Sofia Vergara Is Incredible and Unrecognizable in ‘Griselda’

The road from beloved sitcom star to legitimate dramatic actor can be bumpy. Performers struggle to shed the characters that made them famous and convince audiences that those people they fell in love with were simply television personas—one blip in the breadth of people they can portray. For Sofía Vergara, whose 11 seasons on Modern Family made her a household name in America, this process is likely even more difficult. After Modern Family took off, so much of Vergara’s public presence was relegated to either parroting the same stories about her Colombian roots for curious white viewers, or having her body discussed in the same sentence as her talent. It’s not a stretch to say that many people saw Vergara as her sitcom character, Gloria Pritchett: an intensely lovable but ultimately stereotypical Colombian woman.

In her new limited series, Griselda (now on Netflix), Vergara makes a hard sprint in the opposite direction. Refusing to be pigeonholed as ditzy or the oft-used microaggression “loud,” Vergara takes on the challenge of portraying one of the drug trade’s preeminent figures: Griselda Blanco. Blanco is credited with playing a major part in establishing the cocaine trade between Colombia and America, particularly up the United States’ Eastern Seaboard while Blanco was based in Miami. Blanco was ruthless, rich, and respected—a perfect character for Vergara to take on when looking to carve a new path in her career.

Griselda doesn’t always meet Vergara’s ambitions, often settling for being a fairly standard drug trade tale with little in the way of a tangible style or legitimate surprises beyond a few unexpected kills. But the actress elevates the material into something much more absorbing than what’s on the surface. As Griselda, Vergara gives the Godmother of the Medellín Cartel just the right amount of layered complexity. Yet, remarkably, Vergara never softens her character’s viciousness; she transcends the series’ attempts to make Griselda into a sympathetic antihero, a lethal Narca with a heart of gold. That steeliness is key to Griselda’s success, and it’s visible even under Vergara’s prosthetics.

By now, you’d think we’d have reached peak prosthetic after Bradley Cooper’s controversial Maestro nose and Allison Williams’ Fellow Travelers sniffer. And while, yes, Vergara’s prosthetics—a fake nose, new eyebrows, and false teeth—do serve the purpose of getting people to check out Griselda with the low-brow tactic of making a star “unrecognizable,” they intentionally affect the series too. Vergara’s pattern of speech is different because of the fake teeth, and the transformation as a whole helps to keep that change in Vergara’s naturally bubbly physicality that so many people are fond of. It’s the rare prosthetic work that serves the greater purpose of the art it’s a part of, instead of just being something an actor can trot out in interviews to extoll the challenges of a role. But in Vergara’s case, it works.

The series follows Griselda from her last days in Colombia to Miami, where she struggles to break into the local underworld of the drug trade to provide for her three children. This business is all Griselda has really known, and even her stable day job at her friend Carmen’s (Vanessa Ferlito) travel agency isn’t enough to keep her out of the trade. What’s most fascinating to watch is how the series’ writers and Vergara craft all of the clever ways that Griselda ingratiated herself to a well-established underground scene. As a former prostitute in Colombia, Griselda uses just a few of the tricks she learned at a brothel to get close enough to the power players to let them try her product: The finest coke they’ve ever cut.

While their affection for the drug is undeniable, the commanders of all the different Miami drug territories refuse to do business with Griselda. Not only is she a woman, but her method of selling is also too risky. She could easily be killed and have her body dumped in a river, another dealer jacking her supply from the rat trap motel she’s posted up at. So, Griselda uses something far more compelling than her looks to break into the trade: her cunning.

When Griselda showcases the extent of its titular character’s shrewd intelligence, it operates with as much energy and vitality as those who are buying up Griselda’s coke. Unfortunately, those moments last just about as long as a bump of blow. The limited series is only six episodes long—the preferred length for a story like this—but none of the episodes can live up to the thrill and inventiveness of the show’s first installment. The teleplay in that episode, “Lady Comes to Town,” is sharp as a tack, but the following chapters have their barbs dulled down. That doesn’t mean they’re entirely devoid of thrills; some particularly tense moments reach the same kind of shocking, memorable quality as The Sopranos’ heavy-hitter episodes. But Griselda doesn’t quite lean hard enough into the true, gut-wrenching horror of the drug trade to be impactful all the way to the end.

Just because Griselda can’t maintain its momentum throughout, that doesn’t mean Vergara can’t. She’s utterly captivating as Miami’s Black Widow. Vergara exudes power and intrigue, the kind that could make even the most powerful dealers sit up and listen. And if they don’t take the bait when Griselda weaponizes her sexuality, she’ll ascertain plenty of other methods to build her own clientele and territory right under their coke-powdered noses. Griselda realizes that she can break into a new market if she can convince Miami’s rich, white inhabitants to spice up their lives with cocaine, and Vergara is beguiling as she deftly persuades Miami’s most powerful (well, above-board powerful) residents to fall under her spell.

While Griselda doesn’t reach the emotional depths of Tony Soprano (in six episodes, she simply doesn’t have time to), Vergara embeds the character with an equal amount of kindness and cruelty. There’s a compassionate side to Griselda—the reason why she was known as the Godmother—and Vergara makes it completely believable. She oscillates between humanity and brutality with a startling ease. It’s the kind of performance that’s imbued with enough real-life perspective to walk the delicate line between dark and light. Given that Vergara’s brother was kidnapped and murdered amid the Colombia drug war, prompting her emigration to Miami in the late ’90s, it’s probably not a stretch to say that the actor’s empathetic connection to the story enhanced her character work.

It’s that familiarity that ultimately makes Griselda an engaging watch. The series itself might not have much of a fresh perspective, but Vergara fills in those gaps with her own. Her link to the material and passion for this complicated role is enough to lead Vergara into the next phase of her career, one where uniquely complex parts like this should be piling up at her door.