Sarah Paulson’s courtroom performance as Aileen Wuornos matches the real footage down to the dialogue, movements, head tilts, and defiant cadence. A clip pairs the scene from Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story with Wuornos’ courtroom appearance, including her line, “I’ll be up in heaven while y’all are rotting in hell.”
Reviews of Paulson’s performance split sharply. TheWrap’s Matthew Creith praised her ability to capture Wuornos’ physicality without turning her into a true-crime caricature, while Collider’s Gabrielle Moss said Paulson carries some of the season’s most emotionally brutal scenes. Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi called the performance a “Hillbilly Elegy–level abomination of caricature,” and The Hollywood Reporter’s Angie Han described it as “a broad performance more suited for Saturday Night Live.”
Paulson appears in 4 episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, starting with episode 4. Ella Beatty stars as Lizzie Borden. All 8 episodes arrived on Netflix on September 17.
The show brings Wuornos into a flash-forward storyline and depicts her as obsessed with Borden, checking into the Borden house and treating the 1892 axe murders as a feminist origin story. That connection was created for the series. There’s no evidence Wuornos admired Borden or stayed at the house, which became a bed-and-breakfast in 1996, after Wuornos was already in prison.
Co-creator Ian Brennan told Netflix’s Tudum that Paulson’s work is “really breathtaking.” Paulson accepted the role without seeing a script: “If there’s any opportunity for me to get inside something that has been predetermined by society and have a little look at it through my own particular lens, I’m always going to want to do that.”
