Anna’s boyfriend Chase seems to have been inspired by a real-life app developer.
Aaron Epstein/Netflix
On “Inventing Anna,” Anna’s boyfriend is named Chase Sikorski, an up-and-comer in the tech world who’s working on an app called Wake that catalogs dreams. Chase is played on the show by Saamer Usmani.
The real-life Sorokin’s boyfriend was never mentioned by name in the New York magazine article, however, and was referred to by Pressler only as “a futurist on the TED-Talks circuit who’d been profiled in The New Yorker.”
Many speculate that Sorokin’s real-life boyfriend (and likely the inspiration for Chase on “Inventing Anna”) was an app developer named Hunter Lee Soik, who did, in fact, give a TED talk in 2013, and was profiled by the New Yorker the same year.
Much like the character Chase, Soik was born in Asia and adopted by a couple in the Midwest, per the New Yorker profile. He also was working on an app that kept track of users’ dreams, called Shadow.