Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story landed on Netflix on Thursday, and within hours the conversation split in two directions. One half was about the show itself, Ryan Murphy's fourth crack at true-crime anthology television after Dahmer, the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein. The other half was about its lead actress, Ella Beatty, and the fact that her parents happen to be Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.

Beatty, 26, plays the title role. It's her first time leading a television series, and it's the first Monster season built around a woman. The show dramatises the 1892 case that made Lizzie Borden a household name, an axe murder trial that ended in acquittal and a mystery that's kept true-crime writers busy for over a century.

None of that has stopped a chunk of the online reaction from circling back to her surname. Beatty has become the latest young actor to get tagged with the nepo baby label, a term that's followed pretty much every performer under 30 whose parent has an Oscar nomination. She hasn't pushed back on the label outright. According to The Hollywood Gossip, she's been upfront about benefiting from her last name, while framing her parents' influence as guidance more than a leg up.

The résumé before the discourse

Beatty graduated from Juilliard in 2022 and made her professional debut in Murphy's own Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, before moving to Broadway with Appropriate in 2024. She followed that with 2025's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, and she's next set to appear in The Bell Jar opposite Carey Mulligan and Billie Eilish, per Just Jared.

According to People, cited by The Hollywood Gossip, Beatty went straight into true-crime podcasts and research material after landing the audition, even while treating the series as a dramatisation rather than documentary retelling. She's said her parents told her to "get interested rather than be interesting," advice she's credited more than the family name itself for how she's approached the part.

Whether that advice translates on screen is going to be the actual test here, not the family tree. Murphy's anthology has built its audience on turning notorious cases into prestige television, and the format tends to survive scrutiny of its casting once people actually watch. Whether Beatty's Borden gets judged on those terms, or stays stuck as a nepo baby talking point, depends on how the next few weeks of reviews and viewership numbers shake out.

Netflix hasn't said whether a fifth Monster season is in the works, or whose story it might tell next.