When Julia Garner met with Anna Delvey as part of her preparation to play the faux socialite turned convicted fraudster, Delvey wanted, among several things, to hear Garner’s accent.
The two connected after the Emmy winner and Ozark star traveled to the Albion Correctional Facility in Buffalo, New York, to speak with the woman she’s set to portray in Netflix’s upcoming miniseries Inventing Anna. Created and produced by Shonda Rhimes, the show is based on the New York Magazine article “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People,” and will see Garner play the woman who tricked New York’s socialites into believing she was one before being convicted in April 2019 of grand larceny and attempted grand larceny.
Speaking to Town & Country, Garner acknowledged that what Delvey had done was “really bad,” but said that when meeting her, “she’s actually really sweet.”
“She was extremely charming. She’s very gentle. But then her voice gets less soft-spoken when she wants something,” the actress recalled.
Upon the duo speaking, the actress said that among the things Delvey wanted to know was what she planned to do for her accent, with Delvey even begging to hear it. “She’s like, ‘Please, let me hear it,’” said Garner, before parroting Delvey’s German-inflected accent she had been working on with a dialect coach. “It got very meta.”
Part of why the star of Inventing Anna visited Delvey in prison was, she says, because “I wanted to see if she had any remorse about what happened or time to reflect.”
According to the actress, when asked, Delvey replied, “I don’t really have that much time to think,” occupied instead with tailoring classes and lessons in “stupid culinary arts.”
Garner, who was being interviewed at Sadelle’s — the New York restaurant Delvey hosted a birthday party at before skipping out on the bill — says her comments on cooking were something she loved “in a sick way.”
“I kind of love that about her, in a sick way,” Garner told the magazine. “She’s in a full jumpsuit saying, ‘I’m obviously not going to make myself food when I get out of jail.’”
Source: Hollywood
