Anna Delvey’s trip to Morocco was so extravagant even the Inventing Anna characters can’t help but have FOMO.
Viewers get their first glimpse into fictional Anna’s (Julia Garner) doomed (but gorgeous) vacation to the Mediterranean through the eyes of protagonist Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky) and lawyer Todd Spodek (Arian Moayed) at the beginning of the sixth episode, “Friends in Low Places.”
The promise of Anna’s trip to La Mamounia, an almost painfully expensive resort, is so tantalizing, Vivian and Todd click on the video, despite the fact that they’re sitting — with their less-than-enthused spouses — at a chic New York restaurant for dinner.
The subsequent episode-long flashback of Anna’s misadvised flight to Morocco is one of the highlights of Inventing Anna — and the result of months of work from the miniseries’ team. It’s a project that led the cast and crew in the exact footsteps of the real Anna Delvey.
Inventing Anna filmed “Friends in Low Places” at the real La Mamounia in the exact riad that Delvey and co rented in 2017. Production quickly realized its home of New York would never be able to serve as a dupe for the lavish locale, and a small team scouted the resort — and other parts of Marrakesh — starting in the fall of 2018; filming of the episode began in February 2019. Delvey’s riad was, naturally, the largest one on the property, production designer Henry Dunn confirms to Tudum. “Shooting in the actual rooms — it was haunted, in a way, with her,” Dunn says over the phone while driving to Montauk for another project. “It really was a seductive kind of richness. You could almost understand what was driving Anna to want all of these things.”
The staff also remembered Anna. Since Inventing Anna went to La Mamounia less than two years after its subject’s catastrophic stay, which led to an entire Vanity Fair first-person exposé, many employees still remembered her now-infamous antics. “We were talking to managers who had dealt with her not paying the bills,” Dunn recalls. “They were like, ‘Oh yeah. She stayed here — they left a mess.’ ” The experience reminded Dunn how “fresh” the tales of Delvey’s exploits still are.
While Inventing Anna did shoot all of its resort drama at La Mamounia, a few swaps had to be made to accommodate production. A spa scene was shot at a reflecting pool, Dunn says, and in an effort to ground the setting, the hotel’s restaurant — which is traditionally an Italian eatery — was dressed to look more traditionally Moroccan.
Another central “Friends in Low Places” location, however, couldn’t receive such a straightforward real-life-to-screen adaptation. The most harrowing sections of the episode unfold at the Majorelle Garden, Yves Saint Laurent’s former Marrakesh mansion and the obsession of mark Rachel DeLoache Williams (Katie Lowes). The characters’ dreamy visit to Majorelle quickly becomes a nightmare when Anna refuses to pay for a $2,000 tour. The real location is teeming with expensive art pieces befitting its storied place in style lore.
“As a rule, I really don’t like shooting in places that have priceless antiques,” Dunn laughs. So, set decorator Henriette Vittadini — who joined the team specifically for its Moroccan adventure — tracked down a nearby villa designed by the same architect behind La Majorelle. That grand home is where Inventing Anna set up shop.
“We were able to kind of cram the frames with enough stuff that people watching it would really get a sense of the astounding richness of Morocco,” Dunn says. “We definitely amplified everything that we saw and altered it.” For example, the Majorelle Garden is famous for its lapis blue walls. The space used for filming didn’t have those same walls and “they were not going to let us paint them blue,” Dunn points out. To re-create the majesty of Saint Laurent’s original Majorelle vision, the production team built wall-sized frames, wrapped them in canvas, treated the material to look like stone and painted them seawater blue. While Dunn jokes that the walls “flapped in the breeze” if you looked at them the wrong way, he concludes “it was a wonderful illusion to bring that color that so tells the story of where you are.”
The production team also filled spaces with flowers and fruit to add to the decadent fantasy of “Friends in Low Places.” Certain frames are absolutely packed with bowls and bowls of oranges. “That’s what there was, and so we thought, ‘Get more, put more in, and you’ll really feel the lushness of the place,’ ” Dunn says. “We had all of these flowers dripping down from the trellises as you walk into the riad. All of that was added by us to complete this look.”
Although we can all now visually drown in Inventing Anna’s ocean walls and citrus displays, Dunn recognizes the series could have had a much more difficult time pulling off its Moroccan magic. “Logistically the luckiest break was that the world shut down one week after we came back from Morocco,” he reveals. Creating something as epic as the episode’s bustling market scene alone would have been nearly impossible in a pandemic (and face mask–necessary) world — as would “bringing a whole lot” of Inventing Anna’s stateside crew, as production did. A local company filled out the set with any necessary art designers or assistants. “I'm sure we would’ve figured something out, but it was great to have the Morocco portion finished before everything,” he says.
Now, almost two years later, Dunn can simply ruminate on a keepsake of this time: a photo, naturally — this is an Anna Delvey story. “We were looking for a specific carpet at this place that Anna had visited. There’s this funny photograph of me in the exact same pose as Anna, looking back at the camera like Anna, but not like Anna, with the exact same carpet,” he recalls. “It was sort of uncanny. Like I said, it felt haunted.”
