“I was so unprofessional”: Sofia Vergara names the biggest regret of her career
Between 2009 and 2020, Modern Family was one of the biggest TV series on the box.
For 250 episodes, the adventures of the Pritchett family and their various offshoots got big ratings, great reviews, and made stars out of many of its cast members. The series introduced audiences to Sarah Hyland and Ariel Winter, while it helped to revitalise the careers of Ed O’Neill and Julie Bowen, but the biggest star the show created was easily Sofia Vergara.
Born in Colombia, Vergara rose to fame in her native country as a host on a number of Spanish-language TV shows, moving into English-language content in the early 2000s by landing the role of the feisty Gloria Delgado-Pritchett in the ABC series. As one of the biggest names on one of the biggest shows, her profile shot up over the first few years of Modern Family’s success, and she appeared in other huge series and a number of Hollywood movies, quite a lot of which were awful (she was in The Emoji Movie, lest we forget), but that’s not the point.
Unfortunately, being in demand sometimes leads to conflict, and in 2021, it was announced that Vergara would be producing and starring in a Netflix series called Griselda, inspired by the story of real-life drug kingpin Griselda Blanco. The show had a lot of potential, given the public’s fascination with ‘narcoculture’, and Vergara’s name carried a lot of weight, too, especially due to the fact that she was also involved creatively, which was intriguing, but alas, this same benefit would also become an albatross.
Speaking at a Netflix event in 2024, Vergara revealed that production of Griselda had been forced to pause due to her commitments on America’s Got Talent, which she had joined as a judge in 2020 and had been able to juggle this new work with her acting career up to this point, but all that was about to change.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. “The most absurd thing. But I mean that tells you…if I was a real actress, I would have said, ‘Absolutely not, I’m not doing this’”.
She explained that, after three straight months of playing Griselda, she had just four days to become herself again. When she returned to the series, the director had to pull her aside and point out that she was behaving like she was on reality TV, lamenting, “When I went back, I was like so unprofessional”.
Vergara was eventually able to have her cake and eat it too, though, as following further delays due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, she completed filming on Griselda, and the show was released in 2024 to rave reviews. The star herself came in for most of the praise, earning nominations at both the Primetime Emmys and Golden Globes, and as for America’s Got Talent, she is a judge on the show to this day.
It’s testament to Vergara’s dedication to her work that she was able to make both of these high-profile gigs work at the same time, so while her blood pressure might have been off the scale, at least she got the job done.
