HEIRESS ON THE LOOSE
Wonderland notebook. With Delvey, Garner became so entrenched in her psyche that she found her nerves getting frayed.“My anxiety was through the roof, and I realized it was because Anna had really bad anxiety.” Garner even started sleep-talking in her Delvey accent.“My husband was like, ‘This has gotten out of control.’ ”
Garner, outfitted in a plissé satin turtleneck pantsuit by Danielle Frankel, married Mark Foster, frontman of Foster the People, in New York at City Hall in December 2019 while she was filming Inventing Anna. Then, in early March, Garner was filming a scene with 200 extras at a subway stop in Brooklyn when the Covid-19 pandemic shut the production down. What was supposed to be a three-week delay stretched to six months. Not knowing which character she would have to return to first, Garner spent the lockdown in her Lake Hollywood home practicing her Ruth accent one day and Anna the next, calling to her bulldog Biz in her throaty Delvey timbre. The time functioned as a kind of honeymoon for the newlyweds, who hope to go on an actual trip to Vietnam. “It was very unfortunate that it took the world collapsing in order for us to be together,” Garner says, “but it was a really nice time.”
How will she spend her time going forward? “I want to continue playing strong, complex women,” Garner says. “I love switching people’s minds when they’re going back and forth about a character.” There are rumors she’s on the short list to play Madonna in a biopic, but when asked, she demurs: “You know as much as I do.” She’d love to work with directors like Alejandro Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuaron, Lynne Ramsay, and Martin Scorsese— whose Taxi Driver was the first Netflix DVD she ever watched, when she was 11. But in this moment she’s focused on Delvey’s story.
“People don’t necessarily have to agree with what she did, but I want to help people try to understand why she did it,” she says.“I’m curious what Anna’s going to think about me portraying her.” How might Delvey watch the show while in detention? “Oh,” Garner says, “they for sure have Netflix in jail.”