(Photo by Nicole Rivelli, courtesy Netflix)
“Inventing Anna,” the new hit series on Netflix, has viewers obsessed with the real-life saga of Anna Sorokin, a con artist who duped the glitterati of New York City and tried to swindle millions from big-league banks during the 2010s.
Sorokin, a Russian native who refashioned herself as a German heiress named Anna Delvey, is the focus of a nine-part series from shondaland, the TV production company founded by writer and producer Shonda Rimes. It’s a tale of ambition and privilege, guile and guts, haves and have-nots, adapted from a 2018 New York magazine article by Jessica Pressler.
“Inventing Anna” combines fact with fiction in entertaining ways, warning viewers with a disclaimer that’s cleverly integrated into the scenery at the start of each episode. (“This whole story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up.”)
The series claimed the No. 1 spot Feb. 17 on the Netflix Top 10 list for TV shows in the United States, indicating its popularity with viewers.
“Inventing Anna” also has generated lots of interest in the gutsy, lawless protagonist (played by Julia Garner of “Ozark” fame) and the people in her orbit. One of these was Kacy Duke, a personal trainer and life coach who became entangled in Sorokin’s web.
Laverne Cox, cast as Duke in the series, has been called a scene-stealer for her empathetic, grounded portrayal of the character.
In an interview for the shondaland website, Cox talked about her preparation for the role, which included meetings, conversations and training sessions with the real-life Kacy Duke.
“Shonda and I kind of speculated about some of (Duke’s) motivations … but I needed to meet her to get and feel her,” Cox said. “In most of her public-facing things, like on YouTube, she’s motivational, she’s inspirational, she’s a little coquettish and sexy. And I wanted to kind of get underneath all of that to see if there was some darkness. What is the struggle? What is the human being behind this person who has been a celebrity trainer for 30 years for people like Denzel Washington and Julianne Moore? I wanted to get to the heart of who she is as much as I could.”
Duke, for her part, has offered applause for Cox’s portrayal, telling “Entertainment Tonight” the actress “did a great job (and) she really got my humanity and she got the grace.”
Kudos are nothing new for Cox, an LBGTQ+ advocate who’s best known for her work in the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black.” She earned four Emmy nods, 2014-2020, for her portrayal of Sophia Burset, a transgender hairdresser and inmate at a New York prison.
In 2015, Cox won a Daytime Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Special Class Special as executive producer of “Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word.” She is the first openly transgender woman to win the award, the Emmys website says.
Cox, who was born in Mobile and attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, continues to forge a career as an actress and producer.
Cox’s TV work includes roles in ABC’s “Doubt,” HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Netflix’s “Dear White People,” Fox’s “The Mindy Project,” a 2016 TV remake of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and more. In 2018, she was the host of “Glam Masters,” a reality series on Lifetime.
Cox, a veteran of reality TV, earned public attention in 2008 when she competed on the VH1 series “I Want to Work for Diddy.” She also produced and starred in 2010’s “TRANSform Me,” giving makeovers to women across the country with two transgender pals.
Cox also hosted a podcast, “The Laverne Cox Show,” produced by Rhimes’ Shondaland Audio and iHeart Media.
One of her next projects, a comedy series called “Clean Slate,” has been in development at IMDb TV. In the half-hour series, Cox plays a trans woman who returns to her Alabama hometown after 17 years and reunites with her estranged father, Henry (played by George Wallace). He’s the old-school owner of a car wash, and according to a description of the show, “Henry has a lot of soul searching to do when the child he thought was a son returns as the determined, proud, trans woman, Desiree.”
The series comes from Norman Lear’s Act III Productions. Lear is one of the executive producers, along with Cox, Brent Miller and Dan Ewen, according to a report by Variety. Cox wrote the storyline with Wallace and Ewen, the series showrunner.
