Sofia Vergara’s Transformation into Colombian Queenpin
In Netflix’s Griselda, Sofía Vergara transforms into notorious Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco. Makeup artist Todd McIntosh, working with the show’s prosthetics constructor, Stephen Bettles, used a prosthetic nose, eyebrow covers and fake teeth for Vergara’s look, which he completed with the help of paint and makeup.
“If you look at Griselda, she was not an attractive lady,” says McIntosh. “I understood from the moment I was part of the show that my job was to make this absolutely gorgeous woman look like a plain, average kind of person in the 1970s.”
Vergara’s noticeably full eyebrows needed to be thinned and tweezed with a higher arch for that ’70s look. However, since Vergara wasn’t willing to have that done to her actual eyebrows, eyebrow covers, which are always “problematic,” says McIntosh, were used. Vergara’s nose was also transformed into a nose that “had more of a tip” and was “widened a bit in the middle.”
Once Vergara started reciting her lines, says McIntosh, her “glorious white teeth” offered a jarring contrast to the plain look they had given the rest of her face. So, a set of fake teeth was made by Art Sakamoto.
“In the testing periods, he made several different sets,” says McIntosh. “Some were more bent and twisted, more yellow, less yellow, etc. If you make them too grotty and twisted, then your eyes go away from her eyes and onto her mouth, and then the teeth are not doing their job. It has to be more balanced. So eventually, they settled on a more disruptive set that were slightly crooked, slightly out of line and yellowed from her being a smoker.”
Vergara was given an upper and bottom set, but as soon as she started to deliver her lines in rapid fire, it became clear she had trouble enunciating words with both plates in. McIntosh took the bottom plate out and from that point on painted her bottom teeth yellow, with special makeup paint for the purpose, to match the top.
It took about three hours every day to get Vergara into her Griselda look, with the prosthetics taking up an hour and a half of that time, says McIntosh.
This story first appeared in a June standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.