‘Lizzie Borden’ Cast on Treating the Story as a Comedy, the Joy of Playing a Sadistic Character and Finding Empathy for a Bloody Monster: ‘I Understand This Person’

“Don’t you worry: I look after my axes,” Charlie Hunnam says proudly with an impish grin.

At the moment, he’s not in character but rather marveling at a hobby he picked up before filming “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.” In it, he plays Lizzie’s father, an undertaker who is fine chopping a client’s legs off if they are too tall for the coffin.

Hunnam himself says that in the months leading up to filming, he’d been noticing felled trees on the side of the road while driving through Los Angeles. He took to chopping them up and throwing them into the back of his pickup truck.

“I ended up with probably about 10 tons of wood and bought some great axes and started becoming quite the axeman,” he says. “I’ve been really, really wanting these beautiful Scandinavian axes. When I got this, because Andrew Borden’s an ax collector, I said, ‘Well, it’s for the work. I’ve got to have these axes.’”

The conversation mirrors the surprising, irreverent tone of this season of “Monster.” A complete turn from the darkness of “The Ed Gein Story,” in which Hunnam starred as the titular killer, there is a lightness, beauty and levity to Lizzie’s story — even when she grabs an ax and takes some whacks.

This fourth season stars Ella Beatty as the naive, curious title character, whose world brightens when a new housemaid, Bridget Sullivan (Vicky Krieps), arrives and introduces Lizzie to daring literature and kinky sex. Yet her awakening is dampened by her depressed father and cruel stepmother Abby (Rebecca Hall).

Despite Lizzie committing such a legendary crime, Beatty was able to find a kindred spirit in the character, a very complicated young woman.

“I felt very connected to the character immediately,” she says. “I remember making the audition tape and thinking, ‘I understand this person.’ When I found out that I had gotten the part, I was over the moon and also really scared. I felt a huge responsibility to the part, to the anthology, to the real person. I think immediately I just wanted to start working on it. How does she move? How does she dream? How does she think? How does she speak? How does she blink?”

Hall, whose character says some jaw-droppingly mean things to her stepdaughter, was thrilled to unwrap a deliciously cruel antagonist.

“I’ve never played a true out-and-out villain,” she says. “I just loved on the page how funny she was. It just felt like such an opportunity to be both funny and scary at the same time, which is an interesting tonal challenge. I loved [writer] Ian Brennan’s take on this character, which felt like it was a creation of Ian Brennan and [executive producer] Ryan Murphy and had nothing to do with history really, as much as it gave me license to create this unique character.”

Despite Abby’s savagery, Hall saw a unique reflection of the character and the title killers in the series.

“Nothing in this ‘Monster’ world is straightforward,” she says. “The exercise of the show is really about how monsters aren’t born, they’re created. So even Abby Borden has that as well. There’s reason behind it. She’s also in a pressure cooker, and she’s become an alcoholic over time. I sort of loved the character. There’s a lot of fun to be had, and there’s something very interesting about playing someone who’s keeping up appearances, who wants to appear posh and together and is just a complete and utter mess — and a sadistic one to boot.”

This season is a star-making moment for Beatty, whose parents, Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, are legends in their own right. Yet she’s found her way to “Monster” through plenty of time on stage as well as smaller parts in movies such as “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” and the 2024 Murphy-verse series “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.”

As the central figure on the show, Beatty says she definitely had nerves but was fascinated to get on the series’ unique wavelength.

“I knew that they were interested in exploring an almost farcical tone,” she says. “We all just continued to discover it together. It felt a lot more available on set than you might initially think. I was constantly surprised by the ability of comedy and really intense sadness or drama to be in the show. I felt like we discovered it together the whole time.”

Despite its 19th-century trappings, there is a universality to the story and its outrageousness that Hunnam is excited for audiences to engage with.

“It felt like there was much more license for a bonkers absurdity that felt like it was on the page and that I was surprised by and really excited about,” he says. “I thought there was a complexity and a tragedy and a nastiness and a vulnerability and all of the things that you look for that are true of all of us.”

Watch a trailer for “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” below.