Updated Wednesday, January 24, 2024-21:34
TV Michael Corleone, the son of The Godmother of Coca, sues Netflix and Sofía Vergara for Griselda
MomenTVs Sofía Vergara, the "bitch" who made Pablo Motos sweat a lot
When filming for
Griselda
started ,
Sofía Vergara
felt something unknown: everything hurt, she was completely exhausted.
The second wave of Covid had just reached its peak, so she was tested non-stop.
But no, it wasn't that.
For the first time in more than 20 years,
Sofía Vergara
had a role truly inside her.
"It took me a while to understand what was happening to me," she remembers, "the body doesn't know that you're acting, this must be why actors go crazy."
What the body couldn't finish processing was what the hell the cheerful Colombian actress was doing at 50 years old, smoking like a madwoman, snorting, killing people and in a permanent state of alert after a life of light comedy and healthy habits.
"This was the one who taught me to smoke and do coke, I didn't even know how to hold a cigarette," she confesses, and points out
Andrés Baiz , a Colombian like her, who writes and directs the six episodes of the new
Netflix
series
.
Baiz closes with
Griselda
a fruitful television series on drug trafficking that began with that memorable biography of
Pablo Escobar
that managed to leave half the world glued to the screen in the summer of 2015. He does it again under the orders of
Eric Newman
, creator of
Narcos
and
Narcos México
, who couldn't resist when
Sofía Vergara
showed up in her office with an idea she had been working on for more than a decade.
"It is not usual for an actor to bring the character he wants to embody," acknowledges Newman, one of the few
gringos
on an eminently Latino team, "much less for him to come with such a level of research."
Because
Griselda
, the series, is a personal endeavor of
Sofía Vergara
that was born more than a decade ago.
NETFLIX
"I grew up in Colombia in the 70s and 80s, I know perfectly well how the drug trafficking business works, and yet I never knew that there was a woman in it," says the actress.
That
Griselda Blanco,
wife of a trafficker but also mother of three children, who arrived in Miami after a family misfortune that we will not go into with one hand in front and one behind and not only raised her family but founded an empire that inspired Pablo
Escobar
himself. is, for
Sofía Vergara
, the perfect paradigm of the Colombian woman: "We are strong but very protective. She wanted to survive and she didn't know any other business, she had her children and she didn't have a penny. I'm not saying that we all have to become monsters Of course, she got out of hand with everything."
The actress came to the drug scene more than a decade ago, but first, she felt ashamed to play her when she was still alive.
Then the
Modern Family
hurricane prevented him from undertaking anything beyond
Gloria Pritchett
.
The perfect moment came in the middle of the pandemic, that story had to be told.
She did not expect the impact to be such that Griselda
's own youngest son
, eloquently baptized as
Michael Corleone
, sued the platform and herself as executive producer for damages.
Neither he nor his brothers gave up image rights for the series, he alleges, and accuses the production of having used him to extract private information from him that he himself will soon publish in a book.
She has not yet responded, but the commotion can only increase the anticipation for the premiere.
The producer says that after his first meeting with Vergara all doubts were cleared up:
Sofía Vergara
had - he pronounces it in capital letters and underlined, if that is possible - to be
Griselda
.
"What she did on
Modern Family
, how difficult it is to get to that level of comedy and make it look easy, that requires a level of technical skill and commitment that I later confirmed during filming."
It will not be the last compliment that Vergara receives, "a national treasure," says
Andrés Baiz
.
"That sounds old!" she replies.
The chemistry between the two Colombians, which is obvious, was forged in months of meetings at her house in which she learned to smoke, to snort cocaine, to become a drug trafficker in the 70s. "My neighbors thought I was crazy," jokes
Sofía Vergara
.
Her gesture with the cigarette was her great obsession and the intimate scenes of
Griselda
smoking alone at the end of the day and drawing her empire in the air with the lit tip of the cigarette, her bête noire.
In those meetings they studied everything about the character: how she dances, how she sits, if she is religious, what political orientation she has.
"I didn't want people to see Sofía or Gloria," says Vergara.
And so she began to walk bent over, with her legs apart, to sit much less upright.
This is how Sofía Vergara
broke her back
: "The only day I missed the set was because I couldn't move," she says, "I'm not a real actress, I thought that, at 50, you could walk like that for six months without a problem." "But they have already given me three injections."
NETFLIX
The daily transformation process involved three hours of makeup and hair at the beginning of the day, and one at the end to remove everything: nose and eyebrow prostheses, false teeth, breast and buttock reducers.
The Colombian had some problems with her teeth, and not just with pronunciation: "Sometimes I was going to kill someone and oh, they would fall to the ground," she remembers with a laugh.
Her dramatic turn is also her first role in Spanish: "The bilingualism in the dialogues came out organic to us," she emphasizes.
The balance between
Griselda Blanco,
who, Escobar said, was "the only man" who had scared him in his life, and the mother willing to do anything to save her loved ones, was the greatest dramatic challenge of the series.
"Antiheroes fascinate me because they allow us to understand things about ourselves through contradiction," says the director and screenwriter, who took special care not to
glamorize
her life: "She is a mother, she is an enterprising business woman, she is a criminal. And "It is in a man's world, so everything costs him 10 times more."
Parallels are inevitable, and don't think wrong.
Sofía
saw herself in
Griselda
in some way and wanted to make known the incredible story of a Colombian single mother who lived the American dream to its ultimate consequences without giving up empathy, despite everything.
"From the beginning I told myself: I want to make her a little like
Tony Soprano
, that people fall in love with her a little," she says.
Sometimes, however, they had to stop her drift, the dark side is tremendously attractive: "Andrés told me every so often: 'You're becoming very bad very quickly.'"