After a decade chewing lumps out of her Colombian accent as Modern Family’s comedy glamourpuss Gloria, it’s easy to see why Sofía Vergara would be keen to get her teeth into a meatier role. Step forward notorious “Cocaine Godmother” Griselda Blanco, very much the yin to Gloria’s yang.
Sporting a dodgy prosthetic-enhanced look designed to ugly down her image – it doesn’t really work, Vergara still looks fabulous, albeit a bit bizarre – Vergara is offered plenty of scope for showing off her dramatic chops in the full-throttle Griselda (Netflix). Careering through a colourful life story littered with broken relationships, fortunes won and lost, deals brokered and broken, and many, many corpses, Vergara gets a full acting fix charting Blanco’s journey from savvy schemer to paranoid contract killer.
But, boy, is it bloody: the body count here is extraordinarily high and there’s the rub. At the start of this six-part series it’s not hard to get on side with Blanco as we meet a much-wronged woman determined to make her mark in the macho, Colombian drug-dealing world. She’s doing it for her kids, she says, she’s doing it for women – hell, she’s even doing it for the downtrodden Latinos she enlists to work for her. So we’re along for the ride.
Sophie Anderson, a UK-based writer, is your guide to the latest trends, viral sensations, and internet phenomena. With a finger on the pulse of digital culture, she explores what’s trending across social media and pop culture, keeping readers in the know about the latest online sensations.
