Shonda Rhimes was on the treadmill when she first read the New York magazine article by Jessica Pressler that would inspire Inventing Anna. “It was so visual,” Rhimes tells Tudum ahead of the series’ Feb. 11 release. “I could see the whole thing. I got off the treadmill thinking, ‘This is definitely a show.’”
Pressler’s article, published in May 2018, unpacked the sensational true story of fraudster Anna Delvey, née Sorokin, a woman in her 20s who infiltrated New York’s elite by posing as a German heiress, racking up hundreds of thousands in charges at banks and hotels along the way.
As Rhimes read on, certain scenes stood out as lending themselves to the kind of unmissable appointment television that the legendary showrunner has made her trademark over nearly two decades. “Anna's first entrance into the hotel, where she's handing out the hundred-dollar bills; the scene where [her friend] Neff gets to go to dinner with the person who might have been Macaulay Culkin; Anna stealing the jet; the entire La Mamounia Fest, as I like to call it. There were just these moments that just felt like, ‘Oh, I can see how these are going to play out,’” she recalls.
While Rhimes could envision how certain scenes would play out, weaving together Anna Delvey’s complex story on the small screen presented several challenges. Spanning nine episodes and told through the eyes of journalist Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), a character inspired by Pressler, Inventing Anna follows Vivian’s quest to answer a seemingly simple question: Who the hell is Anna Delvey? That proves harder to answer than expected, however, as everyone who knows Delvey (portrayed by Julia Garner) seems to have a different answer. Is she a grifter? A socialite with piles of old money? A businesswoman? Where did she come from? How did she get here? And why did no one ask these questions in the first place?
As Vivian chases lead after lead, viewers hear from various people in Anna’s inner circle, including fashionista friend Val (James Cusati-Moyer), society philanthropist Nora Radford (Kate Burton), ex-boyfriend Chase Sikorski (Saamer Usmani), trainer Kacy Duke (Laverne Cox), Vanity Fair writer and former friend Rachel Deloache Williams (Katie Lowes), hotel concierge and loyal bestie Neff Davis (Alexis Floyd) and defense attorney Todd Spodek (Arian Moayed), who represents Anna throughout her trial. Only by piecing together their recollections can Vivian begin to put together a story about how Anna managed to trick some of the wealthiest and most well-connected people on the planet.
Still, if you’re looking for definitive answers about Anna Delvey, you won’t find any in Inventing Anna. Even after creating a whole series around her, Rhimes is the first to admit that she still finds her subject to be “unknowable.”
“I’ve been told Anna is a perfect reflection of whoever you need her to be,” she said, stressing that as one of the reasons she has never met Delvey. “I didn't want to be influenced by that reflection at all. I wanted to be able to stay as objective as possible.”
Anna’s mystique is also why Rhimes chose to frame her narrative through Vivian’s pursuit of the truth. “We were never going to get a truthful representation of who Anna was from anybody,” Rhimes said. “We needed the journalist to be able to take us through all these different people telling us about their versions of Anna.”
For Rhimes, putting together the narrative arc of the show required an investigation into the story behind the story. How did all the facts come together? What was the reporting process like? Thankfully, she had a reliable source of her own: Pressler herself, who proved to be an invaluable resource in fleshing out the details of just how she gained access to Anna and her world.
“I can't explain to you, for a writer, how exciting it was to call up Jessica Pressler and say, ‘What's it like to visit Rikers Island?’ and then to get a 20-page email from her with every detail, right down to the woman with the glitter eye shadow. To call her up and say, ‘What's it like reporting the story? What exactly did you do, and how did you do it?’ Or, ‘You were pregnant while you were reporting. What was it like to be nine months pregnant and trying to finish the story?’ Also, ‘Tell me about your first meeting with Anna.’ Hearing all of those little details — and to get a firsthand account of the trial — was incredible.”
In 2017, Anna Sorokin was arrested and indicted on two counts of attempted grand larceny in the first degree, three counts of grand larceny in the second degree, one count of grand larceny in the third degree and one count of misdemeanor theft of service. She was incarcerated at Rikers, where Pressler first met her, and remained there until 2019, when a jury found Sorokin guilty of second-degree grand larceny, theft of services and one count of first-degree attempted grand larceny.
Like everything having to do with Sorokin, the trial was a cultural phenomenon — one that Rhimes was adamant had to be included in the series. But how do you write a script when the outcome is still playing out?
“It was a very interesting process because we weren't just adapting an article,” Rhimes explained. “We started our writers’ room the day the trial began. So we were adapting something that was happening in real time.”
Rhimes sent a writer to the trial to text her updates as they came in. “We were so invested in Anna's life,” she recalls. “I remember I would give these staged readings of Todd's opening statements and Todd's closing statements to the writers’ room.”
Still, the question remained: How was this all going to end on-screen? Different outcomes were considered, and the writers’ room originally conceived a final 10th episode touching on Sorokin’s life as a free woman (not guilty) or in prison (guilty), depending on the verdict. But that all shifted when she was sentenced to 4 to 12 years in state prison and issued fines and forced restitutions of more than $200,000. Suddenly, there was a larger story to tell.
“We all had our feelings about what we thought would happen, so when the charges came down, we all had these very emotional reactions,” Rhimes said, adding, “I felt like while Anna did some things that were definitely morally questionable and were bad, the sentence that she got felt really outsized and large compared to plenty of financial crimes that we've seen happen before.”
Sorokin eventually served two years in the Albion Correctional Facility in upstate New York before her release in February 2021. (Today, she’s in ICE custody as she awaits potential deportation to Germany.) But rather than continuing to look for the answers to an unknowable woman, Rhimes decided to lean into the mystery in the final moments of Inventing Anna. “It felt right to end it with this very ambiguous feeling of her on this bus to nowhere,” she said. “Well, to prison, but to nowhere.”
