Ella Beatty beats me to the Carlyle. I’m not late, by the way: I arrive at 2:58 p.m. for our 3 p.m. coffee, figuring that it would be me waiting for her. (Actors, in my experience, are always running behind, armed with the knowledge that things don’t start happening until they get there anyway.) “Oh, God—I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” I tell her, fumbling with my scarf. Ella promises that she just got here too. But her neatly folded coat, draped over the crook of her arm, suggests otherwise.
Twenty minutes later, over tea in the hotel’s Renzo Mongiardino–designed gallery, I learn she’s following one of her father Warren Beatty’s cardinal rules: “Always be on time.” (Or, in her case, early.) Here’s another, from her mother, Annette Bening: “Be kind—because there’ll always be someone more beautiful, more charming, more interesting. If you show up and be kind, it goes a long way.” A third, which Warren picked up after working with Gene Hackman: “The actor that you are working with is the most important person in the room to you—listen to what they give you.”
We’re here because, after growing up surrounded by actors, Ella’s become one herself. This January, the 23-year-old made her professional acting debut in Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans as Truman Capote’s surrogate daughter, Kerry O’Shea. And next, on March 25, she will replace Elle Fanning as River in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ’s acclaimed Appropriate on Broadway, costarring Sarah Paulson and Corey Stoll. It s a big role to step into. The play has garnered rave reviews, with the Guardian acclaiming it as “a nimble, deft and highly entertaining work…that twists the nostalgia of homecoming.”
Exceptionally poised, she addresses the nepo-baby discourse outright, without me even asking: “I totally acknowledge that there is an inherent privilege and exposure that comes from having well-known actors as parents,” Ella says. “And I really hope that I can offer something meaningful.”
Ella spent her childhood observing her parents: Some of her earliest memories involve sitting on her mother’s lap in a makeup trailer, and as a teenager she visited her dad on set while he directed Rules Don’t Apply (2016). Yet her first real experience with acting came in 2018, when she started at Juilliard—the prestigious performing-arts school with a 7% acceptance rate. Along with the 17 other students in her class, she studied drama under legendary instructors like Moni Yakim. (“He demands 100% of you,” Jessica Chastain once told The New York Times of Yakim. “He’s not really a hand-holder. He’s not a coddler.”) The program gave Ella a cerebral view of her craft: She regards acting as an art form and harbors mixed feelings about having a public Instagram account. “What I grew up learning was that you’re supposed to be a vessel for a character,” she says. “It’s better if people know less about who you are.”
Now a year out of school, Ella still considers herself a student. On her days off from Feud, she’d show up to set anyway, just to observe her costars: “Watching other actors is just as informative as working with them,” she says. Her favorite memories of the show? Being challenged by director Gus Van Sant (“He’s not the kind—to use the euphemism—to blow smoke up your ass,” she says delicately) and the kindness shown to her by Tom Hollander, who plays Truman Capote. “He came to my dressing room privately—not in front of anybody else. He didn’t want to, I think, embarrass me or make me feel like a newbie,” she says. “He was like, ‘Do you want to run lines? Do you want to talk about the scene? Do you want to talk to each other?’ I think he had been tipped off that I was new, that I was jumping on a moving train. They had been working for a couple months already.” (The costumes also were a highlight: “The Van Cleef of it all!” she gushes, clapping a hand to her chest.)
Asked if she had anything in common with her Feud character (based on the real-life Kate Harrington, the daughter of Capote’s ex-lover who later became the author’s mentee), Ella replies that she too knows how it feels to be both fascinated and intimidated by jet-setter types, despite her Hollywood pedigree. “Truman Capote introduced her to all these really interesting people,” she says. “I related to that kind of curiosity meets fear a little bit. You feel intimidated. You feel like you’re the least interesting person in the room compared to these glamorous New York, Los Angeles people.” It’s a dichotomous, contradictory state—to be “so grateful to be exposed to so many different, interesting types of people but feeling shy,” she says.
I ask her to name the person she’s felt the most shy around. After deliberating for a bit, her eyes flash with a distant memory, and she lets out a laugh: “Maybe Zac Efron.”
For her next role, Ella’s youth will be an asset: In Appropriate, River is a New Agey 22-year-old life coach who goes to rural Arkansas with her fiancé, Franz (Michael Esper), after the death of his father. Within weeks of putting herself on tape for the part, Ella had a callback with Paulson and Esper. When her agent told her she’d landed the role, she burst into tears.
I’d chosen the Carlyle as a meeting place because it’s one of the last remaining haunts of Capote’s Swans: Jackie Kennedy lived there for 10 months after her husband’s assassination in 1963. As it turns out, so did Ella’s father in his 20s: “He has amazing stories about living here and having lunches and dinners with New York’s most interesting folks,” she tells me excitedly, looking around. If she doesn’t quite seem to know it yet, some 60 years later, Ella Beatty has become one of the very same.
