Sofia Vergara has explained how she drew from the murder of her brother to play notorious drug lord Griselda Blanco in the Netflix miniseries Griselda.
The Modern Family star – who leads the six-episode drama based on the real-life story of the Colombian drug trafficker – lost her older brother Rafael in 1996 after he was murdered by the Colombian cartel in a botched kidnapping attempt.
In a new interview with Variety, Vergara described the impact her brother’s death had on her family, saying it “destroyed my mom. It changed our lives completely. We didn’t know what was happening, why he had been killed.”
It wasn’t until 2006, though, when the actress watched the documentary Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami, that she learned about Blanco and her years of running a cocaine cartel in Miami in the 1980s.
Vergara said she found Blanco’s story unlikely – “this Colombian woman with four kids being one of the most ruthless narco traffic people in history” – but she knew she had to portray her.
In 2015, after watching the first episode of Narcos, Vergara connected with showrunner Ed Newman to help bring Griselda to people’s screens.
“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,’” Newman told Variety. “Once you get into that, you realize how fated it all is.”
On her portrayal of Blanco, Vergara said she wanted to play her sympathetically and make her “the bad guy that you feel bad you’re rooting for.”
However, before long, she said: “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.”
At the time of the series’ release, Griselda became the highest-rated TV show or movie Vergara has ever appeared in, earning a Rotten Tomatoes score of 88 per cent. Currently, the show sits at 87 per cent on the review aggregator site, placing it on par with her 2014 film Chef.
During a previous appearance on Good Morning America, she said: “It’s been a pleasure and a torture at the same time to be part of this project.”
In a three-star review of Griselda, NME wrote: “There’s enough fun to be had in watching Blanco outfox her male counterparts, their egos imploding in satisfying style, to distract from the general lack of new ideas. And a pleasing soundtrack stuffed with disco anthems from Boney M and Donna Summer does a good job of putting you back in that familiarly vibrant world. Griselda clearly knows its audience, and they’ll hoover it up like a line of gak.”
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