Inventing Anna protagonist Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky) is already on a deadline when she takes on the story of a lifetime. Months into her first pregnancy, she’s nervously counting down the weeks until her due date, which looms like a final period in a chapter of her life. And with her professional reputation in tatters after a career-derailing incident, Vivian doesn’t quite feel ready to take the next step.
In one striking scene in the series premiere, Vivian and her husband Jack (Anders Holm) are at an ultrasound appointment and find out they’re having a girl. While Jack reacts with genuine elation, Vivian starts having a panic attack. “She’s real,” she sobs when he asks her what’s wrong. “I thought I was going to have it fixed — my reputation. Before there is a tiny person I am required to keep alive and pay attention to. I want her; I do. It’s just… I thought I would have my career saved. I thought it would be repaired, breathing, on its feet before who I get to be changes.”
It’s in this fraught context that Vivian comes across the sensational story of Anna Delvey (Julia Garner), a 26-year-old woman claiming to be a German heiress, who has been charged with allegedly defrauding Manhattan’s elite out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Suddenly, Vivian sees a chance to reclaim the career she feels she was meant to have. She embarks on an investigation that will take her from Rikers Island to Park Avenue penthouses and even small-town Germany, all in an effort to unravel the mystery of Anna’s true identity.
Vivian is loosely based on Jessica Pressler, the real-life journalist who wrote the New York magazine article that creator and writer Shonda Rhimes used as a blueprint for Inventing Anna. After finding out Pressler was pregnant as she was pursuing the story, Rhimes said she immediately felt that had to be a major part of the show. “I loved the idea of seeing a working woman very powerfully doing her job while growing a baby, and then getting the article out just before she gets her baby out,” Rhimes tells Netflix. It’s also what drew Chlumsky, herself a mother of two, to the role. The actor, whose breakout performance in 1991’s My Girl helped shape what girlhood looks like on-screen, was eager to take on what she calls Inventing Anna’s “grown-up” approach to pregnancy and motherhood.
Here, Chlumsky explains how she drew from her own experience to play this character and why Vivian’s desire to be taken seriously in the workplace isn’t that different from Anna’s — minus the Celine glasses, of course.
Shonda Rhimes has said that one of the details that drew her to the story initially was that Jessica Pressler wrote this story just as she was about to give birth. What do you think that adds to the overall story? Motherhood changes everything. For people who go through any huge life change, everything is defined as before and after. So, for any woman embarking on something very large in her career and on this whole new definition to her role in life, it feels like an immense pressure. I speak sort of from my own experience too, because the week after my first daughter was born was also the same exact week that I was nominated for my first award. Sometimes it can feel like life is sort of taking the reins and you're just along for the ride. It's a very human thing. Not everybody's a journalist, not everybody's an actor, not everybody's in the exact same place, but we can all kind of relate to life running away and us trying to stay on that train.
It’s still rare to see pregnant women on-screen in a narrative that doesn’t center around the pregnancy. Was that on your mind as you were playing Vivian? It’s one of the major things that drew me to this project in the first place. I thought it was such a grown-up, current and overdue way to examine all of the facets of a female's life. When you're going through pregnancy, it does take up a lot of room. And it should, because it doesn't last forever. However, at the same exact time, you still are doing your job. You still have to spend some of your day doing other things. It’s constant calibration. I was really grateful that Shonda took it on.
As the show progresses, Vivian’s colleagues start to see her less as a journalist and more as just a pregnant woman, a label that she’s constantly pushing back against. What did you think about the way the show approaches Vivian’s impending motherhood? The first pregnancy is different than subsequent ones. When you speak to somebody who's been through it already, they're like, “Enjoy it now; take the time,” and you're like, “No, but you have no idea. I'm kicking and screaming because these people aren’t going to take me seriously. I don't want to be the problem.”
During my first pregnancy, I kept saying, “I have no idea how I'm going to do this because I've never done it before.” When we're embarking on something so uncertain, we also want to rely on the things that we already know. I already know that I'm good at my job, that I can show up on time and that I can be a team player. So, now I’m going to really be those, because those are the things I know about myself. I don't know anything about all this other stuff.
Vivian’s desire to reclaim her identity as a journalist before moving on to a new chapter in her life is something that a lot of women reckon with. What’s the show’s take on whether women can “have it all”? I think this is one of those shows that is intelligent enough to question its audience on how we define “having it all.” From the outside, I think that we would look at a character like Vivian and absolutely categorize that as having it all. She's got her career, she's got her intelligence, she's got her sense of agency, she's going to have a child, she has a lovely husband. She's got a great apartment — we had a whole backstory for that, like there must have been a really nice, benevolent aunt who left her the co-op.
This is the Instagram situation, though. This is social media. However somebody's identifying someone else from the outside, that's only one way to categorize. On the inside, there’s “Oh yeah, but you have no idea how I can't sleep and I’m horrible to myself when I look in the mirror and I'm terrified everywhere I go.” So, can a person have it all? Sure, but what are we calling “all”? There's no such thing as a free lunch, and you must say goodbye to things in order to gain new things.
A woman’s ambition is so often portrayed as a source of conflict in her marriage, so on some level I kept expecting a big fight between Vivian and Jack, but it never comes. It’s interesting because when you're playing it, you have that potential big fight in there the whole time. But because of the way Shonda wrote it, a lot of the relationships in the show are nuanced. They are ongoing conversations, to quote my therapist. It’s all earned. It was written as two humans trying to figure out how to do this moment in their life together.
You even see that with Kacy, Rachel and Neff. It's always this really fine line that we're all walking together, calibrating our balance and our core strength as we're on this little tightrope. I love that the whole time you're like, “Yeah, this could be a blowout.” Or it could work. And that's kind of what every single day you wake up with somebody else is.
How does Vivian’s quest to be taken seriously in her job compare to Anna’s desire to be seen as a businesswoman? Do you see their stories as complementing each other? I do think that we all can identify with some part of Anna Delvey's experience. It’s such folly to just be like, “It has nothing to do with me.” A lot of us would've done different things — maybe not committed some crimes. But I think Vivian can definitely see a connection with what she's had to fight for and go, “Wow, you too” and “Why don't I have the nerve?” I think there's a little bit of that in all of us: “What amount of nerve can I increase without betraying my own values?” That's the dangerous place that Anna Delvey makes you play in.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
