Days after the premiere of Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Netflix’s hit crime anthology has gone back into production — and this time it will have its first female killer lead. Season 4 is set to weave the curious and spine-chilling tale of Lizzie Borden, a young woman who was accused of violently killing her father and her stepmother with an axe in 1892. The following year, Borden went to trial, but she was acquitted by the jury after less than two hours of deliberation due to a strong lack of evidence. While she walked free and lived to the age of 66, she’s still gone down in history in connection with her alleged crimes.
Ella Beatty — daughter of Hollywood stars Warren Beatty and Annette Bening — is set to play the role of Lizzie, while Charlie Hunnam will make his return to the series as her father, Andrew Borden. Other key cast members include Rebecca Hall (Godzilla Vs. Kong) as Abby Borden, Billie Lourd (Scream Queens) as Emma Borden, and Vicky Krieps (The Phantom Thread) as the family’s maid, Bridget Sullivan.
This comes as negative reviews continue to stream in for Monster: The Ed Gein Story. The third installment of the series was released on Oct. 3, and debuted with a surprising 50% critics’ score and a 66% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. In only a few days, it plummeted to a dismal 20% with critics and a 50% audience score.
Charlie Hunnam Hits Back at Criticism
True crime remains one of the steadiest growing genres in fiction and nonfiction-based media, from television shows and film documentaries to podcasts and books. Despite its popularity, a consistent criticism is that in telling these stories, there can be an exaggeration or even romanticization of truly horrific events and the people involved in them. Lucy Gandan of The Guardian said, “The Ed Gein Story feels like it is interested only in bringing an under-exploited piece of true crime estate to market.”
However, Hunnam, who plays Gein in the Netflix show, firmly disagrees.
“I never felt like we were sensationalizing it,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in a story published on Monday, Oct. 6. “I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact. It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could…. What I would hope and feel really confident in is that it was a very sincere exploration of the human condition and why this boy did what he did.”
This was a sentiment shared by the show’s co-creator Ian Brennan, who emphasized the importance of telling “the whole story,” even the parts of it that are “hard to watch.”
“This show is always trying to not be exploitative. It’s trying to actually show that you can pull back too much when you’re telling a macabre story … It’s a real deep dive into a very strange and important touchstone of the 20th century. It just happened to be this very lonely, strange, mentally ill man in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin who had this enormous cultural footprint that changed pop culture.”