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Billie Lourd has spoken about the bond she shares with her Monsters co-star Ella Beatty because of their famous parents.
Lourd, 34, stars alongside Beatty, 26, in the fourth season of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix anthology series, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, which premiered on Netflix September 17.
The pair play sisters Emma and Lizzie Borden, respectively, in the series, which dramatizes the infamous 1892 murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts.
Lourd is the daughter of the late Star Wars actor Carrie Fisher and Hollywood talent agent Bryan Lourd, while Beatty is the youngest daughter of Oscar winner Warren Beatty and five-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening.
“It’s definitely something we all joke about, especially Ella and me, because my mom’s first role was with Warren in [the 1975 film] Shampoo,” Lourd told The Times of London in a new interview.
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“It’s such a cool thing to be able to share that history, especially for me, because my mom isn’t around anymore and I get to hear stories that Ella has from her dad about my mom, and that is a lovely thing.”
Lourd is also the granddaughter of Debbie Reynolds, who died just a day after Fisher in 2016. Fisher was 60 while Reynolds was 84.
“I watched both my mom and my grandma live these really big, extravagant, a little too crazy lives,” Lourd reflected elsewhere in the interview.
“My grandma got into drinking and my mom was famously into drugs,” she continued. “And I was aware of that when I was pretty young because my parents were not together, so I was home alone with my mom a lot. I see how sweet and full of innocence my kids are, and it wasn’t like that for me. But it was also a gift because I learnt what not to do, and that’s sometimes the best thing to learn. So I was able to help my mom through a lot of it and I did my best to keep her alive as long as I could.”
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Lourd has worked with Monsters creator Ryan Murphy on multiple projects, including Scream Queens and the American Horror Story franchise.
Beatty, meanwhile, makes her first leading television appearance in Monsters. She graduated from the prestigious acting school Juilliard in 2022 and made her professional debut as Kerry O’Shea in Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans in 2024. She subsequently appeared on Broadway in Appropriate and in the 2025 film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Speaking to Vogue in 2024, Beatty acknowledged the advantages that came with her background.
“I totally acknowledge that there is an inherent privilege and exposure that comes from having well-known actors as parents,” she told the magazine. “And I really hope that I can offer something meaningful.”
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is out now on Netflix.