‘Griselda’ Star Sofia Vergara On The Reality Of Playing Playing Colombia’s Real-Life Cocaine Godmother: “She Hurt Many, Many Lives”

It took nearly 15 years for Sofía Vergara to land Griselda at Netflix, but when it was finally time to step into the notorious Colombian drug lord’s heels, the Modern Family star was filled with doubt. “There were a million things that I was nervous about, mainly my performance,” she says. “This was my first time acting in Spanish, my first time doing drama, and I was nervous if I was going to be able to convince people that it wasn’t just Gloria Pritchett with a plastic nose.” To Vergara’s delight, the reception has been nothing but effusive. “It’s a risk to do something like this, because you never know,” she says. “To realize people actually love it, it’s a gift.”

SOFIA VERGARA: No, you’d be surprised. My whole life I’ve done things that I’m totally sure I’m not qualified to do, but I don’t like losing opportunities. When I see an opportunity, I’m like, “You know what? I’m going to try it.” I don’t think my job is like a brain surgeon’s, where you’re risking somebody else’s life. The worst that could happen is that you don’t make the money you thought you were going to make, or people are not going to like it. I knew that I knew that character so well, because of the way I lived in Colombia during the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, when narcotraffic was booming. That’s the thing that really made me feel like, “I think I got it.”

DEADLINE: When you set out to make this series, what was it you wanted to say about Griselda Blanco?

VERGARA: As a woman, she fascinated me, because I knew these characters from Colombia. They were household names: Pablo Escobar, the Rodríguez Orejuela [brothers], who are the biggest narco guys in the world. But I never thought that there would be a woman who would be able to rise to the level of these guys. There were women that were laundering money for them or being mules, but never a big, big boss like her. It was very tricky [playing her], though, because I would find myself sometimes rooting for her, thinking, “Wow, it’s amazing that a woman was able to do that,” and I had to check myself out of it, like, “Listen, at the end of the day, this woman was a f*cking serial killer, a sociopath, and she hurt many, many lives.”