Interview: Todd McIntosh Discusses Transforming Sofia Vergara Into Griselda Blanco

Todd McIntosh has had a long and successful career as a member of the makeup department in some of the most popular TV shows and films to date. He’s done makeup work for the award-winning 2005 film Memoirs of a Geisha and cult shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997), Pushing Daises ( 2007), Torchwood (2011), and so much more.

This year, he was tasked with transforming actress Sofia Vergara into the notorious drug lord Griselda Blanco for the Netflix mini-series Griselda. The show is a fictionalized telling of Griselda’s rise to power as she went from a single mother in Medellín, Colombia, to a formidable drug lord in Miami in the 1970s. It is a career-defining performance by Sofia Vergara who truly became Griselda Blanco, and her makeup, provided by Todd McIntosh, invites the audience to get lost in the performance.

Awards Radar spoke with Todd McIntosh over the phone about turning Sofia into Griselda.

Niki Cruz: How many prosthetics were involved in this process of turning Sofia into Griselda? I can think of the teeth and nose right off the bat.

Todd McIntosh: Yes, there were eyebrow covers, a nose. and an upper and lower set of teeth. I think it was probably in the first week of filming, we found that Sofia was having a lot of trouble enunciating properly with the lower set of teeth in. So we took those out and started painting her teeth on the bottom, and that solved the problem of diction.

NC: I was going to ask about any challenges of nailing down her look, but if your lead can’t talk because of the teeth, that’s going to be a problem!

TM: [Laughs] Yeah, I mean, we had issues all along. There was always something new to deal with every day. That’s part of the process.

For example, prosthetics like these are silicone and sort of translucent, and they’re matched to the actor’s skin. But Sofia wanted to be about four shades darker than she actually is, so I put opaque paint over a translucent product. Suddenly, all the edges and flaws showed up that wouldn’t have shown up if we had just used translucent products against translucent skin. Little things like that had to be worked out.

I needed [the cinematographer] Armando Salas to assist by looking through the camera and adjusting the shadows and the lights and whatever it was to what [he] was seeing.

NC: I also wondered about the nose because it’s so specific and can change the whole concept of your face. How was working with a prosthetic nose and collaborating with Sofia on Griselda’s look?

TM: I would put Sofia at the top of the pyramid of people who helped create the look. It was her passion and her design, and her very critical eye that was looking at the details. For the nose, Sofia felt like we achieved the effect that she was looking for, which was obviously to take away some of her more obvious beauty aspects, like her nose and her beautiful eyebrows, and make her plainer.

My job was never to make her look like the real Griselda Blanca. We were never going for that. We were trying to make her look plainer so that she disappeared into the role, much like how she changed her posture. She doesn’t walk like she normally does. She slumps, and her shoulders are rounded. That’s all Sofia disappearing into the role.

NC: How was it to work out those two very different looks? Because we see Griselda at the height of her being a drug lord, and then we see her much older. How was it to develop that, especially the aging process?

TM: Within the makeup, there are many layers. The first layer is the prosthetics that has to go on. And that gives you the foundation for her facial structure. On top of that goes the beauty makeup. We had a journey in that from her original appearance with the softer lighter brown makeups lighter within the 1970s period.

You asked about technical difficulties. The eyebrow covers sit halfway between the top of the eye contour and the eyebrow, which means they don’t accept powder makeups and regular eyeshadow products in the same way. So the original shape of the eyeshadow was all airbrushed in, so that was set first, and then on top of that surface, we could apply period eyeshadows that work. So her eye makeup builds and she becomes more powerful. As she gets into the drugs and becomes paranoid, all the brown mascara, the brown eyeliner, and all of that turns to black. In episode five, she starts to break down, and then makeup smears.

Then, of course, in the end, we had to do a little bit of aging, but the concept wasn’t to make Sofia look old. The concept was to make this woman who has been through so much look a little older and more haggard, and that’s really what we were going for. It’s very simple makeup. It’s stretch and stipple latex with the neck. We also did some research and found out that the real Griselda did have and wear makeup in prison, so we did leave a little bit of lipstick on.

NC: How do you reinvent yourself as an artist with each project?

TM: I think that comes naturally with the parameters of the project. You’re working with different actors, directors, art designers, and prosthetic houses for every project. So when I stepped in to do the Orville, I had Howard Berger of KNB, and that provided a fresh look. When I did Buffy, it was another prosthetic house, and we worked closely together. In Pushing Daisies, I designed all of the prosthetics and had them built. We farmed it out in that way. So, it’s a fresh job every time you step into new parameters.