Ella Beatty: the inheritance she refused, the role she earned

Ella Beatty

Photo: PhilipRomanoPhoto / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 8, 2000 Los Angeles, California
Occupation	Actress
Known for	If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

The question Ryan Murphy is implicitly asking by casting Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden is not whether she can carry a role of this size. The question — and she knows this — is whether anything about who her parents are will be visible in the performance. That is the deal on offer to anyone born into the Beatty-Bening household: the benchmark is not average, it is the two people who defined what screen acting looks like at its most exacting.

She grew up in Los Angeles as the youngest of four children born to Warren Beatty and Annette Bening — a father who had played Dick Tracy and Howard Hughes, directed Reds, and spent decades building the kind of film-world mythology that fills three Hollywood memoirs; a mother nominated four times for the Academy Award across four different decades, in genres requiring entirely different emotional registers. Her paternal aunt is Shirley MacLaine, who built her own screen mythology through the 1960s and beyond. When Ella enrolled at Juilliard’s Drama Division, she left both resumes behind.

The Juilliard School’s Drama Division admits fewer than twenty-five actors per year. Its four-year conservatory curriculum is designed to strip away whatever habits students arrived with and rebuild the instrument from the ground up. Beatty graduated in 2022, having also taken summer intensive courses at RADA and LAMDA in London — a deliberate pattern of exposure-seeking that suggests something more specific than ambition. She wanted to be teachable. The professional world outside Juilliard did not rush to offer anything that would short-circuit the process.

Her first screen credit came in 2024: Feud: Capote vs. The Swans on FX, Ryan Murphy’s anthology about Truman Capote and the circle of wealthy socialites he nicknamed his swans. Beatty played Kerry O’Shea across four episodes — not the center of gravity, not the story — and she did not treat the assignment as an occasion to announce herself. That same year she stepped onto the Belasco Theatre stage on Broadway, replacing Elle Fanning in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play Appropriate as River Rayner.

The theater kept coming. Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts in an off-Broadway run at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater followed, then Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes at the Minetta Lane Theatre, opposite Hugh Jackman. Theater, for Beatty, is not a waiting room between screen work. It is the venue where the discipline was built and where she has chosen, deliberately, to test it against live audiences who cannot be edited.

Her film debut arrived in 2025 with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, written and directed by Mary Bronstein and released by A24. Rose Byrne played Linda, a psychotherapist spiraling through professional collapse and parental exhaustion; Beatty played Kate, one of her patients — a supporting part in a film that collected a Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlin International Film Festival and pushed Byrne to an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. The scenes where Kate sits across from Linda in session carry a quality of focused attention. Beatty does the thing that supporting roles almost always ask for and almost always fail to deliver: she listens so precisely that you watch her instead of the speaker.

Two 2026 films mark the acceleration. Act One, a psychological thriller directed by Sophia Takal and starring Beatty alongside Ari Graynor, Nate Mann, and Elizabeth Reaser, premiered at the Tribeca Festival in June. Then came Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story — the fourth season of Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology for Netflix, and its first with a woman at the center. Beatty plays Borden across the full season, opposite Rebecca Hall as Abby Borden, Vicky Krieps as Bridget Sullivan, and Billie Lourd and Jessica Barden completing the ensemble. The August 2026 teaser showed Beatty in period costume, projecting the contained pressure that the role requires: a woman accused of killing her father and stepmother with an axe, in a culture that had no grammar for whatever she was experiencing.

The lineage and the deliberate arc converge here, and that convergence is worth examining precisely. The counternarrative around Beatty has leaned on Juilliard, the theater years, and the absence of any starring credit until now — a story of careful choices made against the obvious current. The other side of that framing deserves equal scrutiny. Both the Feud credit and the Monster lead came through Ryan Murphy; the professional relationship existed before the public resume did. What changes now is that the screen is large enough and the role specific enough that craft and connection can finally be separated on the evidence. Monster will be the first real occasion when that answer is available.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premieres on Netflix on September 17, 2026. In parallel, Beatty is in final talks to join the cast of The Bell Jar, Focus Features’ adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s novel, starring Billie Eilish as Esther Greenwood and Carey Mulligan as her mother — a production that began filming in Toronto in late June 2026.

The trajectory is moving faster than the career plan that began in a conservatory classroom. What comes after September will depend on whether Lizzie Borden becomes the measure or merely the first one.

Tags: actors, actresses, American cinema, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, Warren Beatty, Annette Bening

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