As the show unfolds, it becomes apparent that Inventing Anna isn’t just about Sorokin, but that her and Kent’s stories are seemingly more intertwined than we realise. Inventing Anna cuts between the events that led up to Sorokin (Julia Garner) being caught and scenes focused on journalist Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), who is working at a fictional version of New York magazine-one of the publications whose coverage helped put Sorokin on the map-and scheming to convince her editor to let her cover the trial.
Her carefully crafted narrative began to come undone when she convinced art collector Michael Xufu Huang to pay her way to the 2015 Venice Biennale, and when she promised to take friends on an all-expenses-paid trip to Morocco (which one of them ultimately paid for). She was prone to racking up huge bills at fancy hotels where she often lived for weeks or months at a time, hosting lavish nights out bankrolled with faulty financial information and making countless promises to pay people back. Over the span of five years, Sorokin grifted numerous people by claiming to be a German heiress with an inheritance of upwards of $60m. Julia Garner as Anna Sorokin in Inventing Anna Photo by Nicole Rivelli, © Netflix And, in typical Rhimes fashion, Inventing Anna plays up the drama while eliding key details along the way. One of the show’s biggest missteps is its failure to unpack the white privilege that Delvey no doubt benefited from as she duped and deceived her way through the art world. The fictionalised account of Delvey's cons, told over nine episodes in the Shonda Rhimes-produced series, offers an exaggerated version of events while also trying to paint the story’s anti-hero as some kind of feminist martyr. That headline-grabbing saga is now the subject of a Netflix miniseries, Inventing Anna, which was released earlier this month. But few scandals have caught the mainstream's attention quite like that of Anna Sorokin, who under the alias Anna Delvey managed to infiltrate the art world’s upper echelons and con many influential figures between 20.
From the parade of forgeries that came to light in the aftermath of the Knoedler gallery’s collapse, to gallerist Mary Boone going to prison for tax fraud in 2018 and, more recently, Inigo Philbrook swindling buyers out of more than $20m before going on the lam and finally being apprehended on a remote Pacific island, there have been many cases of individuals taking advantage of the art world’s opaque rules and codes. Below, you can see a number of the characters in Inventing Anna, compared to the actor portraying them -and where else you may know that actor from before.The art world has long been vulnerable to deception, and the last decade has been filled with instances of fraud and scandal. Even if Inventing Anna ends up losing you a bit with its questionable character motivations, occasionally strange framing of events, and #Girlboss-ification of its main character, many of the performances are good enough to keep you pressing play on the next episode until the very end.Īnd as you can see when looking side-by-side, the show's casting, wardrobe, and make-up teams all did a bang-up job, because these characters really do wind up looking like their real-life counterparts.
Arian Moayed, best known as Stewy from HBO's Succession, is similarly charismatic and great as Todd Spodek, Anna's lawyer, even if he doesn't entirely look like the real guy. Ozark star Julia Garner doesn't normally look like Sorokin, but she really transforms into the fake heiress for the series-once you get used to that accent, it's all smooth sailing. And while the show makes some choices narratively and tonally that are a little bit.off, one thing it generally does very well is cast good actors in good roles.
Netflix's Inventing Anna tells a version of the Anna Delvey/Anna Sorokin Soho Grifter story in the form of a limited series.