Town & Country October 2026 ft. Ella Beatty

Ella Beatty has been the toast of Broadway, a prestige TV breakout, and an indie film favorite. This month, a starmaking role in the latest chapter of Ryan Murphy’s Monster anthology series proves she’s still got an axe to grind. But Ella Beatty is not only a Lizzie Borden for our time, she’s also T&C’s October cover star.

In real life, Beatty is a far cry from the true crime icon she plays on screen. But, there’s at least one similarity between the actress and the show’s fictionalized version of Borden. Beatty says that playing any character is about finding empathy for “an everyday person under extraordinary circumstances.”

As Naveen Kumar writes in our latest issue, that could be an apt description of Beatty herself. In some ways the actress—a recent college grad and fledgling New Yorker—does seem perfectly normal, but in other ways her circumstances are extraordinary.