borden, a role Hall describes with delight. "You get delicious lines, delicious words, like the most cutting insults imaginable," she said.
"It's a dream." Balancing camp with reality was delicate, and both actors approached it their own way. For Hall, the key was refusing to treat camp and truth as opposites. "The camp is real, too," she said.
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