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Louise Thomas
Editor
Sofía Vergara has opened up about how the murder of her brother helped inform her portrayal of notorious drug lord Griselda Blanco in the Netflix miniseries Griselda.
The 52-year-old Modern Family star – who leads the six-episode drama based on the real-life story of Colombian drug trafficker Blanco – lost her older brother Rafael in 1996 after he was murdered by the Colombian cartel in a botched kidnapping attempt.
Speaking 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 years later, in 2006, when she 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.
While she said she found Blanco’s story unlikely – “this Colombian woman with four kids being one of the most ruthless narco traffic people in history” – she says she knew she had to portray her.
Finally, in 2015, after watching the first episode of Narcos, Vergara connected with the showrunner Ed Newman to help conceptualize Griselda.
“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 explained to Variety. “Once you get into that, you realize how fated it all is.”
Despite her brother’s murder, when it came to creating her character of Blanco, Vergara said she wanted to portray her sympathetically, make her “the bad guy that you feel bad you’re rooting for.”
Before long, though, 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.”
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Following Griselda’s debut on Netflix in February, it became the highest-rated TV show or movie Vergara has ever appeared in, earning a Rotten Tomatoes score of 88 percent. It currently sits at 87 percent at the time of writing, which puts it on par with her 2014 culinary drama Chef.
“It’s been a pleasure and a torture at the same time to be part of this project,” she said during a previous appearance on Good Morning America.
Griselda is available to stream on Netflix.
