“I don’t look like her at all,” Julia Garner laughs over Zoom. “Like, at all.”
Garner, the Ozark actor who stars as the charismatic fake German heiress Anna Delvey in Shondaland’s Inventing Anna series, isn’t joking. She really doesn’t look, sound or behave like the Russian-born, German-bred NYC socialite. But she completely transforms into Delvey on-screen — largely because she learned to nail the accent (more on that here). But that’s only a fraction of her metamorphosis: Garner also adopted Delvey’s fashion, her mannerisms, her essence. How do you become a legitimate businessperson or con artist (or both) on-screen? Designer clothing and handbags are certainly a part of it. But their persona — the inexplicable magnetism that attracts and hoodwinks people — that’s the key element. So you study them.
Garner went to the Albion Correctional Facility near Buffalo, New York, where Delvey was serving her sentence, in order to begin her transformation. “I knew I wasn’t going to get answers from Anna, but I wanted to meet her. Anybody can get information, but what you can't get is somebody's energy, somebody's aura,” Garner explains. “I wanted to see her spirit, in a way, and I really wanted to take that and put it in the show... And it makes a lot of sense why she accomplished the things that she did. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.”
She found herself developing a soft spot for Delvey — or, at the very least, an understanding of her allure and intellect — no doubt the defining puzzle piece in her transformation into Delvey. “She’s extremely bubbly. She’s extremely likable. She’s extremely smart. But she also has a darkness about her, very much so. She can go from light to dark really quick. And all of those things that are her pros also make the cons so scary. That makes it so much more dramatic. It gives it the dimensions,” she says, leaning in for a joke. “I mean, Shonda Rhimes is making a television show about her. Of course, there has to be something likable about her.”
The moments Garner most looks like Delvey are when she’s in her iconic Celine glasses, but it goes beyond the fashion. She moves like Delvey, adjusting her frames like a nervous tic. She wears them low on her nose so the rim obscures the top of her eyes — forcing her to look down upon whomever she’s talking to — and making it difficult for them to maintain direct eye contact with her. “As soon as she gets uncomfortable, she adjusts her glasses. Or when she wants to hide and she doesn't want people to really read her, but she's having a confrontation, she's going to put on her sunglasses. If she's not outside and she's not putting on her sunglasses, she's going to adjust her glasses,” Garner explains Delvey’s movement with the precision of an expert choreographer. “I noticed that she did that in interviews Shonda [Rhimes] sent me before we started filming. And then when I actually got to meet her, I was like, ‘Oh, she does this all the time, and she fiddles with her hair a lot, too.’” She adds, “When people fiddle with things, it's a form of not wanting to be present in that moment because they're uncomfortable. It's not so much that they're not listening. They just don't really want to deal with what they're dealing with, so they'd rather focus on something else. People are so unaware [when they do] it, including myself.”
It’s not just the glasses, either — Garner became a Delvey communication expert, perfectly parroting her laugh. I point out that Delvey has a tendency to chuckle loudly at her own jokes. “That was one of the first things that I saw when I met her in person,” Garner says. “She asked me, ‘How are you playing me? What are you doing with me, with my character?’ which is very intimidating.” So Garner began to mirror Delvey’s actions. “She was like, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ and she laughed. ‘Oh my god, that's so funny.’ Then I laughed. ‘Oh my god, that's so funny.’ It was really meta.” In retelling the anecdote, Garner slips into Delvey’s accent with the ease and enthusiasm of an athlete.
It’s no easy task — becoming someone you look nothing like. But it’s not impossible. “One of my favorite things is, at the very beginning of the show, you see her photo cover being printed out. And I remember saying to somebody, ‘We can't use the photo of Anna. You guys understand that,’ ” show creator Shonda Rhimes tells Tudum. “And they're like, ‘That's not Anna. That's Julia.’ I'm like, ‘It's so well done.’ They did a really good job of recreating the looks beautifully.”
They, of course, refers to Garner’s costumers, makeup artists and hairstylists — but also Garner herself, whose performance shifts as the Anna character grows and changes throughout the series. The faux heiress undergoes physical transformations, like dyeing her blonde to red — which Garner had to mimic and make look believable. “She didn’t want these corporate men to treat her like a dumb blonde, and I think they did, which is not okay,” Garner says of Delvey’s motivation. “I'm not saying what Anna Delvey did is great. It's not great. I personally would not do it. That being said, those men, they weren't even listening to her unless her hair was a certain color and she had glasses on, which is so vain and superficial.”
As for her choice to dye her hair herself using box dye, Garner laughs, “Not only is she great with language and finances, but she also can color hair.”
If Garner identified Delvey’s motivations in something as seemingly trivial as coloring her hair, the question becomes: Did she — or would anyone — have to believe Delvey’s lies in order to play a convincing Delvey? The answer is even more complicated. “I think that, yes, to a certain degree she did believe her own lies. She was trying to justify herself. ‘I'm doing this because the outcome is going to be this.’ Everything had an intention in a way and reasoning,” she says. “Like, I think Anna did have feelings for [her boyfriend] Chase, but I also think that, if Anna doesn't get her way, she doesn't have a problem cutting him off.” The ends justify the means — and Delvey could be merciless, which, ironically or appropriately, is good business acumen.
“People are very complex. I don’t agree with how Anna handled things, but I also have an attachment to her because I was playing her for almost two years. I understand Anna’s worst fears,” she adds. “Anna’s fear of being rejected and fear of failure. That’s something everybody is going to identify with if they watch the show — they’re afraid to fail, to be rejected.” On social media and in our daily lives.
Regardless of your personal feelings about Anna Delvey — what you’ve read online, what you’ve heard from friends, what you’ve taken away from Inventing Anna — one thing is certain: Garner melts into her role, a total transformation that only worked because she understands Delvey’s behavior, appearance and fear. That’s no con.
