Sofía Vergara wants you to forget Gloria Pritchett when you’re watching “Griselda.”
Her new project, a Netflix miniseries following the life of the real-life and ruthless Colombian drug dealer Griselda Blanco, is worlds away from “Modern Family,” the ABC sitcom she starred in for 11 years.
“Getting the look correct was very important to me because I needed to disappear. I wanted no one to think of me or my last role as Gloria Pritchett,” she said, per Netflix press notes.
Perhaps that’s why, while speaking to Kelly Clarkson on “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” Vergara had such a spirited reaction when the host said her transformation was “slight.”
“I feel like they only changed your nose,” Clarkson said. Vergara’s face instantly transformed into a look of shock.
“What?” Vergara asked.
“I feel like they only changed your nose,” Clarkson continued.
“Are you crazy?” Vergara said, adding that it required “hours” in the makeup chair.
Clarkson tried to elaborate on her point. “The slight change completely changed your being!”
Vergara doubled down on her take. “Shut up!” she said. “It was a lot! They did a lot to me. It was wig, it was teeth, it was plastic from here to here.”
At first seemingly tense, the two came to a conclusion that Griselda “looked real.”
“That’s exactly what I wanted. I love that you thought it was a little thing because that means it’s natural,” Vergara said.
Here’s how she transformed — and why she didn’t go all the way.
How did Sofía Vergara transform into Griselda Blanco? She didn’t
Vergara said, in Netflix press notes, that she “an incredible hair and makeup design team that did an amazing job creating this character who was in the world of Miami in the ‘70s and ‘80s.”
But creators emphasized the point of the transformation wasn’t for Vergara to be a copy of Blanco.
“We didn’t want her to look like Griselda, particularly at the expense of performance, because what ends up happening in a lot of those prosthetic shows is the nose does the acting,” creator Eric Newman said in Netflix press notes. “It’s no longer the actor, and in our case we wanted to be able to see her emote.”
“I’m sure that it would’ve been less challenging, less risky for her to be in full prosthetic, but we really wanted to see her performance, and we did,” Newman continued. “We had a couple tests, some that had been a little too extreme, some that perhaps had not been enough, but we found our way to a really great place.”
Rather than help her become Griselda Blanco, Vergara’s makeup artist Todd McIntosh said the task was to make Vergara’s face appear “average.”
Vergara’s makeup, which took an hour and a half to complete, partially entailed removing her “beautiful eyebrows” and replacing them with the “tweezed-out, late-‘70s look.” She wore prosthetic eyebrow covers with false eyebrows on top.
She also wore a prosthetic nose and “a plate of teeth that (were) slightly bucked, slightly uneven, a little bit discolored,” he said, adding that the show “(yellowed out) her bottom teeth a bit more because she smokes all the way through the show.”
Hairstylist Kelly Kline said the large hairstyles of the era made Vergara look “too beautiful.”
“So every hairstyle is flatter and smaller than it really should be to make her look more real as opposed to just Sofía with a wig,” she said, per press notes.
When the final look came together, “Griselda,” co-creator Ingrid Escajeda said she was amazed at the outcome.
“The first day on set, I remember walking out thinking, ‘Wow, that’s Griselda.’ And underneath the prosthetics, Sofía’s natural charm shone through,” she said.
By disappearing into Blanco, Vergara said she could get into her head.
“I wanted to get inside Griselda’s head and really understand her mentality, where she was coming from,” she said.