The Netflix series Inventing Anna premiered on Netflix on Friday, and Julia Garner’s unique accent confused viewers.
The award-winning actress revealed she mixed up accents as she was filming another Netflix series, Ozark, at the same time.
The limited series has garnered mixed reviews from critics and fans alike.
Garner stars as Anna Delvey, portraying convicted fraudster Anna Sorokin who scammed banks and friends around New York by pretending to be a German heiress, inheriting a massive fortune.
Sorokin was paid $320,000 from Netflix for the rights to her story. However, she paid $199,000 in restitution, $24,000 in state fines, and $75,000 in attorney fees. Sorokin kept about the remaining $2,000, according to Deadline.
Julia Garner admits to mixing up accents between series
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, Garner was shooting the fourth season of Ozark while filming Inventing Anna.
“I kind of was forgetting how I sounded,” Garner confessed to Indiewire, continuing:
“There were certain things that if I was talking it would be a combination of Ruth and Anna.”
Garner plays Ruth Langmore in Ozark – a role in which she has picked up multiple awards.
After claiming that she wouldn’t watch the Shonda Rhimes Netflix series based on her crimes, Anna did weigh in with her verdict on Julia Garner’s accent.
“I don’t think it’s off,” Sorokin told Insider in an interview this week, adding: “I think she kind of falls in and out of it. Some of it she gets right — but not everything.”
Julia Garner says Anna’s accent was the toughest of her career
Garner told IndieWire, that imitating Sorkin’s accent was the hardest of her career as the fraudster has a multi-cultural accent.
“I was like, ‘What is her accent?’ I didn’t even know what her accent was,” Garner said. “It’s a hybrid of different accents. 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.”
Sorokin’s confusing accent reflects her upbringing. She was born in Russia and lived there until she was seven years old. After that, her family relocated to Germany, where she lived until she was 17.
The fraudster then spent a few years around Europe before moving to New York in 2013.
The 31-year-old was released from prison in February 2021; however, she was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in March for overstaying her visa and remains in custody.