These are rich weeks for weird accents. In Netflix’s new drama Inventing Anna, Julia Garner does a wonderful turn as Anna Delvey, born Anna Sorokin, the “fake heiress” who conned gullible New Yorkers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The best thing about her performance is the accent, a kind of heightened Mitteleuropean rollercoaster of a voice where every stress and sound comes as a mild surprise. Sorokin is a Russian-born German, but to listen to her English she could have come from anywhere east of Paris and north of Milan. You can’t take your ears off it. Not only does Garner’s accent not sound much like the real Delvey, whose voice is available in interviews, but it doesn’t sound much like anyone you’ve ever met, in Europe or anywhere else.
It’s hard to say whether this is a deliberate ploy on Garner’s part. If you were inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, you could say that the exaggerated weirdness of the accent parallels the strangeness of the person. Delvey was an outsider who extracted money from people simply by seeming like the kind of woman to whom money was due. But the question that the viewer keeps asking, as with Netflix’s other recent contribution to scam history, The Tinder Swindler, is why? Garner’s startling vowels add to the sense of bafflement. How could you trust anyone who sounds like that?
