Netflix Dropped the Full Lizzie Borden Trailer and Sarah Paulson Is in It as Aileen Wuornos
The fourth season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's Monster arrives September 17, and the full trailer landed Thursday. Ella Beatty plays Lizzie Borden, the first woman to headline the anthology.
Then the trailer ends with a voice saying nobody really knows what happened that day, and Sarah Paulson — as Aileen Wuornos — replies that she knows exactly what happened.
The cast
- Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden
- Charlie Hunnam as her father, Andrew Borden
- Rebecca Hall as her stepmother, Abby Borden
- Vicky Krieps as Bridget Sullivan, the family's live-in maid
- Billie Lourd as Lizzie's older sister Emma
- Jessica Barden as Nance O'Neil, an actress friend
- Sarah Paulson as Wuornos, in scenes set roughly a century later
Eight episodes. Max Winkler directs six of them, Sarah Adina Smith the other two.
What it's doing
The 1892 case is the hook — Borden was accused of killing her father and stepmother with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts, and acquitted. The season's actual project, per Beatty, is a story about female rage and what circumstances produce it, with Wuornos functioning as a spiritual successor rather than a separate case file.
The logline describes a repressed daughter and a rebellious maid trapped in a house built on humiliation, escaping into a fantasy of sex, power and revenge. Which is a lot more interesting than another true-crime reenactment.
Hunnam is in this and also headlining an entirely separate meta-thriller about his own career. The man is having a year.
September 17, Netflix, all eight episodes.