She disappeared as an actress at the best moment of her career, with the last of the 250 episodes she recorded for Modern Family, the comedy series that established her as a great star and left her with four Emmy nominations and as many Golden Globe nominations.
When the last installment of its 11 seasons was broadcast, on April 8, 2020, Sofía Vergara was the highest-paid actress on television, since she earned half a million dollars for each episode, to which she added 10 million of that currency that she was paid for each season as a judge on the reality show America's Got Talent.
In total, according to Forbes magazine, that year he had deposited $43 million in his bank account, as he also had income from his representation company Latin World Entertainment, his lingerie line EBY and a digital company called Raze.
Currently the owner of a fortune estimated at 165 million euros, the Colombian actress could afford not to appear in any kind of fiction since then, although she lent her voice to a couple of animated films in their original versions and maintained her presence in the popular television show hosted by Terry Crews.
Instead, she put all her energy into the series that comes to Netflix today and in which she not only has the leading role but is also the producer. The world premiere of Griselda has led her to go on an extensive promotional tour in which she has visited El hormiguero in Madrid and also the Jimmy Fallon show in New York. During her visits, she has generated numerous videos that have gone viral thanks to the unmistakable sense of humor with which she has bullfighted the drivers.
The series, for which he has summoned the team that created the successful Narcos and its sequel Narcos: México, tells the story of drug trafficker Griselda Blanco, who in the 1980s created an empire importing cocaine to Miami, and became an early mentor of Pablo Escobar.
This is not the first television portrait of her, since in 2018 Catherine Zeta-Jones played her in the telefilm Griselda: the queen of cocaine and before that, in 2014 it was Ana Serradilla who portrayed her in The Black Widow, a co-production between Mexico and Colombia that lasted two seasons. Even Jennifer López developed a feature film in which she was going to play Griselda Blanco and which she herself thought about directing, although she later hired Reed Morano from The Handmaid's Tale.
In a global press conference in which La Vanguardia participated, Vergara herself, accompanied by showrunner Eric Newman and Colombian director Andrés Baiz, explained her reasons for trying her own version: “What initially interested me is that I had never heard talk about her, even having lived in Colombia at that time, at a time when the leaders of the cartel were all famous. She intrigued me that a woman could measure up to those men. And when I saw the documentary Cocaine Cowboys where they talked about her, I couldn't believe it was true. Then I forgot about her, until I read an article in an airline magazine and from then on, I started asking all the drug traffickers I knew if they knew who she was.”
Once she decided to tell her life, tracing her story was not so complicated, since having been imprisoned for 22 years in the United States, it was enough to consult the court records. “When I started thinking about this project, Griselda was alive and free, and that's why it took me so long, because I didn't want to glorify her. When she died in 2012, I picked it up again.”
Vergara pointed out that beyond the enormous differences, the similarities with her were very strong: “I am Colombian, I was a single mother and an immigrant and I have been working since I was very, very young. My brother was involved in drug trafficking and was killed in Colombia, so I knew how this horrible business destroys families. As an actress, I had to think about how a mother can do that kind of thing. That's what interested me. She was not a man looking for power and money, but a mother of four children,” she said.
Without a doubt, her decision to bet everything to reinvent herself as a dramatic actress has been the right one. Despite the fact that what is told in Griselda is much kinder than what really happened, the reviews so far have been favorable. Aramide Tinubu of Variety wrote: “Fast-paced and well-acted, this series is brutal, fascinating and full of drama.” Most of the media have highlighted her performance, in which through prosthesis, she has managed to make herself ugly, although she does not even remotely resemble what Blanco looked like.
Recently separated from her second husband, actor Joe Mangianello, whom she married in 2015, it is likely that Vergara is about to begin a new stage in her career and that her commitment to Griselda will be rewarded with a notable presence in the next race for awards.
