'Fake heiress' Anna Sorokin asked to hear Julia Garner's version of her accent when the 'Inventing Anna' star visited her in prison
- Julia Garner says Anna Sorokin (aka Anna Delvey) wanted to hear her accent when Garner visited her in prison.
- The "Ozark" star plays the infamous "Soho scammer" in a new Netflix series premiering in February.
Julia Garner revealed in a new interview that Anna Sorokin wanted to hear her accent for the new series "Inventing Anna" when Garner visited her in prison.
The "Ozark" star is playing Sorokin — the infamous "Soho scammer" who goes by the name Anna Delvey and was the subject of a wildly-popular New York Magazine profile by journalist Jessica Pressler in 2018 — in the show, created by Shonda Rhimes. Garner told Town & Country that she visited Sorokin at the Albion Correctional Facility in Buffalo, New York to prepare for the role.
"She's actually really sweet," Garner said of Sorokin. And while the actress believes that Sorokin's past behavior was "really bad" (Sorokin was convicted of grand larceny, attempted grand larceny, and theft of services in 2019), she also called the Russian-born Sorokin "extremely charming."
"She's very gentle. But then her voice gets less soft-spoken when she wants something," Garner said.
According to Garner, Sorokin even wanted to hear the accent the actress had developed to portray her in Rhimes' Netflix show.
"She's like, 'Please, let me hear it.' It got very meta," the actress revealed. Garner ended up repeating whatever Sorokin said in the accent she'd been working on with her dialect coach.
Born in Russia, Sorokin came to New York in 2013, and quickly established herself as a member of the upper class. She hosted lavish dinners at expensive restaurants and lived in high-end hotels, but it was later revealed that she had little money to her name. Sorokin, then going by Anna Delvey, was ultimately held responsible for defrauding friends and financial institutions of thousands of dollars, and was released from prison in 2021 after spending nearly four years behind bars.
"Inventing Anna," starring Garner, Anna Chlumsky, Katie Lowes, and Laverne Cox, premieres February 11 on Netflix. You can watch the trailer below.