The Ozark star discusses her third Emmy win and how she crafts her own characters through fashion.
There are certain fashion collections that just make so much sense with certain stars. For Julia Garner, it’s perhaps Alessandro Michele’s poetic Cosmogonie collection for Gucci. Earlier this month, the Ozark star won her third Emmy for Best Supporting Actess while wearing an embellished velvet gown from the resort 2023 collection. Less than two weeks later, she’d touch down in Milan to attend Michele’s stellar spring 2023 show in another velvet look—this time a dramatic wide-legged jumpsuit. There were edgy, skin-baring elements to both ensembles, with Garner’s Emmys gown featuring a diamond-shaped cutout that revealed her midriff. Meanwhile, her front-row outfit boasted wide shoulder straps that left just enough to the imagination.
On-screen and off, Garner is a fashion chameleon and often likes to disappear into a character when approaching her style for special events. For this occasion, the velvet jumpsuit afforded the 28-year-old the opportunity to reference 1920s Hollywood, a time and place she often returns to in her dressing. Working with her stylist Elizabeth Saltzman, Garner accessorized the look with a multi-strand choker necklace of glass pearls, as it was seen on the runway. Gelled-down hair and strong brows were the finishing touches to turn the actress into what she has dubbed “an old Hollywood tomboy.”
Here, Garner chats with W more about the inspiration behind the ensemble, her recent Emmys win, and how she curates her Instagram mood boards.
What was the inspiration behind your look for the Gucci spring 2023 show?
My brilliant stylist and friend, Elizabeth Saltzman and I had so much fun with this look. We love having a story behind every look. When I first tried on the suit, it felt very feminine and masculine at the same time, almost something you would see in a Helmut Newton photograph. For hair and makeup we were going for a silent film era, Louise Brooks vibe mixed with ’90s Linda Evangelista. I had my other friend and hair guru, Bobby Eliot, do my hair and the wonderful Emily Cheung do makeup.
Do you ever approach your outfits as a sort of character creation like you do in your acting? What character were you embodying for the Gucci show?
I always approach my looks for fashion events as some kind of a character. The character for the look yesterday was kind of like an old Hollywood tomboy.
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The star of hit series ‘Inventing Anna’ reveals details of meeting the now-famous grifter in prison in our March cover story: “It was very intimidating”.
You know her as a money launderer on Ozark, and her next role—that of real-life SoHo grifter Anna Delvey, sees Julia Garner embody a chaotic and intense life. But the 28-year-old actor tells marie claire her life is rather ordinary in comparison.
“My career is not normal, but my life is pretty normal. I live with my husband [Mark Foster, of the band Foster the People] and my dog [a bulldog named Biz].”
In a cover story for the March issue of marie claire Australia, Garner reveals details of meeting the now famous grifter Anna Delvey (real name Anna Sorokin).
During their meeting at the medium-security women’s prison, Anna bluntly asked Garner to show her how she would portray her. “How are you going to play me?” Anna said in her hybrid accent. “Can you do me right now?”
There was a beat of silence, before Garner parroted Anna’s question back to her. “So, how are you going to play me?” replied Garner, uncannily mirroring her accent. Anna burst into laughter.
“It was very intimidating, but when I just repeated what she was saying, she thought it was so funny,” says Garner. “I told Anna that it was my goal for people to see her as a person instead of a caricature. They don’t have to agree with what she did, but they should be open and willing to understand why she did it. People make mistakes and Anna is a person.”
The so-called SoHo grifter, who swindled New York’s elite out of hundreds of thousands of dollars between 2013 and 2017 pretending to be a German heiress, is a gifted linguist who speaks seven languages. Under her monotone German infliction is a hint of her Russian homeland, mixed with notes of her school-taught British English and a light touch of American learnt from watching reruns of Gossip Girl.
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High fashion, high society and a conwoman who tricked them all: the story of Anna Delvey gripped the world. Now, a new TV show is set to tell the tale of the ‘fake heiress’. Laura Pullman meets its star
Julia Garner hasn’t got to where she is as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actresses by half-heartedly getting into character. Her portrayal of the money launderer Ruth Langmore in Ozark, the drug cartels and hillbillies Netflix series, shows she’s someone who dives in deep. However, transforming into Anna Delvey, the real-life con artist who swindled friends, bankers and hoteliers out of $275,000 (£200,000), pushed her to the brink.
“I kept on having this feeling like I was going to get caught all the time,” she recalls of the period filming Inventing Anna, the hugely anticipated Netflix adaptation of Delvey’s crime spree. “My anxiety was through the roof. I didn’t know why at that moment, but it was really because it was the character.”
Garner’s musician husband, Mark Foster, was alarmed by her anxiety-ridden dreaming. “I’m a sleep-talker and I woke him up apparently. I was saying [Garner adopts Delvey’s accent], ‘I don’t want that bag, I want this one,’ and then I kept saying, ‘I didn’t take it.’ ”
Let’s rewind on the fake heiress. This is the outrageous tale of how Delvey — now 31 but then in her mid-twenties — cast herself among Manhattan’s glitterati as a German trustafarian awaiting her $67 million inheritance. She had a killer wardrobe, killer connections and — for the influencer crowd — a lifestyle to die for, bouncing between countries, superyachts and five-star hotels. In 2017, as she dished out $100 tips and got $400 eyelash extensions, everyone from celebrity hoteliers (André Balazs, owner of Chiltern Firehouse, for example) to Wall Street suits were pulled into her orbit as she plotted to open a $40 million private members’ club, the Anna Delvey Foundation, in the heart of Manhattan.
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In Inventing Anna, Julia Garner plays a con who scammed her way into life among the Manhattan elite. Offscreen, the actress has figured out a way to make it without having to fake it at all.
A funny thing happened at the Albion Correctional Facility. When Julia Garner traveled to the prison outside Buffalo, New York, where Anna Delvey was being held, the actress discovered someone different from what she expected. “She’s actually really sweet,” the 28-year-old Garner says sheepishly of Delvey (née Sorokin), the socialite swindler who Garner plays in the Netflix series Inventing Anna. Garner allows that what Delvey did—bilk banks and friends alike out of hundreds of thousands of dollars—was “really bad,” but that when she met Delvey in prison, “she was extremely charming. She’s very gentle. But then her voice gets less soft-spoken when she wants something.”
What did Delvey want? For one thing, to hear the accent Garner had prepared to play her. “She’s like, ‘Please, let me hear it,’ ” says Garner, who began parroting whatever Delvey said in the German-inflected accent she had honed with her dialect coach. (Delvey was born in Russia, grew up in Germany, learned British English, then mimicked American English by watching shows like Gossip Girl.) “It got very meta.”
Delvey is a millennial Becky Sharp gone bad, a faux heiress who charmed and then scammed the downtown elite while posing as an insouciant Eloise of Soho’s hippest hotels and restaurants. She was made infamous by a May 2018 New York magazine article by Jessica Pressler, which quickly ignited an adaptation arms race, with Shonda Rhimes and Lena Dunham both rushing to produce versions of the viral fable. Rhimes’s will come first, her 10-episode series premiering on Netflix this month. “It’s a classic New York story: the outsider who comes to the city looking to make it,” Pressler says. “Plus, there’s the digital piece of it. Everyone is reinventing themselves online. That tipped it from being a classic grifter story.” Of course, there’s a long tradition of charlatans both fictional (Tom Sawyer, Tom Ripley) and real who have been catnip to the public. Showtime has a new Talented Mr. Ripley in the works, and in March Hulu will air The Dropout, a series based on the Silicon Valley scam perpetuated by Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, proving the fascination is alive and well.
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