Inventing Anna creator Shonda Rhimes explains why parts of Netflix show were ‘intentionally fictionalised’

‘Everything is true until it’s not in Anna’s world,’ she said

Inventing Anna creator Shonda Rhimes has explained why some moments featured in the show aren’t true.

Ever since the drama was released on Netflix last month, viewers have been wondering where exactly the fact stops and the fiction begins.

Rhimes, who developed the series about con artist Anna Delvey, has shed some light on why the series tweaked the truth in a new interview.

Julia Garner plays Delvey, real name Anna Sorokin, in the show. It tells the true story of the twenty-something socialite, who successfully posed as a rich German heiress under an alias in New York City.

Sorokin successfully scammed her friends and big banks out of hundreds of thousands of dollars before she was convicted of fraud and grand larceny.

Rhimes told Inventing Anna: The Official Podcast that the show features “some things... that are true that we can’t admit are true”, but that “there are some things in there that are made up”, which she said “encompasses the essence of who Anna is”.

“Everything is true until it’s not in Anna’s world,” she said.

Rhimes added that having a researcher on the show was “extraordinarily important” so that the writers had a basis of knowledge to work from when fleshing out the storyline.

Julia Garner as Anna Delvey in ‘Inventing Anna’ (Netflix)

“We were telling a story that was based on fact, so needed a document to build an extensive timeline of events, to dig into little things that we weren’t even sure wee going to matter,” Rhimes said.

“For this particular show, having someone who has read every transcript of the trial, who was paying close attention to every detail in Anna’s life, was really, really important, because we wanted to know what we were thinking. We wanted to know what we were making up; we didn’t want to be making things up just for the sake of it.”

Rhimes added: “We wanted to intentionally be fictionalising moments versus just accidentally be fictionalising them.”

Inventing Anna is available to stream on Netflix now. Find out which parts are fact and faction here.