In , Sofía Vergara leaves behind her comedic roots and steps into the violent, backstabbing world of her eponymous character, a real-life drug lord becoming increasingly deranged over the course of the six-part miniseries. Episode five sees her break her composure, pulling a gun on her estranged husband, Dario, shooting up his car and then forcing party guests to have sex in front of her at gunpoint. Max Mermelstein, a real-life drug smuggler and character in the show, wrote a book that describes this last moment between Dario and Griselda Blanco, the final ripping apart of their marriage.
“For writers Eric Newman, Ingrid Escajeda, Andy Baiz and I, when we were structuring the story, the way we do it is we have tentpoles from the truth, and those become what we build the larger story around,” explains writer Doug Miro. “Mainly the dynamic is what we took, not the location, not what was happening.” Despite several details of the script being exaggerations of Blanco’s story, the truth is stranger than fiction, and Blanco’s gun antics are no fable.
“She did pull a gun at a party like this,” notes Miro. “She was famous for once forcing her guests to have sex at gunpoint. We changed it to his birthday.
We decided to have one big party that really made for the claustrophobia, because the other piece that’s here is that paranoia, for Griselda, is a big part of her story.” Over the course of the show, she is followed by detectives, causing her to constantly lo.
