Christina Ricci Will Play Lizzie Borden For Lifetime [Report]

Christina Ricci will play Lizzie Borden in a new Lifetime movie that will be directed by Burn Notice director Nick Gomez and produced by Sony Pictures Television. That’s the report published Friday by Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva, who said that she had been given exclusive information about the Ricci casting.

A competing HBO project on Lizzie Borden is also underway, a miniseries that will star Big Love’s Chloe Sevigny.

Is it just me, or does Christina Ricci seem like an unusual choice for the part of Lizzie Borden?

Borden was a Fall River, Massachusetts woman who was tried and acquitted for the 1892 axe murder of her faather and stepmother. No one else was ever arrested for the crime, and it officially remains unsolved.

However, many people do believe that she got away with murder. The whole mess was immortalized in the famous skip-rope rhyme:

“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.”

The violent murder continues to fascinate mystery buffs even in the 21st century, and for much the same reason that the O.J. Simpson case continues to fascinate. A lot of people think the jury just plain got it wrong.

Unlike Simpson, in that less mobile age, Borden didn’t relocate to Florida to escape outraged locals after she was set free. Instead, she lived out her life in the same small town despite being widely ostracized. So her life is certainly a heck of a story.

But leaving aside the question of Borden’s guilt or innocence, I just don’t see tiny Christina Ricci as being right for the part. I’ve always imagined Borden to be a big, husky Yankee woman who could at least believably be accused of hacking two people to death. I think Ricci would be lucky to axe murder two toy poodles.

But, hey, maybe that’s just me.

What do you think of Christina Ricci as Lizzie Borden?

[Christini Ricci photo by s_bukley / Shutterstock.com]