Ella Beatty

Ella Beatty (born April 8, 2000, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is an American stage, television, and film actor known for roles in the Broadway play Appropriate (2024) and in the TV miniseries Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story (2026). She is the youngest of four children born to acclaimed actors Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.

Family and education

Beatty always wanted to be an actress. She grew up immersed in the Hollywood of her legendary parents—who have 19 Academy Award nominations between them—and she often used make-believe and playing pretend to understand the world around her. She ultimately enrolled at Juilliard to study drama and graduated in 2022.

Theater

Beatty made her Broadway debut in March 2024, stepping into the role of River in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Tony Award-winning play Appropriate. (Elle Fanning had originated the part.) The unsettling family drama centers on a group of white siblings as they clean out their childhood home, a former plantation in Arkansas, shortly after their father’s death. Others in the production included Sarah Paulson, whose admiration of Beatty’s audition helped land her the role. “In the beginning I was lamenting, ‘How are we going to find someone to play this part?’ ” Paulson recalled in a conversation with Beatty for Interview magazine in 2025. “You came in and when you walked out, Michael [Esper, a costar in Appropriate] and I turned to each other and we’re like, ‘It’s got to be Ella Beatty.’ ” Beatty portrayed River—the kindhearted fiancée of one of the siblings—until the play closed in June 2024.

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In 2025 Beatty appeared as a housemaid in Ghosts at the Lincoln Center Theater; it was an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 play. Also that year Beatty appeared off-Broadway alongside Hugh Jackman in Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes. The well-received two-person production centers on an acclaimed novelist and professor (Jackman) who has an affair with a student (Beatty).

Film and TV

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Beatty’s television debut came in 2024 with Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, in which she played the daughter of Truman Capote’s lover. The following year Beatty appeared in her first feature film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which was written and directed by Mary Bronstein. The dark comedy stars Rose Byrne as a struggling mother contending with her sick child, absent husband, and therapy clients, one of whom was played by Beatty. She then reunited with Murphy for the fourth season of his true-crime anthology series Monster, which debuted on Netflix in September 2026. Beatty was cast as the infamous murder suspect Lizzie Borden, who was charged with murdering her father and stepmother in 1892 but ultimately acquitted.