'Inventing Anna' casting director says the whole room 'stopped' during Julia Garner's first table read

• Insider spoke to an "Inventing Anna" casting director about Julia Garner's transformation into Anna Sorokin.
• Allison Estrin said she "got chills" the first time she heard Garner speak as Sorokin.

Julia Garner stopped time when she spoke her first words as Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, during the first "Inventing Anna" table read, casting director Allison Estrin recently told Insider.

"The room stopped," Estrin said, remembering the moment that she and many others first heard Garner speak as Sorokin. "You could hear a pin drop the first time she spoke because it was so dead on and so exciting to hear."

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, and bilked money and services from financial institutions, hotels, and other companies to fuel a lavish lifestyle.

Estrin worked with series creator Shonda Rhimes and her team to cast "Inventing Anna," which was based on a 2018 article about Sorokin that journalist Jessica Pressler wrote for The Cut.

Estrin told Insider that Rhimes' longtime casting director Linda Lowy, who worked on "Inventing Anna" as well as the creator's earlier shows "Grey's Anatomy," "Scandal," and "How to Get Away With Murder," was the person responsible for putting Garner in her Emmy-nominated role. Because of that, Estrin was able to experience the magic of Garner's transformation for the first time with most of the cast and crew during the first table read.

"She spoke and I got chills," Estrin said. She recalled that Garner was probably reading the first scene where viewers see her acting on screen when it happened, so she was narrating part of her story from Rikers, the jail where the real Sorokin served her sentence before her January 2021 release and subsequent re-arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for overstaying her visa.

"Everyone really just stopped and you could see the smile spread across everyone, because that was when we knew that it would work," Estrin continued. "And everyone's then craning to see her, to see Julia, because all of a sudden, she just became Anna Delvey. It was an extremely exciting moment."

Part of the reason why Garner's transformation was so fascinating to watch for fans of the show and the cast alike involves Sorokin's unique accent, which is vaguely Eastern European and hard to place, likely because, as Estrin told Insider, it's "made up."

Estrin said that the "Inventing Anna" casting team knew that anyone they cast was going to have to work with a dialect coach to perfect Sorokin's particular speaking voice and vocabulary. "There were so many specific things that I would call an 'Anna-ism' that only she would say," the casting director explained.

Though Estrin recalled Garner was an early favorite of Lowy's to get the role of Sorokin, she said that actors of many different European backgrounds read for the part. Other actors (who Estrin preferred not to name) gave "wonderful auditions," she said.

"But really, 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," she said.

Garner told Netflix's publication Tudum in February ahead of the show's release that Sorokin's was "the hardest accent I've ever had to do." And the actor is no stranger to to mastering challenging accents — to play Ruth Langmore in Netflix's "Ozark," her breakout role, she had to adopt a very strong Southern accent.

"People have been asking me about the accent, and I can't give a one-sentence thing. It's a hybrid," Garner said of her accent as Sorokin. She explained that Sorokin was born in Russia and grew up in Germany. Then, she learned English in Europe which has a different tone to it than it would if she had learned English in America.

But when Sorokin did get to the US, she picked up certain aspects of an American accent.

The "Ozark" star even explained to Tudum that Sorokin's voice while at Rikers is different than the accent she had before she went to prison. "Her accent was actually a little thicker. I think when she was in an American prison, it Americanized it, in a way," she said. "Wherever she is, she picks up how everybody's talking."

Sorokin told the New York Times that Garner got her accent "right in a way" because "it's really hard to tell" where Netflix's version of her would be from.