How Colombian actress Sofia Vergara created her Tony Soprano role in miniseries Griselda

LONDON – When Sofia Vergara invited Narcos (2015 to 2017) showrunner Eric Newman to her home in Los Angeles in 2015 to pitch a TV show about Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco, she had done her research.

“I watched the Cocaine Cowboys documentary in 2006, and I was like, ‘Wow, this character has so many layers,’” the 51-year-old actress said of Blanco, the kingpin who was suspected of being involved in more than 200 murders before being shot dead in her home town, Medellin, in 2012 at age 69.

The facts of Blanco’s life – the murders, the kidnappings, the tense backroom meetings with drug bosses – hardly needed embellishment for TV. But what had so hooked Vergara, she said, was the idea that “this innocuous-looking woman was raising four kids while building this insane, brutal empire”.

She knew it would be a tougher sell to convince people that after a little more than half a decade portraying the feisty, fun-loving mother Gloria Delgado-Pritchett on the ABC sitcom Modern Family (2009 to 2020), Vergara was the right person to play the cut-throat Blanco.

“I was like, ‘What are the odds that this guy is going to think that Gloria Pritchett can play this ruthless, crazy character?’” Vergara, who is Colombian, said in a recent phone conversation from London.

But her passion for the material, her biographical overlap with Blanco and her confidence convinced Newman – and soon, Colombian director Andres Baiz, who worked with Newman on Netflix’s Medellin cartel series Narcos – that she could pull it off.

Both were driven, ambitious women who had immigrated to the United States from Colombia and ascended to the top of their industries, Baiz said. Both had grown up in a misogynist culture, and both shared “an unstoppable, fierce quality”, he added.

“She knew so much about this woman,” Baiz said from Bogota in a recent video call, which Newman also joined from Santa Monica, California. “And she felt strongly that there was a part of her story that hadn’t been explored on-screen before.”

Of course, Blanco’s rise and downfall as a boss in the fearsome drug trafficking syndicate founded by Pablo Escobar in 1976 had been dramatised before, most recently in the Lifetime movie Cocaine Godmother (2017), which starred Catherine Zeta-Jones, and in Cocaine Cowboys (2006).

Although HBO announced in 2016 that it was developing a Blanco biopic that would star Jennifer Lopez, the project has yet to come to fruition.

Amid a landscape of South American narco tales that had been made mostly by white producers, Vergara had something different in mind.

She envisioned a story told half in English and half in Spanish, with a majority-Latino cast, that put female characters front and centre. She would executive produce and star, with Baiz directing all six episodes.

“It’s hard for me to find characters because of my accent and because I’m known for comedy,” Vergara said. “So in a selfish way, I was like, ‘Oh, this is perfect for me.’”

Rather than tracing Blanco’s life story, as the other projects had done, Griselda – which is available on Netflix – focuses narrowly on the late 1970s and early 1980s, starting with her arrival in Miami as the newly single mother of three sons.

As she builds her empire, she is trailed by June Hawkins (Juliana Aiden Martinez), one of the first female homicide detectives in Miami, who worked to bring Blanco down.

“Her story offered a mirror to Griselda’s story,” Newman said of Hawkins. “Both were single mothers of Latin descent who found themselves rare women in similarly male-dominated fields.”

Martinez, a Colombian-American actress who was born in Miami, said it was gratifying to be part of a project that centered on the stories of its female characters, including Blanco’s friend and confidant Carla, a sex worker who is played by Colombian pop star Karol G, in her acting debut.

“The world understands the story of Griselda Blanco as something that is fiction, but we as Colombians see that story in a different way,” Karol G said in a recent phone conversation from Los Angeles. “In every family, there is a story about someone who passed away because of Pablo Escobar or Griselda Blanco.”

Much of the Latino cast and creative team personally felt the difficulty of a nuanced depiction of Blanco, who had an outsized role in Colombia’s sprawling drug trade and so had impacted their lives.

Vergara said her older brother Rafael “was part of this business” when he was fatally shot in Bogota in the 1990s, and her younger brother Julio battled drug addiction and was arrested nearly 30 times before being deported from the US to Colombia in 2011.

“That era was horrible,” she said. “What it did to generations – their families, their kids – was really heartbreaking.”

Baiz – who said he saw numerous friends kidnapped after they were inadvertently caught up in the drug trade when he was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in Cali, Colombia – called the task of balancing Blanco’s business acumen with the brutality of the drug trade the show’s “dramatic challenge”.

For Newman, it was important that the series resist the temptation to paint Blanco as a one-note villain.

“I don’t believe in monsters,” he said. “The danger of thinking that monsters spring forth from the womb is that you miss the ones created by their environments or circumstances.”

At the heart of Blanco’s story, Vergara said, was a tale of a mother trying to protect her children, by whatever means possible. The actress has a 32-year-old son, Manolo, from her first marriage at the age of 18 to her high-school sweetheart Joe Gonzalez.

“I’m a mother, I’m an immigrant, I’m a woman,” she said. “If something is happening and I have to kill someone for my son, I don’t think I would think about it, I would just do it.”

Many times she struggled to shake off her character after shooting wrapped for the day.

“Your body doesn’t know that you’re not going through those emotions during the day,” Vergara said, explaining her character’s range of experiences during a day on set.

“I was doing coke, I was killing, they were choking me, I was screaming, I was crying, so when you go home, it’s like, ‘What is happening to me?’”

Baiz said he hopes that, no matter what emotions people feel while watching the series – empowerment, revulsion, horror, all of the above – they will stick with it for all six episodes.

“If you end the show on Episode 2, it’s a very different story that you’re telling,” he said. “We ended much later in her life story so we can see her humanity, but also her amoral and corrupt side.”

Vergara hopes viewers come away not rooting for Griselda, but maybe understanding her.

“I always dreamed of Griselda to be a little bit like Tony Soprano,” she said of the Italian-American mobster protagonist of the crime drama series The Sopranos (1999 to 2007). “He was a very bad guy, but you wanted him to win; you could justify some of his behaviours.” NYTIMES

Griselda is available on Netflix.