The real-life Anna Sorokin says Julie Garner's accent work in 'Inventing Anna' is like 'when you hear yourself on TV'

• Julia Garner developed a complex accent for Anna Sorokin (AKA Anna Delvey) for Netflix's "Inventing Anna."
• The real-life Anna Sorokin says it's a bizarre experience to listen to it.

The real-life Anna Sorokin has listened to Julia Garner's take on her accent in "Inventing Anna." She's not quite sure what to think.

"I don't think it's off," Sorokin told Insider in an interview this week. "I think she kind of falls in and out of it. Some of it she gets right — but not everything."

Garner plays Sorokin — also known as Anna Delvey — in the new Netflix show. It chronicles how Sorokin scammed New York by pretending to be a European heiress with a $60 million trust fund, fooling friends, socialites, and banks along the way. Ultimately, Sorokin was arrested in 2017 and convicted in 2019 on theft and attempted larceny charges.

Sorokin was born in Russia in 1991 and lived there until she was seven years old. Her family then moved to Germany, where she lived until she was 17. She then spend a few years in different cities in Europe before moving to New York in 2013.

So her real-life accent is tricky to nail down.

"This is a girl who said that she was German, and people believed it, but she actually was born in Russia, so she's not going to have a Russian accent," Garner told IndieWire. "And then she probably learned English in the British way because she's European [and] they don't learn American English."

Sorokin finished her prison sentence for her scam in February of 2021 but was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement a month later for overstaying her visa. She remains in ICE custody in New York's Orange County Jail and can't exactly sit and watch Netflix from her cell.

I played Sorokin a clip from "Inventing Anna" while interviewing her, and she said other people who spoke with her in the past week played excerpts for her as well. Sorokin said watching Garner play her was "weird."

"I was watching myself, what I was saying, but it's nothing like I ever experienced before, having somebody impersonate you so publicly," Sorokin said.

It was hard to evaluate Garner's accent work, Sorokin said, because people don't really know what their own voices sound like while they're speaking.

"I don't feel like I sound like that," Sorokin said of Garner's performance. "It's like when you hear yourself on TV and it's not really the voice you hear in your head when you speak."

Garner, whose voice sounds deeper and more guttural than Anna's, called the accent the most difficult one she's ever done in an interview with Jimmy Fallon.

"First, I had to do like a European, a German accent, right? But it's very subtle, you have a vocal fry at the end of it. And then I had to add a little Russian for certain words," she said, adding: "Then it gets Americanized because you know how Americans sometimes add a little question to the end of everything? 'You know what I mean?' Europeans don't do that."

In "Inventing Anna," Garner's accent also seems to be different between the scenes set in Rikers Island and flashback scenes of Sorokin traipsing through high society in Europe and New York.

"That's supposed to go with my multiple personalities they try to portray" Sorokin jokingly said, referencing her at-times villainous persona.

Garner visited Sorokin in prison at Albion Correctional Facility. While developing her accent, she sometimes mixed it up with the one she used for her role on "Ozark," she told IndieWire. Garner said Sorokin wanted to hear her accent work.

"She was like, 'How are you playing me? What are you doing?' And I was like, "Uhhh.' I started freaking out inside," Garner told Entertainment Tonight.

In an essay for Insider published last week, Sorokin said she had little interest in watching herself onscreen.

"Even if I were to pull some strings and make it happen, nothing about seeing a fictionalized version of myself in this criminal-insane-asylum setting sounds appealing to me," she wrote.

But she does care about how "Inventing Anna" affects her legacy. She told Insider that she quizzed contacts outside of the jail whether they think the Netflix show would make her seem like a terrible person.

Two people, she said, assured her they trusted her so much that they'd hire her to babysit their kids.