Inventing Anna: Real-life ‘Anna Delvey’ gives verdict on Julia Garner’s accent

‘Some of it she gets right – but not everything,’ convicted scammer said

The real-life Anna Sorokin has admitted that she struggled hearing Julia Garner’s impersonation of her accent in Inventing Anna.

Garner stars in the show as Anna Delvey, a pseudonym used by convicted fraudster Sorokin to scam thousands of dollars from banks and hotels around New York by posting as a German heiress.

The series dropped on Netflix on Friday (11 February), with viewers left confused by Garner’s accent as the Russian-born Anna.

In a two-star review of Inventing Anna, The Independent’s Annabel Nugent called it “a baffling concoction of German, Russian and American that sounds like bad acting”.

However, in a new interview with Insider, Sorokin said that she didn’t feel like the on-screen Anna’s voice was “off”.

“I think she kind of falls in and out of it,” she said. “Some of it she gets right – but not everything.

“I was watching myself, what I was saying, but it’s nothing like I ever experienced before, having somebody impersonate you so publicly.”

Julia Garner as ‘Anna Delvey’ AKA Anna Sorokin (Aaron Epstein/Netflix)

Sorokin said that it was difficult to compare Garner’s accent to her own, as people’s voices sound different in their own heads to how they sound to others.

“I don’t feel like I sound like that,” Sorokin said. “It’s like when you hear yourself on TV and it’s not really the voice you hear in your head when you speak.”

The real-life Sorokin (AFP via Getty Images)

Discussing her accent as Sorokin, Garner told IndieWire: “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.

“And then she probably learned English in the British way because she’s European [and] they don’t learn American English."

Inventing Anna is on Netflix now.