Julia Garner

Julia Garner's "socialite" scammer Anna Delvey steals the show in Shonda Rhimes' otherwise uninspired Netflix series.

(And plenty of people did, despite the apparent warning signs: According to Pressler, Garner‘s version of the voice is “exactly” like the real deal.) With a victim-of-the-week episode structure, the series delivers mini-portraits of those Delvey swindled, mostly without digging into their motivations. Personal trainer Kacy (Laverne Cox) is one of a few people in Anna’s orbit who senses something is wrong, and she’s ultimately one of the only ones who doesn’t get hurt. Anna is an entitled monster much of the time. Anna is not a relatable personality, but Garner connects through her character’s idiosyncrasies: She may be conniving, but look closely and there are flashes of doubt and insecurity in her otherwise ice-cold gaze. It doesn’t help that its thinly veiled version of Pressler, frumpy Manhattan magazine reporter Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), is 110% less compelling than the scammer she’s chasing. Anna’s elaborate ruses are intoxicating, commanding attention even as the show’s pacing sags into the rhythms of an old (and predictable) broadcast network drama.

The actress explains how she nailed that bizarre accent, and what she learned from her jailhouse meeting with the real Anna.

It’s really interesting because with Anna, everybody’s like “Well, she was transactional and manipulating,” but it was also transactional for the other people in her life. You hear someone be like “I hate that girl so much,” and then literally an hour later, they’ll upload a photo with that person with a caption like: “My best gal pal!” Social media is great in a lot of ways, but a lot of the time people are lying, because they don’t want to face themselves. Yeah, and then you kind of understand why she was afraid to get rejected. I think there’s a sense that a lot of people are trying to be a version of themselves that is not really them, because of social media and the internet. Even if she knew deep down that it was not real, I think there was a degree that she definitely believed in it. And I don’t think Anna was okay with who she was. It was a lot of pressure, and I had to kind of break it down into stages. I also think she had a deep, deep fear of failure. I think Anna had a dream, and I think she believed in her dream, and when you have someone that believes that strongly in something, other people start to believe it too. I feel like one of the questions with these scam stories is always, how much did she believe in it? But she just couldn’t provide what she said she was going to provide. “It’s German, but then she grew up in Russia, so you hear a little bit of the Russian inflection alongside the German. But then the musicality of it is more American,” Garner continues, warping her own voice into each new intonation as she speaks.