Netflix handed its new Monster season to an actress with two screen credits
Ella Beatty is 26, left Juilliard in 2022 and had been on screen exactly twice before Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan handed her eight episodes and the first female lead the anthology has had. Her parents are Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, and that is the smaller half of the story.
The actress carrying Netflix's biggest show this week has been on screen twice in her life. Ella Beatty made her screen debut in 2024, spent last year on off-Broadway stages, and is now the first female lead the Monster anthology has had in four seasons.
She has spent Thursday explaining the job. To People she described feeling "a huge responsibility to the part, the character on the page, as well as the real person and the anthology, more generally". To Netflix's own outlet she admitted she is frightened of blood, which is an awkward trait for this particular role. To Variety, on Thursday evening, she talked about the season swinging between comedy and horror.
"I felt a huge responsibility to the part, the character on the page, as well as the real person and the anthology, more generally." — Ella Beatty
Two screen credits, then a season of her own
The record is short enough to read in one go. She left Juilliard in 2022. In 2024 she appeared in four episodes of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans as Kerry O'Shea, and made her Broadway debut the same year in Appropriate, taking over the role of River Rayner from Elle Fanning. In 2025 she did two off-Broadway runs and her first film. This year she has two releases, one of which is this.
- 2022 — graduates from Juilliard
- 2024 — screen debut in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans; Broadway debut in Appropriate
- 2025 — two off-Broadway plays and a film debut in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
- 2026 — Act One, and the lead of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story
Four years from first credit to carrying eight episodes is fast in any era. It is faster still for a show whose previous seasons were led by Evan Peters and Charlie Hunnam, actors with two decades of work behind them.
She is also the least experienced person on her own call sheet. Charlie Hunnam plays her father, Rebecca Hall her stepmother, Vicky Krieps the family maid, and Sarah Paulson turns up in the later-period scenes as Aileen Wuornos. The newcomer is the one the season is named after.
Read more: Sarah Paulson plays a woman executed in 2002 in Netflix's Monster season set in 1892
The surname, and what it does not explain
Her parents are Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. Both broke through young and in public: his first film was Splendor in the Grass in 1961, hers was The Grifters in 1990, the first of five Academy Award nominations she has never converted into a win.
Neither of them took this particular road. Beatty came up through studio pictures, Bening through theatre and then prestige film. Their daughter's first lead is a streaming true-crime season built by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, a format that did not exist when either of them started and that turns an unknown into a household name in a weekend.
A famous surname opens a casting-office door. It does not get anyone through eight episodes of a Ryan Murphy anthology.
What she has been handed is not a favour, either. The season dramatises a woman a jury acquitted in 1893, and it opens by showing her killing her parents. Every interview she gives this week comes back to that, which is why the word she keeps using is responsibility.
The reviews have split on the show — the coverage has been arguing about tone since Wednesday — but almost none of it argues about her. That is the part of the debut that will matter in a year.
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