Inside ‘Inventing Anna’: Julia Garner Performed Delvey’s Accent to Her, and Anna Chlumsky Learned How Easy It Is to Scam
variety.comAngelique Jackson When a story about a faux-heiress called “Anna Delvey” first appeared in New York Magazine in May 2018, actor Julia Garner was among the voracious readers who pored over journalist Jessica Pressler’s account of how Anna Sorokin, a twentysomething Russian-born German woman, had scammed her way into the top branches of New York business and society by pretending to have a $60 million fortune.“I had the same reaction that the whole world had,” Garner recalls, telling Variety she read the piece, titled “Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It,” the week it published. “Then two months later, when I heard that it was going to be a series, I was not surprised about it at all.
It’s an amazing story.” But what did surprise the actor was that she landed the part in “Inventing Anna,” the Shonda Rhimes-created Netflix limited series. “I knew that I could play her, but I didn’t know that Hollywood would be able to see that,” she says.Fortunately, Rhimes and the Shondaland producers felt Garner’s talent fit perfectly into their vision for the series, even if she looked a little different than Sorokin.
To transform into “Anna Delvey,” Garner changed her hair, donned fake teeth, padded her bra and carefully crafted a German — by way of Russia — Americanized accent.
To further inform her performance, Garner visited Sorokin in prison, where she performed the “Anna Delvey” accent at Sorokin’s request.
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