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.”