Sofia Vergara’s Brother Was Killed by a Cartel. She Still Found Empathy in ‘Psychopath’ Drug Lord Griselda Blanco
“Why the fuck do you think that Gloria Pritchett is gonna be able to play Griselda Blanco?”
That’s what Sofía Vergara assumed Eric Newman, the showrunner of Netflix’s “Narcos” franchise, would say when she told him she not only wanted to executive produce a series about the murderous Colombian drug lord, but she wanted to star in it.
After all, Vergara had spent 11 years as Gloria, the hilarious, ditzy trophy wife of Ed O’Neill’s Jay Pritchett on “Modern Family.” Gloria had been an important role for Vergara — not only did it put her on the map, but she portrayed the only adult character of color on a show about an affluent white family. She received four Emmy nominations for the part and was a crucial player in the show’s five-year winning streak in the comedy series category. So would audiences be open to her playing a dramatic part? A drug lord? Was she even up to it?
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The answer has been a resounding yes. Released on Jan. 25, “Griselda” spent six consecutive weeks in Netflix’s Top 10. And Vergara has been nominated in the limited series lead actress category, alongside Academy Award winners Jodie Foster and Brie Larson.
It’s been a long, rewarding road for Vergara, whose passion for the “Griselda” story wasn’t merely fueled by a desire to expand her acting portfolio after “Modern Family” ended in 2020. It was more deeply rooted in her personal connection to the material. In 1996, when she was 24, her older brother, Rafael, was murdered by a Colombian cartel in a botched kidnapping attempt.
“It destroyed my family,” she says, sitting in an office in Netflix’s Hollywood headquarters. “It destroyed my mom. It changed our lives completely. We didn’t know what was happening, why he had been killed.”
Vergara was raising a son at the time — five-year-old Manolo — and had just come to Miami from Colombia a year earlier. After her brother’s murder, she moved her mother, sister and younger brother to the States to live with her. “It was hard, because I had to take responsibility for my whole family.”
Ten years after the murder, in 2006, Vergara saw “Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami,” a documentary about Miami drug lords Sal Magluta and Willy Falcon that featured Blanco. Though Blanco’s story seemed improbable to the actress — she couldn’t picture “this Colombian woman with four kids being one of the most ruthless narco traffic people in history” — she felt she had to play her. But it was too dangerous to take on the series while Blanco was still walking the streets of Colombia. So Vergara waited.
Then, in 2012, three weeks before Season 4 of “Modern Family” debuted on ABC, Blanco was murdered outside a butcher shop in Medellín.
Yet, it wasn’t until watching the first episode of “Narcos” in 2015 that Vergara felt she’d found the team that could best tell Blanco’s story. Despite thinking he wouldn’t take her seriously, Vergara invited Newman to her Beverly Hills home to discuss working together on “Griselda.”
“I never doubted her ability to do it,” Newman says. “I was always aware of how difficult comedy is. It’s really hard. And there aren’t a lot of people who can do it as well as she can do it — she makes it look effortless.”
If he was skeptical at all, Newman says, it was about “the degree to which” Vergara wanted to dive into this dark character. “What I needed to know, and what I got in our first meeting, was that she was committed,” he says, adding, “There are some real similarities between Griselda and Sofía, and not just their place of birth but their path: the unlikely rise of a single mother showing up in America going, ‘All right, here I am.’ Once you get into that, you realize how fated it all is.”
Both Vergara and Newman were in. And when they met with Ted Sarandos, Netflix was in too.
That’s when the panic began.
Vergara had never led a show or starred in a drama. She’d never even taken an acting class. Clearly, she says, she needed help.
“I’m like, OK, who is a comedic actress that did good in a drama?” she remembers thinking. “Jennifer Aniston!”
Vergara asked her team to set up a meeting with acting coach Nancy Banks, who has worked with the “Friends” star since 2013. Connecting with Banks was easy, but learning the skills to play Griselda proved to be more of a challenge. First, Vergara had never cried on-screen, and was unsure how to do it.
“Nancy said, ‘If you want to cry, you just have to think of something.’ And I did have a lot of horrible things to think about,” Vergara says.
It turns out Vergara could make herself cry, but the horrible things that set her off remained in her mind after each day of shooting. Vergara struggled to sleep for the first three weeks of filming, and thought something was wrong with her.
“I was anxious. Nancy told me, ‘You’re killing, you’re screaming, crying — everything — during the day. You go home and your body doesn’t know that you weren’t doing those things for real, feeling those things,’” Vergara says. “So I had to start taking a little bit of Xanax at night to calm down. I was not prepared for that. I didn’t know. That’s why actors go crazy! How do they do that for years?”
As a young person, Vergara never dreamed of becoming an actress. At 17, her parents “forced” her to star in a Pepsi commercial, and after that, modeling offers came in. But she’d had a different career in mind: After getting married to her high school sweetheart, Joe Gonzalez, in 1991, she enrolled in dental school. She had Manolo that same year. Three years later, though, her marriage fell apart, and she dropped out of school. To support herself, she moved from the beaches of Colombia to Bogotá, the capital, to pursue an acting career. “I was a single mother; I needed a job,” she says.
In 1995, Vergara was hired as a host of the Univision travel show “Fuera de serie,” which made her famous throughout Latin America. Then she began landing spokesperson jobs. But she needed a lawyer to help her with contracts and had no idea how to get one. So she turned to what she did know how to do: use three-way calling. She offered an intern money to pretend to be her agent on the phone. “I cannot sell myself — how wonderful and hot I am,” she told the intern. “So you’re going tell them how wonderful and hot I am.’”
