The makeup artist who transformed Sofia Vergara into Griselda Blanco for a new Netflix show has fired back at claims the actress was made to look like an ‘ugly’ version of the Colombian drug lord.
Sofia, 51, wore a wig, fake teeth, and a prosthetic nose to transform into the ‘Cocaine Godmother’ for six-part series, Griselda, which sees her smoking crack, snorting cocaine and wielding a gun.
The portrayal angered Griselda’s real-life son Michael Corleone Blanco, 45, who exclusively told DailyMail.com that he wasn’t happy with the interpretation because his mother ‘was a beautiful woman’ who was even called ‘the porcelain doll in her youth.’
Angela Nogaro, who served as the Makeup Department Head clapped back, arguing that ‘glamour and beauty are two different things’ and claimed that the real Griselda was ‘never a stunning model’ – even during the height of her notorious Miami reign in the 1970s and ’80s.
Colombian actress Sofia Vergara looks rather different in the new Netflix series Griselda
The real Griselda Blanco looked far from glamorous in one of her mugshots taken by police in the 1980s
Griselda’s youngest son Michael Corleone Blanco described his mother as a ‘beautiful woman’
‘Sofia is glamorous in the show, she’s just not as beautiful as she normally is,’ she told DailyMail.com exclusively. ‘But she is glamorous – we didn’t make her ugly, and she has beautiful clothes and great hair. We just changed her face so she didn’t look the same.
‘We just tried to make Sofia less than this stunning model – which his mother never was. So those are two very different traits, two different properties. Glamour and beauty are two different things.’
She continued: ‘The thing is, she is glamorous, and when he sees the show, he will see she’s never wearing sweatpants with her hair in a ponytail. She’s always made up, she’s beautifully manicured, she’s always got her nails done, she’s very glam – even when she’s beating the guy with a baseball bat, she’s glamorous!’
Angela revealed that she and director, Andrés Baiz, never intended to completely transform the Modern Family actress into Griselda – who was shot dead in Medellín, Colombia, in September 2012 – owing to time and money constraints.
‘The show would never have gotten made because first of all, it would have taken us nine and half months to shoot the show and we didn’t have the money nor the resources to do that,’ she said.
‘Our attempt wasn’t necessarily to replicate the actual person, but it was to take Sofia and transition her, so that she didn’t have that beautiful, perky, sweet look.’
Referring to the mugshot of the real Griselda, Angela explained: ‘We could never have made her into that. If we start with basic logistics, what it would have taken to put her into that character for a television series would have been undoable. She was almost in every shot of every day, and that would have been… I mean to do a complete transformation like that would have been a four-hour makeup every day.
‘So, our goal was to just give her an edge. I mean, that’s really the best way I can describe it because we didn’t make her ugly and our intention was never to make her ugly, but our intention was to give her an edge.’
Michael, 45, revealed that his drug lord mother was ‘called the porcelain doll in her youth’
Sofia, 51, wore a wig, fake teeth and a a prosthetic nose for the gritty six-part Netflix series
The Makeup Department Head for Griselda said they simply just wanted to give Sofia ‘an edge’
Michael claims that his mother was ‘the crème de la crème’ and says that even politicians and mayors tried to court her
She said Sofia had to undergo a slight transformation as viewers would have been ‘distracted’ by her ‘pretty little face running around with a gun.’
She added: ‘Her beauty would have taken away from the story as opposed to enhance it.’
One of the main ways in which they altered Sofia’s stunning looks was by getting her to wear a prosthetic nose – which Angela has now revealed had to be re-sculpted a total of 11 times.
‘My thing was, “if you want to change your face, lets pull your nose down because it’s going to change the look of your face,” but she didn’t want her nose down, she kept saying, “it’s not right, it’s not right”,’ she admitted.
Angela confirmed that Sofia was in the makeup chair for around two hours every day and said she thinks that the Modern Family actress was ‘out of her comfort zone’ with modelling such a different look.
‘I think overall, we just made her look a bit rougher,’ she said. ‘There’s also supposedly a tremendous amount of cocaine abuse that’s going on, which doesn’t bode well with beautiful skin anyway, when you’re living that kind of lifestyle.
‘Because if you look at the real Griselda, there’s some crazy pictures. I mean, she changes radically. You know when she’s in prison, she looks like a man almost. It’s crazy what she looks like because when she was younger, she was never a beauty, but she had a relatively sort of sweet face and there was something about her.’
However, her son Michael claimed that his mother ‘was called the porcelain doll in her youth’ and described her as a ‘beautiful woman’.
Back in 2022, Sofia shared a behind the scenes selfie and confirmed that her transformation took two hours
Makeup artist Angela said she thinks that Sofia was ‘out of her comfort zone’ with the look
Griselda is sure to shock Sofia’s fans as it shows her in a completely different light and a serious role
‘It’s crazy that a lot of people say, “No, you’ve got to look more like a drug addict”… The fact that they call her “ugly” that really offends me,’ he told DailyMail.com.
He also expressed his frustration that people always based their idea of his mother from her mugshots, highlighting that using pictures taken after she spent decades in prison was not a fair representation.
‘People see the mug shots and just go from that,’ he continued. ‘But when you read my book, you’ll see that my mother was called the porcelain doll in her youth.’
‘Mayors, governors and politicians in different countries would try to court my mother…even here in the United States. She was the crème de la crème.’
Michael recalled the fact his mother was a ‘celebrity’ of sorts during her time within the Medellín Cartel, and highlighted that she had a glamorous and pampered appearance.
‘She was always a beautiful woman,’ he insisted. ‘Now, of course, 26 years of jail will age a person. And my mother was so used to pampering and she was so used to her maintenance.’
