How Sofía Vergara Created Her Tony Soprano Role

When Sofía Vergara invited the “Narcos” showrunner Eric Newman to her home in Los Angeles in 2015 to pitch a TV show about the Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco, she’d done her research.

“I watched the ‘Cocaine Cowboys’ documentary in 2006, and I was like, ‘Wow, this character has so many layers,’” Vergara, 51, said of Blanco, the kingpin who was suspected of being involved in more than 200 murders before being shot dead in her hometown, Medellín, in 2012 at age 69.

The facts of Blanco’s life — the murders, the kidnappings, the tense backroom meetings with drug bosses — hardly needed embellishment for TV. But what had so hooked Vergara, she said, was the idea that “this innocuous-looking woman was raising four kids while building this insane, brutal empire.”

She knew it would be a tougher sell to persuade people that after a little over half a decade portraying the feisty, fun-loving mother Gloria Delgado-Pritchett on the ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” Vergara was the right person to play the cutthroat Blanco.

“I was like, ‘What are the odds that this guy is going to think that Gloria Pritchett can play this [expletive] ruthless, crazy character?’” Vergara, who is Colombian, said in a recent phone conversation from London.

But her passion for the material, her biographical overlap with Blanco and her confidence convinced Newman — and soon the Colombian director Andrés Baiz, who worked with Newman on Netflix’s Medellín cartel series “Narcos” — that she could pull it off.

Both, Baiz said, were driven, ambitious women who had immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia and ascended to the top of their industries. Both had grown up in a misogynist culture. Both, Baiz said, shared “an unstoppable, fierce quality.”

“She knew so much about this woman,” Baiz said from Bogotá in a recent video call, which Newman also joined from Santa Monica, Calif. “And she felt strongly that there was a part of her story that hadn’t been explored onscreen before.”

Of course, Blanco’s rise and downfall as a boss in the fearsome drug trafficking syndicate founded by Pablo Escobar in 1976 had been dramatized before, most recently in the Lifetime movie “Cocaine Godmother” (2017), which starred Catherine Zeta-Jones, and in “Cocaine Cowboys” (2006). Although HBO announced in 2016 that it was developing a Blanco biopic that would star Jennifer Lopez, the project has yet to come to fruition.

Amid a landscape of South American narco tales that had been made mostly by white producers, Vergara had something different in mind. She envisioned a story told half in English and half in Spanish, with a majority-Latino cast, that put female characters front and center. Vergara would executive produce and star, with Baiz directing all six episodes. “Griselda” premieres Thursday on Netflix.

“It’s hard for me to find characters because of my accent, and because I’m known for comedy,” Vergara said. “So in a selfish way I was like, ‘Oh, this is perfect for me.’”

Rather than tracing Blanco’s life story, as the other projects had done, “Griselda” focuses narrowly in the late 1970s and early ’80s, starting with her arrival in Miami as the newly single mother of three sons. As she builds her empire, she is trailed by June Hawkins (Juliana Aidén Martinez), one of the first female homicide detectives in Miami, who worked to bring Blanco down.

“Her story offered a mirror to Griselda’s story,” Newman said of Hawkins. “Both were single mothers of Latin descent who found themselves rare women in similarly male-dominated fields.”

Martinez, a Colombian American actress who was born in Miami, said that it was gratifying to be part of a project that centered the stories of its female characters, including Blanco’s friend and confidante Carla, a sex worker who is played by the Colombian pop star Karol G, in her acting debut.

“The world understands the story of Griselda Blanco as something that is fiction, but we as Colombians see that story in a different way,” Karol G said in a recent phone conversation from Los Angeles. “In every family there is a story about someone who passed away because of Pablo Escobar or Griselda Blanco.”

Much of the Latino cast and creative team personally felt the difficulty of a nuanced depiction of Blanco, who had an outsize role in Colombia’s sprawling drug trade and so had impacted their lives. Vergara said her older brother, Rafael, “was part of this business,” when he was fatally shot in Bogotá in the 1990s, and her younger brother, Julio, battled drug addiction and was arrested nearly 30 times before being deported from the United States to Colombia in 2011.

“That era was horrible,” she said. “What it did to generations — their families, their kids — was really heartbreaking.”

Baiz, who said he saw numerous friends kidnapped after they were inadvertently caught up in the drug trade when he was growing up in the 1980s and ’90s in Cali, Colombia, called the task of balancing Blanco’s business acumen with the brutality of the drug trade the show’s “dramatic challenge.”

For Newman, it was important that “Griselda” resist the temptation to paint Blanco as a one-note villain.

“I don’t believe in monsters,” he said. “The danger of thinking that monsters spring forth from the womb is that you miss the ones created by their environments or circumstances.”

At the heart of Blanco’s story, Vergara said, was a tale of a mother trying to protect her children, by whatever means possible.

“I’m a mother, I’m an immigrant, I’m a woman,” she said. “If something is happening and I have to kill someone for my son, I don’t think I would think about it, I would just do it.”

More difficult was the physical transformation Vergara underwent to portray Blanco, who stood just five feet tall and, with her cleft chin and cartoonish dimples, was hardly an intimidating physical presence. Vergara said she spent three hours in the makeup chair each day, donning a prosthetic nose, fake teeth, plastic “from my eyelids up to my forehead” to hide her thick eyebrows beneath her period-specific thin ones, as well as pads to flatten her bottom and bras that compressed her breasts.

“I didn’t want people to see me and say ‘Why does Gloria Pritchett think that by putting on a fake plastic nose, she’s going to convince us that that’s not her?’” she said.

Vergara also developed a swaggering stride for the character, trading her “sexy Caribbean walk” for a hunched masculine slouch she’d copied from one of her cousins.

“I thought it was great because it would help me with the character,” she said. “But then after three months, it was 4 in the morning and I was trying to get out of bed to go to the set, and I couldn’t do it — my back gave out.” (It was the only day of the three-month shoot, she noted, that she had to cancel filming).

Many times she struggled to shake off her character after shooting wrapped for the day.

“Your body doesn’t know that you’re not going through those emotions during the day,” Vergara said, explaining her character’s range of experiences during a day on set. “I was doing coke, I was killing, they were choking me, I was screaming, I was crying, so when you go home, it’s like, ‘What is happening to me?’”

In her depiction, Vergara wanted to show Blanco’s resilience as a survivor of domestic abuse with no education and few options, but also how those circumstances might have shaped her violent actions.

“You want to think that she’s forced to do all these things because she needs to take care of her people,” Vergara said. “But then little by little you realize, wait a minute, she had options to get away, to stop the madness. And then you understand that it was not a good intention that was making her do all of this that she did at the end.”

Baiz said he hopes that, no matter what emotions people feel while watching the series — empowerment, revulsion, horror, all of the above — they will stick with it for all six episodes.

“If you end the show in Episode 2, it’s a very different story that you’re telling,” he said. “We ended much later in her life story so we can see her humanity, but also her amoral and corrupt side.”

Vergara hopes viewers come away not rooting for Griselda, but maybe understanding her.

“I always dreamed of Griselda to be a little bit like Tony Soprano,” she said. “He was a very bad guy, but you wanted him to win; you could justify some of his behaviors.”