‘Griselda’ Star Sofia Vergara Says Her Looks Were ‘My Passport To The World’

“My body opened doors for me when I was 20 years old, but today I’m 51 years old and I’m still here.”

Maxim Staff

Jan 25, 2024

(Taylor Hill/WireImage via Getty Images)

Sofia Vergara has no illusions about the aesthetic qualities that helped launch her career. In the press junkets surrounding Netflix’s Griselda, which stars the America’s Got Talent judge as infamous cocaine queenpin Griselda Blanco, Vergara discussed how her appearance has served her well professionally.

“It would be absurd to deny it or for that to make me feel bad,” Vergara told Spanish newspaper El País, per the New York Post.

“My giant boobs and my body opened doors for me; they were my passport to the world when I was 20 years old when I started as a model, but today I’m 51 years old and I’m still here.”

Looks may have gotten her in the door, but a combination of work ethic, effervescence and awareness are what made her a star, Vergara added.

“I am not afraid of [taking a] risk, I work harder than anyone, I have the personality, I have always been aware of what was outside, and I have not been afraid. There are women who are prettier, younger, who have bigger breasts and a better body than me, but I’m still around because I have demonstrated that I can stay.”

She continued, “I don’t do brain surgery, it’s just entertainment, and the worst that can happen to me is that they can say I look ugly or that this jackass doesn’t know how to act. I can take it.”

Elsewhere in the interview, the Colombian-American actress also touched on the many facets of Blanco’s story that resonated personally and made the role so appealing.

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“When I heard about Griselda, I wanted to play her. Because she was Colombian, because she was a woman, because I experienced the drama of drug trafficking, because my brother Rafael was part of that business and they killed him in 1996. Because of all that, I knew I could do it. And I did do it when I got them to trust me to do it.”

“Empowered women are trendy now, but 12 years ago when I was drawn to the story and wanted to produce it, not so much,” Vergara added. “That was precisely what appealed to me: that the boss was a woman who had to become worse than any man to be the best of them all.”

Critical reviews of Griselda’s were mostly positive. The six-part miniseries holds an 88-percent “Fresh” score on Rotten Tomatoes’ critical review aggregator, with Variety writing, “Fast-paced and well-acted, the show is brutal, fascinating and full of high drama.”

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Praising Vergara specifically, the London Evening Standard writes, “Vergara herself is superb, if completely [unrecognizable] under heavy prosthetics. It’s a slightly disconcerting watch as you know it’s her, it sounds like her, but after the two-hour daily stint in the make-up chair it’s a pretty astounding transformation.”

Even the less positive reviews were far from scathing. “A solid but almost by-the-numbers exercise. Chalk that up in part to the fact that in both TV and the drug trade, the product doesn’t always deliver as much of a kick if you hit the same stuff too often,” a review for CNN reads.

The Daily Telegraph had a different take: “While Vergara gives it her all, she can never make us truly care about a character so morally hollow at the core. For all its highs, Griselda is ultimately a bit of a downer.”

Griselda began streaming on January 25.

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