If Julia Garner’s accent in Inventing Anna sounds unusual to you — you’re not alone.
In the upcoming Shondaland Netflix series, the Ozark alum stars as the titular Anna Delvey, a charismatic entrepreneur or con artist (depending on who you ask) who convinces many of New York’s power players that she was a German heiress worthy of their financial support... to the tune of millions of dollars. Delvey’s accent — a hodgepodge of Russian, German and American inflections — is as complicated and muddled as her past.
“People are like, ‘This accent is crazy. Is this what she sounds like?’ They can't believe it,” Garner tells Tudum. “But at the same time, I want everybody to just Google how she sounds. I wouldn't allow myself to just go on screen and do a half accent. I’m a perfectionist.”
Garner says nailing Delvey's accent is the key to nailing the character. And she was never going to take on the role without mastering the contours of Delvey’s tonality.
“It's definitely the hardest accent I've ever had to do,” Garner explains, weaving in and out of Delvey’s voice with virtuosic ease. “People have been asking me about the accent, and I can't give a one-sentence thing. It's a hybrid.”
So, instead, she offers an abridged dive into Delvey’s history, pointing out that the real person her character is based on was born in Russia, grew up in Germany and moved to New York City to change her identity. “She is very gifted in languages and dialects that she convinced people that she was from Germany. First, I had to learn a German accent. German is very much like a vocal fry at the end of everything. Then I had to incorporate Russian. Russian, anything that’s an ‘oool’ sound comes out very subtly,” Garner explains, accentuating some consonants and softening others. “Then she learns English. People in Europe learn English in the British way. And then she comes to America, and the musicality is not European. So she speaks like an American, and, in America, people end every sentence with a question mark? ‘That’s what she picked up here, really? What about you? Are you happy?’” As she gives examples, suddenly it’s Delvey talking, not Garner.
Garner’s Delvey accent is the result of intense study, pointing out differences that would go unnoticed by even the keenest observers. Take the shift between Delvey’s pre-incarceration voice and her time in jail, for example. “Her accent was actually a little thicker. I think when she was in an American prison, it Americanized it, in a way. Wherever she is, she picks up how everybody's talking,” Garner remarks. “The accent was so important with the character development because this is a woman who's trying to be something that she's not, and it's even coming down to how she's speaking.”
Naturally, that meant only learning the accent from one person and one person only — Delvey — who Garner met at the Albion Correctional Facility in Buffalo, New York. “The only person that was influencing me was Anna Delvey. She didn't sound properly German. It's not like a proper German accent. It's much more monotone, it's much flatter. She didn't speak like that,” she says. “But she also doesn't sound like Russian either.” In preparation, show creator Shonda Rhimes sent Garner hours of footage of interviews with Anna in jail and in Morocco. “I was obsessed. I would listen all day [to] how she would speak.”
That meant learning how to do Delvey’s accent, acting and acting in her accent. “It is fun to scream [in Anna’s accent, too]. I will never forget the day where I'm crying, like, ‘You leave me here all on my own!’ The funny thing is, I didn't even know that it was going to come out like that [in the accent]. I was just acting out the scene and I was very serious and emotional,” she says of Delvey’s more stirring moments. “When people have their walls down and they're emotional or they're tired or they're drunk, their real colors come out. I tried to sound a little more Russian in those scenes because she was emotional.” In the rare instances that Delvey becomes less composed, her truest voice — the one of her homeland — naturally emerges.
“I don’t think I was ready for that accent. I don’t think anybody is ready for that accent,” Rhimes says of Anna Delvey’s voice. “It’s very specific, and very real, and very Anna. I think you get sucked in really easily. There was no way we could do the show without incorporating it because it also lent itself to the idea that you had no idea where she was from. It lent to her mystique. It went to why people were willing to buy her story. This German heiress thing wouldn’t have flown, I think, without that accent.” And Garner was the perfect person to embody the voice. “She was great. She worked really hard at it and really went for it, which I thought was really wonderful,” Rhimes says of her lead. “She committed. She really committed.”
Garner’s costars recognize the work the actor had to put in to master the intricacies of Delvey’s multinational accent, too.
“Everyone in my family has an accent but me,” says Arian Moayed, who plays Delvey’s lawyer Todd Spodek. “I have Iranian cousins that grew up in Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee, and their accent is as wild as you might imagine it to be — there is Tennessee drawl and Persian umph. And so, I see [in Delvey’s accent] someone that's lived in a bunch of places.”
“I hear the American side of her wanting to Americanize an accent that's Russian, that grew up in Germany,” Moayed explains. “I can see that the wheels are turning in her brain. She has to think about how to say the next word. I think in Anna Delvey's actual life, every moment, she's thinking about it. And our Julia Garner, I don't even know how she did that.”
“It's like a smoothie of Russian, German, New York and a woman who has memorized Sex and the City to study,” adds Alexis Floyd, who plays Delvey’s BFF Neff Davis.
Arguably, most impressive of all is that Garner was filming Ozark, the cartel drama in which she speaks with a deep Southern accent as the spirited Ruth Langmore, at the same time as Inventing Anna..
“It was really hard. I'm not going to lie,” she admits, stone-faced. “I was doing a Southern accent one day and an Anna Delvey accent [the next]. The tongue movement was different. It's not even that I had a different accent — my tongue movement had to change.”
I joke that Garner could become a linguistics professor, with all the dialect work she’s taken on in the last few years. “Oh my god, no,” she laughs. “I'm terrible with language. I'm just good at mimicking people. That's why I'm an actor. I can recite other people's words.” Clearly, it’s more than that — she can do it in their voice, too.
Inventing Anna premieres on Netflix on Friday, Feb. 11, 2022.
Check out the video below to learn more about how Garner crafted Delvey’s accent:
