How tragedy connected Sofia Vergara to Netflix role
Best known for her long-running stint on the popular sitcom Modern Family, any concerns that Sofia Vergara didn’t have the dramatic chops to play notorious Columbian drug lord Griselda Blanco were summarily dismissed when the Netflix series premiered in January 2024.
The star and producer won the best notices of her entire career for a transformative performance, and even though there were criticisms directed towards the lack of resemblance between the actor and her onscreen counterpart, a phenomenal performance is always the easiest way to silence the doubters.
That’s exactly what Vergara did, effortlessly disappearing into the role and projecting the air of authority, menace, and cold-blooded callousness that made Blanco one of the most feared figures in the drug-running underworld for the better part of three decades.
Griselda debuted as the number one most-watched series on Netflix in no less than 90 countries around the world and spent two weeks as the streaming service’s top-viewed episodic title, with Vergara earning a Primetime Emmy nomination for ‘Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie’.
As well as being born and raised in Columbia before moving to the United States, Vergara used personal tragedy as another way to get into the right mindset of embodying Blanco, with her older brother Rafael being killed by a local cartel in 1998 following an attempted kidnapping gone wrong.
In an interview with Variety, Vergara explained not only how that incident affected her family, but impacted her role as Blanco almost 30 years later. “It destroyed my family,” she said. “It destroyed my mom. It changed our lives completely. We didn’t know what was happening, why he had been killed.”
After becoming aware of Blanco’s story, Vergara couldn’t wrap her head around “this Colombian woman with four kids being one of the most ruthless narco traffic people in history,” but she sought to make the character as sympathetic as possible, more of “the bad guy that you feel bad you’re rooting for” as opposed to an out-and-out villain.
Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. “I had to check myself,” she admitted. “Like, ‘Sofia, this woman killed hundreds of people and kids’. It was very difficult not to romanticise her or to make it seem like she was the hero. She’d become a psychopath.”
Vergara saw that there were “some real similarities between Griselda and Sofia, and not just their place of birth but their path,” which made it easier for her to get into the mindset required for what’s comfortably career-best work.