"I had to check myself" Sofia Vergara has explained how she drew from the murder of her brother to play notorious drug lord Griselda Blanco in the Netflix miniseries Griselda . The Modern Family star – who leads the six-episode drama based on the real-life story of the Colombian drug trafficker – lost her older brother Rafael in 1996 after he was murdered by the Colombian cartel in a botched kidnapping attempt. 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 2006, though, when the actress 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.
Vergara said she found Blanco’s story unlikely – “this Colombian woman with four kids being one of the most ruthless narco traffic people in history” – but she knew she had to portray her. Sofia Vergara ‘Griselda’. CREDIT: Netflix In 2015, after watching the first episode of Narcos , Vergara connected with showrunner Ed Newman to help bring Griselda to people’s screens.
“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 told Variety. “Once you get into.