Viewers are watching Charlie Hunnam return to queer storytelling in Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, decades after Queer as Folk helped launch his career. The new drama matters because it uses repression, desire and identity to reframe a notorious historical case, while reminding audiences how far mainstream LGBTQ+ representation has travelled.

Essential Takeaways

  • A career-defining beginning: Hunnam played Nathan Maloney in the original British Queer as Folk.
  • A very different role: He now portrays Andrew Borden in Netflix’s fictionalised Lizzie Borden drama.
  • Queerness drives the plot: The series explores sexuality, power and repression inside a troubled Victorian household.
  • History meets invention: The production dramatises the case, so imagined relationships shouldn't be treated as proven fact.
  • Still streaming: Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is available on Netflix.

Hunnam’s first major role still carries weight

Before Sons of Anarchy and The Gentlemen made him internationally recognisable, Charlie Hunnam appeared as Nathan Maloney in Queer as Folk. The Channel 4 series, created by Russell T Davies, followed three men navigating Manchester's gay scene and arrived at a time when openly queer sex, nightlife and relationships were still unusual on mainstream British television.

ScreenUK describes the show as a landmark in British television history, while Rotten Tomatoes records its lasting place in television culture. It wasn't designed to make everyone comfortable, and that was precisely the point. The series had a bright, unruly energy that felt startlingly direct.

Hunnam has spoken warmly about the experience, describing it as an important beginning. Looking back, there's a clear sense that he understands the show's significance wasn't only professional. It helped make queer lives visible to audiences who'd rarely seen them treated with such confidence.

From Manchester nightlife to Victorian repression

Hunnam's new role couldn't look more different on the surface. In Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, he plays Andrew Borden, the father at the centre of a notorious 1892 Massachusetts murder case. Netflix's cast guide places him alongside Ella Beatty as Lizzie, Rebecca Hall as Abby Borden and Vicky Krieps as Bridget Sullivan.

The series isn't a strict courtroom reconstruction. Instead, it builds a heightened family drama around the known case, using imagined sexual and emotional dynamics to explore control, resentment and isolation. Marie Claire's coverage of Bridget Sullivan also underlines the importance of separating the show's dramatic interpretation from the limited historical record.

That distinction matters, especially with true crime. A glossy period setting can make invention feel like evidence, so viewers should treat the relationships and abuse depicted on screen as elements of the adaptation, not settled history.

Why queer themes sit at the centre

The drama's queer perspective is more than a decorative twist. Lizzie's sexuality and her relationship with Bridget become ways of examining what it means to be denied autonomy, affection and recognition.

Marie Claire's profile of Ella Beatty highlights the actor's interest in the story's emotional relevance. The fictionalised romance gives Lizzie a rare sense of being understood, but the series doesn't suggest that emotional pain excuses violence. That tension is essential: empathy can deepen a character without turning their actions into something acceptable.

Rebecca Hall has also pointed to the production's wider queer sensibility. The story focuses on women constrained by Victorian ideas about family, gender and respectability, where desire is carefully hidden and power rarely shared fairly. In that world, repression isn't confined to one person. It hangs over the entire household like stale air.

What changed since Queer as Folk?

When Queer as Folk premiered, Britain was still wrestling with legal and social inequality affecting gay and bisexual people. The series entered that debate with explicit scenes and characters who weren't reduced to tragic symbols or polite side plots.

Today, queer stories are far more visible across streaming television, but visibility doesn't automatically mean freedom from stereotypes. Netflix's new drama arrives in a different media landscape, yet it returns to familiar questions: who gets to define a person's identity, whose desire is treated as dangerous and what happens when a private life is forced into secrecy.

The contrast between Hunnam's two projects is especially revealing. Nathan was a teenager moving towards discovery and self-definition. Andrew belongs to a household shaped by concealment, hierarchy and fear. The settings have changed, but the pressure of being unseen remains recognisable.

How to watch the new series with context

For viewers approaching Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the best starting point is to treat it as historical fiction with a true-crime foundation. The central murders and trial are real, but the show's intimate relationships and psychological explanations are dramatised.

The acquittal remains one of the case's enduring mysteries. Woman&Home's account of why Lizzie Borden was found not guilty explains how the prosecution's evidence failed to secure a conviction, leaving generations to debate what happened inside the family home.

It also helps to notice what the series is doing beyond the crime itself. As Netflix's guide suggests, the ensemble matters because the household's tensions are shared across several characters. The murders provide the shock, but repression, dependence and the hunger to be recognised provide the drama's deeper pulse.

A career coming full circle

Hunnam's move from Queer as Folk to Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story gives his career an intriguing loop. His first breakthrough helped bring contemporary queer life into sharper view; his latest series uses queer desire to illuminate a historical world built on silence.

That doesn't make the two shows equivalent, and it shouldn't. Their politics, styles and historical settings are worlds apart. But both understand that stories about sexuality can expose who has power, who is allowed to speak and who gets trapped behind a respectable facade.

For Hunnam, it's a return to a question that has followed him from the start: what happens when people are denied the chance to live honestly?

Explore the new drama as a provocative adaptation, not a substitute for the historical record.

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