- "Inventing Anna" casting director Allison Estrin said Anna Sorokin's reaction to the show is "so Anna."
- Estrin told Insider that when Sorokin comments on the show it "adds to the lore" surrounding her.
Casting director Allison Estrin recently told Insider she's not surprised by Anna Sorokin's apparent change of heart about "Inventing Anna" since the Netflix series has been nominated for several Emmys and that the fake heiress' shifting opinion is "so Anna."
The casting director said she'd been following Sorokin (who also goes by the name Anna Delvey) since before she became a member of the team that cast the hit Netflix series based on Jessica Pressler's 2018 story about Sorokin for The Cut.
As Insider's Jacob Shamsian previously reported, Sorokin was charged, in a pair of indictments in 2017 and 2018, with a scheme where she pretended to be a European heiress with a $60 million fortune. She bilked money and services from financial institutions, hotels, and other companies to fuel a lavish lifestyle.
Sorokin wrote an essay for Insider published on February 2 and said she wouldn't watch "Inventing Anna," even though she was reportedly paid $320,000 for her life rights and served as a consultant, according to a piece in the New York Times by Emily Palmer.
She wrote the essay from an ICE detention center, where she's been detained since 2021, but said that even if she were able to "pull some strings" and watch the show, "nothing about seeing a fictionalized version of myself in this criminal-insane-asylum setting sounds appealing to me."
But soon after "Inventing Anna" premiered, Cosmopolitan published a story detailing Sorokin's reaction to some scenes from the show after she and Palmer screened it together.
"I don't think I ordered people around as much. I think I'm more self-aware of the way I come across. Not all the time, but I just don't think I'm so brazen and shameless," Sorokin told Palmer.
And in July, Sorokin praised the actor who portrays her, Julia Garner, on her Emmy nomination. "Exactly no one is surprised ~ congrats on the Emmy nomination Julia," Sorokin wrote in an Instagram caption of a video featuring an interview Garner did with Jimmy Fallon.
Sorokin has had consistently nice things to say about Garner, calling her a "very sweet girl" on Julia Fox's "Forbidden Fruits" podcast and admitting that Garner got her accent "right" because "it's really hard to tell where she would be from" in the New York Times. But her seemingly shifting feelings about "Inventing Anna" are more difficult to keep up with.
This is no surprise to Estrin. "I mean, it all feels so Anna to me," she told Insider. "It all definitely tracks in the most wonderful of ways."
She said Sorokin is known to take "any opportunity to really keep herself in the spotlight there, which is something that I think we all love about her, in all honesty."
"So I love every time she comments about any of it, because it just adds to the lore that is Anna Delvey," Estrin continued.
Estrin, who is known within her field for having a part in casting Asia Kate Dillon as the first non-binary actor playing a non-binary lead role on television on the Showtime series "Billions," said the "Inventing Anna" casting team had a very clear idea of who could play Sorokin from the start.
Her colleague on the project, Linda Lowy, has been a longtime member of series creator Shonda Rhimes' team, beginning with her work on "Grey's Anatomy." Estrin said Lowy had Garner in mind to play Sorokin.
"I think Julia is who captured every bit of it between the strong boss bitch that is Anna Delvey and then also the really deep vulnerability that is why everyone actually ends up really caring about her," Estrin said.
"It really does take an actress like Julia Garner to really inhabit this. It's an extremely, extremely difficult role," she added.