The ruse worked and gave Vergara the confidence to negotiate future projects, including “Modern Family” and “Griselda.” In fact, she topped the Forbes list of highest-paid actresses eight times. Her “Modern Family” salary, her gig as a judge on “America’s Got Talent” (a job she took in 2020) and her many endorsements added up to $43 million in the sitcom’s final year.
“I’ve never been afraid of doing that,” she says about negotiating her own deals. “The worst that can happen is that they say no to you.”
The day-to-day on “Modern Family” was a breeze for Vergara. She’d wake up at 4:30 a.m. and get into the makeup chair by 6. Sometimes she’d wrap by 9. But the days on “Griselda” were grueling — and she was 52, not 37, the age she was when “Modern Family” premiered.
“Back then, my lines were easy,” she says. “It wasn’t like monologues.” Gloria’s lines had come in quippy, shouty bursts, but on “Griselda,” Vergara had to memorize pages and pages of dialogue. “I’m going through pre-menopause; I can’t remember where my glasses are. And now I have to learn all these monologues?”
Plus, she spent three hours a day in the makeup chair to transform into Blanco: an hour and a half dedicated to prosthetics and facial makeup, and an additional hour and a half spent applying the wig and body makeup.
Vergara, too, was faced with the challenge of hiding her curves to play Blanco, while also keeping a certain sexiness. “She was maybe not a Barbie doll, but the real Griselda Blanco had something — she had some kind of sex appeal that I needed to show,” Vergara says. But Vergara didn’t want her own body to come through. “I didn’t want the bouncing that is natural for Latin women to show. I would have to wrap myself so that my butt wouldn’t jiggle. I had to wear a really bad bra. I had to cover my arms, because I have very skinny arms, and you don’t look threatening when you have this stupid little arm.”
She viewed Griselda as a Tony Soprano-like character, and wanted to craft her as “the bad guy that you feel bad you’re rooting for.” Despite what happened to her brother, Vergara wanted to make the drug lord sympathetic. After a while, though, she had to remind herself who Griselda actually was.
“I had to check myself, like, ‘Sofía, this woman just killed hundreds of people and kids.’ It was very difficult not to romanticize her or to make it seem like she was the hero. She’d become a psychopath.”
During production, Blanco’s only living son, Michael, reached out to the producers and asked to consult to show who he felt his mother was. He was denied. “It’s not a story that I would accept ever at face value, and while I understand it, it’s never really the story we want to tell. It’s always much more complicated,” says Newman, who had similar experiences with the families of Pablo Escobar and Chapo Guzman during the “Narcos” franchise. “The prism through which we see our parents, even in my own case, is really not a reliable one… I would be fascinated to hear his story about his mother, but that’s not the story we’re telling.”
Meanwhile, Vergara also had to learn some new skills from director Andrés Baiz: “I had never smoked in my life. Andy would come to my house the month before we started. We would talk about the script, and he would teach me how to smoke and do cocaine and crack.”
Vergara knows a thing or two about faking it. In the spring of 2009, right before “Modern Family” was picked up, she got a call asking if she was interested in auditioning for “Chicago” on Broadway. Though she had no stage or singing experience, she lied and said she did. Next thing she knew, she was flying to New York from L.A. to audition, confident she wouldn’t get the part. Then, two hours after the audition, she got the call. “My agent’s like, ‘OK, great. You got the part!’” she recalls. “‘What the fuck do you mean I got the part?!’ It was horrific.” She had two weeks to prepare for Mama Morton, a role she played for five weeks.
Since then, Vergara has worked continuously. During her time on “Modern Family,” she also starred in multiple films, including the action-comedy “Hot Pursuit” with Reese Witherspoon, and Garry Marshall’s ensemble rom-com “New Year’s Eve.”
Today, she’s only the second Latina to be nominated for lead acting in a limited series. “I feel the thing that would change the entertainment business for Latinos is to have Latin writers,” she says. “If there were more Latin writers, then they would know how to incorporate us.”
But Vergara isn’t sweating it. She has a mantra that she credits much of her happiness to: “Don’t think too much.” “When you sit too much with your thoughts, that’s when people get depressed and people get paralyzed. I always keep active,” she says. “What the fuck can we do? Nothing. We have to keep living.”
This philosophy is one she seems to be applying to her recent split from actor Joe Manganiello, to whom she was married for seven years. Though Vergara has said publicly that their relationship ended because he wanted children and she didn’t want to be an “older mom,” Manganiello has said that Vergara’s statements are “simply not true.”
“At the end of the day, you never even know if that’s what he said for real,” Vergara says. “I’ve read a lot of things that I’ve said that I’m like, Huh?’ What am I gonna do, call him? I don’t know if he even said that.”
As the interview comes to an end and Vergara is preparing to go, she mentions her newly “bionic” knee. She underwent surgery three months ago, she says, due to “old age and shit.”
Her plain-spokenness is refreshing. It’s no surprise that “Modern Family” co-creator Steven Levitan describes her as “the one everyone wanted to sit next to” at cast dinners.
Newman hopes Vergara’s humor and charm will do the trick when he and Vergara approach Netflix with a pitch for their next show. “It’s about a strong, funny, vulnerable woman in the center of a lot of shit,” Newman says. “I’ll also say that it takes place in Miami.”
For her part, Vergara would like to revisit “Modern Family.” “I’d die to be on that set,” she says. “It’d be so much fun. A TV movie maybe?”
While she thinks it’s too soon to bring back the Pritchett family, she continually needles O’Neill about the possibility. After seeing him in this year’s “Clipped,” the FX miniseries in which he portrays L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling, she told him, “You look fucking old.”
“I always joke with him,” she says, “‘Ed, don’t die. Because if we do the sequel, it will take some time, and you’re the oldest of us. You can’t be dead!’”
