With her upcoming role as Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco, aka “The Black Widow,” aka “La Dama de la Mafia,” in the upcoming true-crime series Griselda, Modern Family actor Sofía Vergara is up for a challenge.
Justified producer Ingrid Escajeda discussed her role as showrunner of upcoming Netflix series Griselda in a panel discussion Sunday morning at the ATX TV Festival with The Staircase co-showrunner Maggie Cohn, and moderator Emily Moss Wilson.
The Netflix series, currently in production, will follow Vergara as Griselda Blanco, a prolific drug lord in the underworld of the 1980s Miami cocaine trade. The show follows the success of another Netflix series, Narcos, which examines a different angle of the same undercover cocaine trade explored in Griselda.
Escajeda discussed getting to bring a fresh perspective to Griselda Blanco’s story and reexamining the popular narratives about Blanco, which were formed primarily by male writers in the Seventies and Eighties. She explained the series will lean into the complexity of Blanco’s story as a mother and abuse survivor who grew up surrounded by the Colombian civil war known as La Violencia (while stressing the point that not all abused women turn to violent criminal activity). Escajeda connected Blanco’s experience as a woman in a male-dominated industry to her own experience earlier in her career as the only woman in writing rooms full of men. “I’ve often been that, the woman in the man’s world.”
Vergara may seem like an unexpected choice for such a serious role, but she was actually the catalyst for the whole project. Escajeda shared that the Colombian American actor had wanted to play Blanco for as long as she’s been in the business, and it was Vergara who originally pitched the idea to Netflix years ago. When discussing Vergara’s pivot from comedy to this darker, more dramatic role, Escajeda admitted, “Everybody was a little nervous, she was nervous.”
Escajeda said Vergara’s comedic sensibilities actually served her well in this project, and remarked how Vergara’s inherent likability made it easier to convey the humanity in a complicated character like Blanco. That’s not to say that Vergara shied away from the darkness of Blanco’s life. “It’s a Sofía Vergara you’ve never seen.”
Escajeda and Cohn both discussed the ethical and legal concerns inherent in telling a story based on real people. Escajeda revealed that “Netflix legal was on top of us” about facts, especially when it came to the criminal activity portrayed in the show.
A different challenge came in replicating 1970s Miami, because Miami now looks nothing like it did then. The crew considered filming in Panama before landing on locations in L.A. and Long Beach. Escajeda praised the work of Griselda’s production designer, Knut Loewe, and stressed how important it was to have a production designer she could trust to create the changing, chaotic location. It was important to Escajeda to get the sets and the costumes and the prosthetics to look just right. “Visually the show’s gonna be stunning.”
Escajeda also talked about how much fun she personally had with the period props and set-pieces and how she wished she could take certain parts of the set home with her. “I’m like a kid in a candy store.”
ATX TV Festival, June 2-5. Tickets and info at atxfestival.com.
This article appears in June 3 • 2022.