A Makeunder Fit for a Drug Lord

Paint, prosthetics and a yellowing of her pearly whites turned Sofía Vergara into an infamous Columbia queenpin of Netflix’s ‘Griselda.’

In Netflix’s Griselda, Sofía Vergara transforms into notorious Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco. Makeup artist Todd McIntosh, working with the show’s prosthetics constructor, Stephen Bettles, used a prosthetic nose, eyebrow covers and fake teeth for Vergara’s look, which he completed with the help of paint and makeup.

Vergara’s noticeably full eyebrows needed to be thinned and tweezed with a higher arch for that ’70s look. However, since Vergara wasn’t willing to have that done to her actual eyebrows, eyebrow covers, which are always “problematic,” says McIntosh, were used. Vergara’s nose was also transformed into a nose that “had more of a tip” and was “widened a bit in the middle.”
“If you look at Griselda, she was not an attractive lady,” says McIntosh. “I understood from the moment I was part of the show that my job was to make this absolutely gorgeous woman look like a plain, average kind of person in the 1970s.”