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Where is Anna Delvey from? According to the new drama series, based on a The Cut article about the fake heiress who tricked New York's banks and party people, it depends who you ask. In the Netflix adaptation, Julia Garner's Delvey sports a nowhere accent which jumps between Moscow and Munich as she tries to deflect attention from her real origins.
Anna Delvey, real name Sorokin, is a Russian-born German citizen who briefly moved to London in 2011 before returning to Germany. Two years later she headed to New York to attend fashion week, but liking what she saw, decided to stay. It was in this epicentre of extreme wealth and inflated egos – where the drive to hustle can excuse almost any act – that Delvey began to see how much she could take.
Garner has called Delvey's voice “the hardest accent I’ll ever do”, likely because she's an American playing someone who is trying to hide they are Russian, demonstrating they are a little bit German, while also alluding to their assimilation in America.
By episode two we see her confusing intonation called into question, as a fellow passenger on the yacht she's hopped onto announces "ваше здоровье!" (cheers in Russian), and Delvey looks bemused. "Sorry I thought I caught a little Russki in your accent?" he asks. For Sorokin – as we later find out her passport reads – her accent is another aspect of her performance, a way of covering her tracks from her start in life in a suburb outside Moscow, the daughter of a truck driver and a convenience shop owner.
Garner's accent is a little all over the place, perhaps intentionally, but it's hard to believe anyone wouldn't hear Russian immediately, given she often strays into an Eastern European drone that sounds more like a voice Sacha Baron Cohen might put on than the monied movers and shakers of Moscow. It's an accent which strays into the caricatures of Eastern Europe, and as such it feels more like someone trying to reveal their origins than hide them.
What is interesting is the real Anna Delvey's accent, whereby she more easily shed her native accent and adopted a generic European tone of affluence. After all, the real language that Delvey spoke was money: Alaïa clothing, sojourns to Morocco, vintage bottles of Dom Pérignon to keep the staff at the hotel she was swindling sweet, and in being fluent in the calling cards of the mega wealthy, she was able to fool everyone that she was no outsider.
