‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’ Team on Painting a Portrait of Female Rage — and Leaning into Lesbian Theories

Monster: The Ed Gein Story actor Joey Pollari was in the gazebo at his mother’s Minnesota home when Ryan Murphy called to invite him back for the newest season of the Netflix anthology series. “I got a call, from Ryan who said, ‘I have a project for you. I wrote this role,’” the actor recalled during the show’s red carpet premiere in New York on Wednesday night. “Then he went into it: ‘This character, John Morse, is obsessed with his knives. He was a really uncanny figure.'”

Pollari’s character, the knife-wielding uncle of Lizzie Borden, and an overlooked murder suspect, is not the only sharply unsettling thing in the show’s latest season, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story . Uncanny is pretty much how you’d describe the whole tale of the Massachusetts woman who, in 1892 at the age of 32, was tried and acquitted for the still unsolved, gruesome axe murders of her father and stepmother, Andrew (played by Charlie Hunnam ) and Abby (played by Rebecca Hall), respectively. Related Stories Movies Zach Cregger on Revamping 'Resident Evil' and Why He Doubts He'll Ever Return to Comedy Movies Anya Taylor-Joy Kidnaps Chris Evans in Netflix's 'Sacrifice' Trailer

Executive producer Murphy and showrunner Ian Brennan ’s version of Lizzie Borden (played in their series by Ella Beatty ) is just the latest take on the true crime case that has become its own legend , and it’s one that the show’s team took real creative liberties on, given how little confirmed information surrounds the case — which is one among several things that makes this season different than its predecessors.

“There’s a lot of information, but there’s not a lot of information,” Billie Lourde, who portrays Lizzie’s sister Emma, told The Hollywood Reporter at the show’s New York premeire about the challenges of tackling the Borden story. “Researching this character was really difficult because there wasn’t all this media that we have now in the 1800s. It’s not like today, when we have TikTok and documentaries and books. So what was so fun about that is we got to create our own version. We’ve been talking about it being more like a painting than a documentary. It’s an interesting way of doing this because most of the other seasons have been by the book, down-to-the-word true.”

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story ’s depiction, as Lourde described, centers on “a person who has never felt seen, a person who has never felt loved, who is really eager to experience the world.” Part of how the show explores that is by leaning on a theory that the never-married Borden was a lesbian. “In the context of the really repressive northeastern WASP-y Victorian mores, it’s an interesting thing to play with dramatically. So even if we didn’t think it was true, I’d still do it. But I actually happen to think that was true,” said Brennan.

“The question of, why would you do a story about different serial killers? and, why would you do it about a man or a woman? is about exploring what is in between — the black and white, right and wrong, good and evil.