Kristen Stewart and Chloe Sevigny are in in talks to star in a movie about Lizzie Borden, the 19th century woman accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an ax. According to Variety, if the talks are successful, Stewart would play Bridget Sullivan, the family's live-in maid, and Sevigny would portray Lizzie.
The true story took place in Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie, 32, and her older sister Emma, 41, were living with their father and stepmother. One summer morning in 1892, their stepmother was killed by an attacker wielding a hatchet, struck 20 or 21 times in the head. Shortly thereafter, their father was murdered with a hatchet-like weapon, struck 10 or 11 times. Both Lizzie and Bridget were home when the murders were committed; Emma was away.
Lizzie and her sister apparently had an increasingly chilly relationship with their father, who was quite well off financially, because of his greater material generosity toward his second wife than with them. Lizzie became a suspect in the murders, and was eventually charged and brought to trial the following year. She was acquitted of all charges, and the case was never solved.
Three television shows in the 1950 and '60s were based on the story, with the most sensational coming in 1975. Made for television, The Legend of Lizzie Borden starred Elizabeth Montgomery as the titular character and it speculated that Lizzie committed the murders while naked, leaving behind no physical evidence.
More recently, Christina Ricci starred as the accused killer in Lizzie Borden Took an Axe, which inspired a follow-up miniseries, The Lizzie Borden Chronicles. Both shows took a different approach to the material.
As to Stewart, she's been making bold choices, especially since the release of the final installment of The Twilight Saga in 2012. She received acclaim for her lead performance in Camp X-Ray and for her supporting roles in Clouds of Sils Maria and Still Alice. She took on a thankless part as a girlfriend in American Ultra (top) and has already gotten good notices for her star turn in the upcoming sci-fi movie Equals.
Although Chloe Sevigny (above) would play Lizzie Borden, which sounds like the flashier part, we're intrigued to see what attracted Stewart to the role of Bridget Sullivan. All we've heard about the plot for the still-untitled movie is that it "explores the true events that led up to the infamous double murder," but that leaves a lot of room to probe the relationship between Lizzie and Bridget, and one theory that the latter actually helped in the murder.
Pieter Van Hees (Waste Land) will direct an original script by Bryce Kass that's described as a psychological thriller. We're not sure exactly when Sevigny will complete her commitment to the current season of television's American Horror Story: Hotel, but it's reasonable to speculate that filming on the new movie could start in the first half of 2016. We hope we don't have to wait too long to see what this new version will reveal.
