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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