What looks like effortless physical comedy on screen usually comes with a messy reality behind the scenes. For Monster: The Lizzie Borden star Rebecca Hall, filming the show’s most repulsive domestic sequence meant enduring an entire day drenched head-to-toe in tomato soup.
Rebecca Hall Reveals the Truth Behind That Unhinged Soup Scene
Discussing her role as stepmother Abby Borden, Hall addressed the logistics behind one of the show’s most viscerally gross-out moments: an explosive bout of illness featuring simultaneous projectile vomiting and digestive distress. While audiences experience the scene as a rapid burst of dark comedy, executing the stunt required a long, grueling day on set submerged in makeshift practical fluids.
“It’s pretty dark,” Hall joked about the scene in an interview with Collider. “It’s pretty just like… just a lot of tomato soup.”
Beyond the visual shock value, Hall explained that the physical sensation of the set was something the cameras could never capture. The actor admitted she had significant dread going into production because she knew how long television takes to assemble practical effects.
“It was unbelievable,” Hall recalled. “I was so worried about it ’cause I just had visions of… you know, for what makes maybe four minutes of screen time takes easily a day to shoot. That’s a day of sitting around tomato soup that smells in a specific way. Like, you’re not getting that when you watch it on your screen. Like, we were—we were in it. Literally.”
The sheer commitment to practical, messy horror fits right into the heightened reality creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan established for the anthology, ensuring that Abby Borden’s bitter domestic life looked and smelled just as grotesque behind the camera as it did on screen.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden is currently streaming on Netflix.
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