Sofía Vergara wants everyone to know how much of a physical transformation her Griselda role was. While sitting down with Kelly Clarkson on her talk show, the Modern Family alum, 51, corrected the American Idol season 1 winner, 41, for calling her makeup and prosthetics a “slight” change.
“So, this is incredible,” Kelly began. “I feel like they only changed your nose or something. I don’t know what they did.” This prompted Sofía to respond, “What?! Are you crazy” and hilariously stare into the distance for a moment.
Kelly defended her statement by noting, “No, I’m saying, like, whatever they did, though, it looked slight. It doesn’t look like — you know what I’m saying? Like when you look at you, it doesn’t look …” but Sofía interjected by saying, “No, Kelly. It was hours!.”
“No, here’s what I’m saying,” the “Since U Been Gone” artist added. “It probably took time. The slight change completely changed your being.”
Although Kelly explained her statement, Sofía jokingly responded, “Don’t be jealous!” and added that her costume and makeup transformation included, “a wig. It was a lot. They did a lot to me!” Sofía then told Kelly to “Shut up,” making the talk show host laugh with her.
“It was teeth, it was wig, it was nose. It was plastic from here to here,” Sofía pointed out.
At the end of their funny tiff, Kelly praised Sofía’s on-camera changes for the character. “But what I’m saying is it looks like … they did such a good job, that it looked seamless, and you just looked like a different — you literally look like you could actually just be this person in other movies,” Kelly said. “You could have two careers. You look like you’re a different actress, like you could have a whole different life.”
Sofía’s new miniseries, Griselda, features her playing the real-life “Cocaine Godmother,” Griselda Blanco, a drug lord who was part of the Miami drug war in the 1970s and 1980s. The series premieres on Netflix on Thursday, January 25.
The America’s Got Talent judge’s dark, dramatic portrayal is a stark contrast to her past comedic roles in sitcoms and films, such as New Year’s Eve. While promoting the production, she openly discussed how she wanted to fully embrace her character. The hair and makeup team were the brains behind her physical transformation, so Sofía had to do her homework.
“It was a lot of work, it was a lot of preparation,” she told PEOPLE in a recent interview. “I had to really investigate what it meant to be a woman in that era. A mother, a Colombian woman … that turned into this monster. So, it was a really difficult task for me to understand it.”
While it was challenging to pinpoint similarities between herself and Griselda, Sofía told the outlet that she found a way to “relate” to the drug lord because they are “both Colombian. We are both immigrants. We are both mothers. We are both women.”