How Sofía Vergara Created Her Tony Soprano Role

When Sofía Vergara invited the “Narcos” showrunner Eric Newman to her home in Los Angeles in 2015 to pitch a TV show about the Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco, she’d done her research.

“I watched the ‘Cocaine Cowboys’ documentary in 2006, and I was like, ‘Wow, this character has so many layers,’” Vergara, 51, said of Blanco, the kingpin who was suspected of being involved in more than 200 murders before being shot dead in her hometown, Medellín, in 2012 at age 69.

The facts of Blanco’s life — the murders, the kidnappings, the tense backroom meetings with drug bosses — hardly needed embellishment for TV. But what had so hooked Vergara, she said, was the idea that “this innocuous-looking woman was raising four kids while building this insane, brutal empire.”

She knew it would be a tougher sell to persuade people that after a little over half a decade portraying the feisty, fun-loving mother Gloria Delgado-Pritchett on the ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” Vergara was the right person to play the cutthroat Blanco.

“I was like, ‘What are the odds that this guy is going to think that Gloria Pritchett can play this [expletive] ruthless, crazy character?’” Vergara, who is Colombian, said in a recent phone conversation from London.

But her passion for the material, her biographical overlap with Blanco and her confidence convinced Newman — and soon the Colombian director Andrés Baiz, who worked with Newman on Netflix’s Medellín cartel series “Narcos” — that she could pull it off.