Julia Garner. Stephen Lovekin/Shutterstock
No thank you. Playing the faux German heiress Anna Delvey on Inventing Anna has made star Julia Garner realize that fame is often more trouble than it’s worth.
“I think it’s gross, to be honest,” the Emmy winner, 28, told the UK’s The Times in an interview on Sunday, February 13. “To have [fame and] be an unhealthy higher power, I think that’s dangerous … so much so that look what happened with Anna.”
She continued: “People are obsessed with celebrities and fame. I mean it’s like they pick you up and then they put you down and then they pick you up.”
The Ozark star is also uncomfortable with all of the attention she’s received after starring in the highly anticipated Netflix series. “I never thought I had anything interesting to say. It’s weird that people are asking you all these questions,” she said.
The real Anna Delvey — whose real name is Anna Sorokin — allegedly posed as a rich German heiress in order to secure loans to open a lavish art club in the mid-2010s. Over the course of 10 months, the Russian native swindled her friends and businesses around New York City out of $275,000. Delvey served two years in prison after being convicted on four counts of theft services, three counts of grand larceny and one count of attempted grand larceny in April 2019.
Julia Garner as Anna Delvey. NICOLE RIVELLI/NETFLIX
The con artist was released in February 2021 but was arrested again just six weeks later, with law enforcement claiming that her post-prison Instagram posts showed a lack of remorse for her crimes. Delvey is currently being held in custody by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and faces deportation.
Despite her crimes, Garner has a great deal of sympathy for the former socialite. “The thing women my age can relate to [with] Anna is that everybody understands what it’s like being in your twenties and trying to make something of yourself,” the Americans alum said. “Anna just wanted to be validated. Maybe she wasn’t validated as a child.”
After meeting Anna in prison, Garner also understands why Delvey was able to charm her way into high society. “Understandably Anna has her guard up, that’s just who she is as a person. I knew I wasn’t going to get a whole lot of information from her past, but I wanted to capture her spirit and energy,” the New York native recalled. “She was surprisingly bubbly and very funny. I think that’s the thing that captured so much attention with these people and they bought it.”
Garner will likely not know how well she captured the art aficionado’s energy onscreen, as Delvey has stated that she is not interested in watching Inventing Anna.
“While the world is pondering Julia Garner‘s take on my accent in Inventing Anna … the real me sits in a cell in Orange County Jail in upstate New York, in quarantine isolation,” she wrote in an essay for Insider on February 2. “Even if I were to pull some strings and make [a viewing] happen, nothing about seeing a fictionalized version of myself in this criminal-insane-asylum setting sounds appealing to me.”
Inventing Anna is available to stream on Netflix.
