Why the bizarre 'Inventing Anna' accent is good, actually
Inventing Anna seems like a standard ripped-from-the-headlines true crime retelling until Anna Delvey opens her mouth. Then, it becomes a show about a fascinating scammer with an absolutely wild accent — one everyone who's seen the show has noticed.
In real life Delvey is Anna Sorokin, a Russian national who posed as a tony German heiress. Part of the reason she succeeded in bamboozling New York high society is the implacable voice she put on that sounded like a believable blend of private schooling, vague European vowels, and anything else Sorokin could mix in to complete the illusion of mysterious wealth.
Julia Garner's interpretation of Sorokin's accent is best described as big. She's nasal, elongating single vowels into three-syllable diphthongs and liberally coating the whole vibe with vocal fry. The effect is intentional, annoying, and mostly fascinating. It's also a subject of some contention among viewers.
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Chris Neher is an actor and professional voice coach, who teaches at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy and is an Adjunct Professor of Voice and Speech at Marymount Manhattan. In an interview with Mashable, Neher broke down how actors do the work of creating a character's accent and where he thinks Garner made a bold choice, but ultimately the right one for Delvey's voice.
"Playwrights, film screenwriters, when they write a role with an accent, they're generally going to paint with a broader brush than we saw in Inventing Anna," Neher said. "'This is a German character, they have a German accent, a French character, a French accent, a Ghanaian character, a Ghanian accent.' If you listen to actual human beings, the storytelling is not so clear cut, that's where Inventing Anna starts to veer a little bit."
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Julia Garner breaks down her unusual hybrid accent in 'Inventing Anna'
Neher explained the accent-creating process of substitution, which he uses with his own clients: "[For example] a British accent: every time an American would say 'Oh,' I will instruct an actor that that becomes 'Ouh.' "
"Next comes finding really good samples of actual speakers and supplying the actor with as many of them as possible, so they find ones that they can identify with," Neher explained. "They can mimic and get muscle memory of melody, rhythms, even thought patterns, because culturally, you're going to hear different ways of thinking and phrasing things."
Since Sorokin's accent was so unique, Julia Garner only had one person upon which to develop her accent. Neher supposed that the actress had access to more clips of Sorokin's voice than the average person on the internet, which informed her choices beyond what Sorokin's accent sounds like in polished media sound bites.
"If that's the thing that people notice, then that's a good thing in my mind."
Neher described this as Sorokin's idiolect, which is the specific voice used by a specific person. "The definition of that word is your accent," he said. "Everything that could include a regionalism, where you're from. It could include languages you speak, could include any number of cultural societal elements that go into."
When it comes to mimicking and perhaps exaggerating Sorokin's idiolect, Neher thinks Garner did great work: "I think she's largely really consistent. I think she's largely consistent with the melody choices. I mean, she changes from speaker to speaker. But so does everybody.
The Anna Delvey/Sorokin accent in Inventing Anna is anything but subtle. It's meant to be noticeable and to be a crucial part of the story Garner is telling with her character. "If that's the thing that people notice," Neher summed up at the end of the call, "then that's a good thing in my mind. Because it's an interesting and challenging thing, and it makes it memorable.
"If you're pissing people off, you're probably doing something right, he declared," And I bet Netflix isn't annoyed at all."
Alexis Nedd is a senior entertainment reporter at Mashable. A self-named "fanthropologist," she's a fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero nerd with a penchant for pop cultural analysis. Her work has previously appeared in BuzzFeed, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Esquire.
