All this craziness gives Sofía Vergara her best chance yet to just go absolutely nuts on screen. The comparison that springs to mind for me is watching Jon Hamm in Fargo Season 5 after watching him in comedies for a decade. Who the hell is this terrifying maniac, this delusional tyrant plagued with paranoia and arrogance and the inability to let go of a grudge? For god’s sake, she takes a golden uzi and forces a man to strip nude and bark like a dog while forcing two other guests to fuck in front of everyone, and you believe it. It’s not funny, either, not campy, and don’t let anyone try and tell you otherwise. The show may not be going for realism, but that rage, that compulsion to humiliate and terrorize in order to feel in control? That’s real. Vergara makes it real.
It’s kind of like once it starts coming out, she can’t make it stop — certainly not until she stops chain-smoking crack. Vergara portrays Griselda as a woman hurling herself from one experience to the next: having an off-camera threesome with Rafa Salazar’s manipulative party-girl wife Marta (a captivating Julieth Restrepo), gazing dumbstruck at the fireworks display she arranged for her suddenly estranged husband, nearly choking her best friend to death, hitting the pipe over and over, shooting up Dario’s beloved Cadillac, sexually assaulting her guests, berating her son Uber for trying to be a voice of reason like Dario, perseverating on the idea that she still has an informant in her organization despite a ruthless mass murder campaign against any potential rats, accusing virtually everyone who cares about her of being said rat…she’s mainlining first dopamine and then adrenaline to a dangerous degree.
