Shondaland’s latest series, Inventing Anna, has officially hit Netflix. theGrio‘s Cortney Wills sat down with stars Laverne Cox and Alexis Floyd to talk about the show, how Anna Sorokin‘s story would have been quite different had she been a Black woman, and more.
Inventing Anna is Shonda Rhimes‘ first series created by the TV titan under her Netflix deal, per a Grio report. The series is based on the article “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People” by Jessica Pressler in New York Magazine, which detailed the wild, real-life story of Anna Sorokin, who posed as Anna Delvey, a German heiress with a wealth of $67 million in order to swindle Manhattan’s social set, as ABC reported.
“I have a lot of concerns about that,” Floyd explained when asked about how far Delvey would have gotten away with her scam, if at all, had she been Black. “I think it would have been almost impossible for her to have even knocked on the doors that she got to knock on. The struggle is just a different struggle. The constantly swimming upstream; it takes a lot of endurance.
Even people who are perfectly positioned and poised, that we would be lucky to have in positions of power, we don’t have the privilege of seeing because of the misunderstanding we have about the color of skin.”
Cox, who plays real-life fitness guru Kacy Duke in the series, shares that her character is particularly devastated when she finds out she, too, was conned by Sorokin.
“It’s devastating because I have tried to stay out of this, I have tried to stay above the fray and I ended up in some mess,” Cox, in character, explained. “Being there for Rachel, (Katie Lowes) I ended up in some mess and I ended up played and there’s something so devastating about that.”
Cox got to meet the real Duke. The actress shared that through hearing the real-life betrayals Duke experienced, the feeling her character goes through in that pivotal moment is “not again.”
She continued, “I think most of us, when it’s hysterical, it’s historical. When we’re really destroyed by something, it’s probably because of something that has happened before, that this is bringing up again.”
Inventing Anna is available to stream now on Netflix.
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