Sofia Vergara’s Brother Was Killed by a Cartel. She Still Found Empathy in ‘Psych…see more

Sofia Vergara’s Brother Was Killed by a Cartel. She Still Found Empathy in ‘Psychopath’ Drug Lord Griselda Blanco

“Why the fuck do you think that Gloria Pritchett is gonna be able to play Griselda Blanco?”

That’s what Sofía Vergara assumed Eric Newman, the showrunner of Netflix’s “Narcos” franchise, would say when she told him she not only wanted to executive produce a series about the murderous Colombian drug lord, but she wanted to star in it.

After all, Vergara had spent 11 years as Gloria, the hilarious, ditzy trophy wife of Ed O’Neill’s Jay Pritchett on “Modern Family.” Gloria had been an important role for Vergara — not only did it put her on the map, but she portrayed the only adult character of color on a show about an affluent white family. She received four Emmy nominations for the part and was a crucial player in the show’s five-year winning streak in the comedy series category. So would audiences be open to her playing a dramatic part? A drug lord? Was she even up to it?

The answer has been a resounding yes. Released on Jan. 25, “Griselda” spent six consecutive weeks in Netflix’s Top 10. And Vergara has been nominated in the limited series lead actress category, alongside Academy Award winners Jodie Foster and Brie Larson.

It’s been a long, rewarding road for Vergara, whose passion for the “Griselda” story wasn’t merely fueled by a desire to expand her acting portfolio after “Modern Family” ended in 2020. It was more deeply rooted in her personal connection to the material. In 1996, when she was 24, her older brother, Rafael, was murdered by a Colombian cartel in a botched kidnapping attempt.

“It destroyed my family,” she says, sitting in an office in Netflix’s Hollywood headquarters. “It destroyed my mom. It changed our lives completely. We didn’t know what was happening, why he had been killed.”

Vergara was raising a son at the time — five-year-old Manolo — and had just come to Miami from Colombia a year earlier. After her brother’s murder, she moved her mother, sister and younger brother to the States to live with her. “It was hard, because I had to take responsibility for my whole family.”

Ten years after the murder, in 2006, Vergara saw “Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami,” a documentary about Miami drug lords Sal Magluta and Willy Falcon that featured Blanco. Though Blanco’s story seemed improbable to the actress — she couldn’t picture “this Colombian woman with four kids being one of the most ruthless narco traffic people in history” — she felt she had to play her. But it was too dangerous to take on the series while Blanco was still walking the streets of Colombia. So Vergara waited.

Then, in 2012, three weeks before Season 4 of “Modern Family” debuted on ABC, Blanco was murdered outside a butcher shop in Medellín.

Yet, it wasn’t until watching the first episode of “Narcos” in 2015 that Vergara felt she’d found the team that could best tell Blanco’s story. Despite thinking he wouldn’t take her seriously, Vergara invited Newman to her Beverly Hills home to discuss working together on “Griselda.”

“I never doubted her ability to do it,” Newman says. “I was always aware of how difficult comedy is. It’s really hard. And there aren’t a lot of people who can do it as well as she can do it — she makes it look effortless.”