Playing fake heiress Anna Delvey is daunting for a lot of reasons. It’s a performance within a performance, for one–Delvey (real name: Anna Sorokin) famously conned her way into elite New
York City circles by posing as a wealthy German heiress, and Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix series Inventing Anna explores that artifice in depth. And then there’s that accent.
“This is probably the hardest job I’ve ever done,” Garner admits when she sits down with ELLE.com during a break from filming. She says this not only because Delvey-slash-Sorokin is a complicated character, or because the show’s choppy shooting schedule requires her to give a totally nonlinear performance, but because of that singularly strange, “consistently inconsistent” accent.
“It’s German, but then she grew up in Russia, so you hear a little bit of the Russian inflection alongside the German. But then the musicality of it is more American,” Garner continues, warping her own voice into each new intonation as she speaks. “A lot of times, people coming from Europe to live in America, their accents starts to shift. And Anna especially does that anyway, she kind of embodies whoever she’s hanging out with. She’s struggling a lot with her own identity, so you see her pick up on traits from whoever she’s hanging out with.”
Over the course of two conversations–one on set in March of 2020, one via Zoom almost two years later–Garner discusses her accent process, the show’s depiction of both real and faux friendships, and her experience of meeting the real Anna.
How long did it take you to nail the accent?
Well, they cast me kind of late, so I only had three weeks. It was a lot of pressure, and I had to kind of break it down into stages. First, I had to get a German accent down, before I could start adding other accents. And if you notice, a German accent sounds very choppy, almost like every word has a period at the end of it. Then it was introducing the Russian, with some of the rolling “R” sounds. I’ve done many accents before, and I knew at the outset this was the hardest accent I’m ever going to do in my career. By far. Because her accent is so consistently inconsistent.
You met with Anna while she was in jail. What was that experience like?
It was really surreal. She’s very funny, when you meet her in real life, and so I knew there had to be that comedic aspect to the show. Very funny, very likable, and she wanted to talk, as much as she was able to. But I also still don’t think that she thinks she did anything wrong. I think she just wanted power, and prestige, and success, and she was still thinking like that. It seemed like her perspective was still that she didn’t do anything wrong, that she was just doing everything it took to get to where she should be. I don’t think she sees a difference between being hungry, and being ambitious.
Which is a quality we generally admire in men. It sounds like the show may touch on the fact that Anna’s crimes are pretty comparable to what dudes on Wall Street get away with constantly, right?
For sure, definitely people on Wall Street—I always try to make it clear that it’s not women against men, it’s just about people. There’s a certain type of personality that is like that. I mean, look at politicians, they’re all like that, and you have to be like that in order to get far. I think the difference with Anna is that she did have a good idea, and she was funny and charming and fun to hang out with, and I think that’s why people fell for it. There was something to fall for. But she just couldn’t provide what she said she was going to provide. She was digging herself in a hole, and her response was like “Well, I’ve got the shovel and I’m just gonna keep digging!’”
What was your reaction to Anna’s Insider article, where she discussed Inventing Anna from prison? It seems like she’s not reacting so much to the show as to her situation, which is pretty terrible.
The whole situation is terrible. It’s terrible for Anna, but it’s also terrible to the people that it happened to, the whole situation is traumatic as a whole. And I never had the anticipation that Anna would watch the show or not, I respect whatever decision she’s going to make.
I feel like one of the questions with these scam stories is always, how much did she believe in it? Did Anna 100 percent know it was a scam, or did she believe it herself?
I think Anna had a dream, and I think she believed in her dream, and when you have someone that believes that strongly in something, other people start to believe it too. Even if she knew deep down that it was not real, I think there was a degree that she definitely believed in it. That’s why it’s so believable to other people.
I also think she had a deep, deep fear of failure. She really did not want to fail, and behind the fear of failure is a deep fear of rejection, and behind the fear of rejection is somebody that’s struggling with their identity, because they’re not okay with who they are. And I don’t think Anna was okay with who she was.
“Even if she knew deep down that it was not real, I think there was a degree that she definitely believed in it.”
2022 is a real golden age of scam stories on TV, between this show, The Dropout, WeCrashed, and so on. What do you think it is about this moment that’s producing so many stories like this?
I think there’s a sense that a lot of people are trying to be a version of themselves that is not really them, because of social media and the internet. It’s the version of yourself that you want other people to see, a fake version. You’re not scamming people, but you’re also not really telling the truth. You hear someone be like “I hate that girl so much,” and then literally an hour later, they’ll upload a photo with that person with a caption like: “My best gal pal!” Social media is great in a lot of ways, but a lot of the time people are lying, because they don’t want to face themselves. I think that’s really what the show’s about.
Some of Anna’s relationships on the show do seem genuine, especially with Neff, who‘s played by Alexis Floyd.
That relationship starts out as transactional, obviously, because Neff is working at the hotel, but it ended up becoming a real relationship. Out of all the dynamics on the show, that, to me, is the most genuine relationship. My goal was really just for people to be flip-flopping, with [their feelings] towards Anna. One minute, I want you to be like ‘Oh my God, how could she do that?’ and then the next minute you feel bad for her.
There’s something really lonely about the way Anna uses social media in the show, especially in later episodes. She’s very isolated.
Yeah, and then you kind of understand why she was afraid to get rejected. It’s really interesting because with Anna, everybody’s like “Well, she was transactional and manipulating,” but it was also transactional for the other people in her life. She was paying for everything, she was portraying herself in a certain way, and people were drawn to that.
Obviously what she did was not right, but I think it also shows how blinded people get with money. It’s insane. That thing that happens when someone has money, it changes dynamics. It’s not a natural emotion, you know? It’s not something a baby is born with. And it can warp people.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
