Sofía Vergara, Hollywood’s Hysterical,Business-Savvy, Unapologetic Sex Symbol
The Modern Family star hits the big screen this month with Hot Pursuit. Sitting down with Lili Anolik, she tells how she turned her biggest liability into gold—and what she’s ready to do for love.
Sofía Vergara is hubba-hubba incarnate. She walks into a room, and all of a sudden, heads are on swivels, and jaws are on floors, tongues unrolling from mouths like so many pink red carpets. There’s something outrageous about her good looks. Something exaggerated, gaudy, blatant, preposterous. Something borderline indecent even. That luscious face—those kiss-puffed lips and velvety eyes, skin without a flaw, lustrous as a pearl—atop that bodacious bod—the softly swelling hips, the gently tapering waist, the oodles of breast and thigh and buttock—is too much. It’s overkill. Not to mention in bad taste. I mean, shouldn’t she be a little less explicit about her extraordinary physical assets? Wear them not quite so proudly? Act as if they’re her burden rather than her glory? Or at least downplay them some? Cool it, for instance, on the clothes that make her look naked? Surely the necklines don’t have to be as low-dipping as the heels are high-climbing? The fabrics as clingy as the patterns are predatory? (She’s not dressed, she’s gift-wrapped.) Why doesn’t she do what actresses the public would prefer to see in flagrante than in Shakespeare so often do and turn her hair into a veil she can hide behind, treat her beauty like it’s a disfigurement? Or like it’s an obstacle, the thing standing between her and True Artiste-dom? (Charlize Theron didn’t win that Oscar until she blimped out and got herself prosthetic teeth and a frizzed-out mullet.) Or like it’s a joke—the most popular option of all? Deface it with tattoos and piercings, extreme applications of eye shadow? Degrade it by featuring it in a sex tape with negligible production values—improper framing, poor sound quality, unflattering lighting?
Maybe because she’s not an American by birth and therefore the crackpot notion that all men are created equal never even crossed her mind. Or maybe because she’s a Catholic, convent-educated, and so understands that the need to worship isn’t unseemly or evidence of weak character, that it’s a perfectly natural human impulse, and is thus able to accept the rapture she inspires with a grace and an ease and an utter lack of neurosis. Small wonder that Sophia Loren (born in 1934) was her idol growing up. That’s about how far back you have to go to find another un-ironic sex symbol.
HOW TO MAKE AN ENTRANCE
The room Sofía is walking into today, known as “The Living Room”—the cozy folksiness of the name a dead giveaway that it’s going to be the ultimate in austere chic—is on the first floor of the Peninsula Beverly Hills. Sofía wanted to meet there for afternoon tea. Tea doesn’t seem like it would be her cup of, and it certainly isn’t mine, but, hey, I can crook my pinkie when the circumstances demand it. I arrive at 1:30, though I’m not due ‘til 2, because the ebbs and flows of L.A. traffic are mysterious to me, plus intimidating, which means I’m half an hour early minimum to every appointment in the city.
The Peninsula is, as I suspected, a very hoity-toity affair, so understated in its elegance it’s almost flashy, with a clientele that likes puttin’ on the Ritz even at hotels that aren’t. Lots of women dressed to the nines, swizzle-stick-thin with ash-blond hair and of no discernible age other than not-old, fussing with teapots and sugar bowls and nibbling on sandwiches the size of large crumbs. The males present are either waiters—Latino, every one—in button-down shirts and vests, darting hither and yon unobtrusively, trays balanced on spread palms, or high-level wheeler-dealers—white, every one—in dark suits with berserkly expensive-looking watches and/or ties and/or briefcases, conducting urgent business in low voices.
Sofía Vergara, photographed at the Smith-Costos residence, in Rancho Mirage, California.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Sofía enters at two on the dot, the moment the heads-and-jaws-and-tongues thing happens, though the crowd is a sophisticated one, so it gets ahold of itself pretty quick, remembers that maintaining a blasé front is how you prove you belong, the secret handshake, and people start pretending that they were yawning or stretching or signaling for the check—anything other than gawking like fish-mouthed hick tourists—then return to their conversations or cell-phone screens, and thereafter sneak only the discreetest of peeks. Sofía acts as if she doesn’t notice the furor she’s created, not flinching, not even blinking, as she crosses from one end of the room to the other, running the gauntlet of all those non-looks without a trace of shyness or self-consciousness. As I wait for her to reach our table, it occurs to me that that’s a star’s job—or a star’s trick: to be watched by eyes both human and camera while behaving as if unobserved, never breaking the spell.
A waiter pulls out the chair for her, and she thanks him in Spanish, and the expression on his face says he wants the earth to open up and swallow him whole because life can’t get any sweeter. Sofía looks—surprise, surprise—like the character she plays on the Emmy Award-winning ABC sitcom Modern Family, Gloria Delgado-Pritchett, the much younger wife of Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill). Dresses like her, too: jeans that are less pants than a second skin, snug top with a cheetah motif on it, and a humdinger diamond on her ring finger that puts all other humdinger diamonds in the vicinity to shame. Also, sounds like her. (That accent, let me tell you, is not part of the act.)
We don’t waste any time, get right down to it. Sofía just came from a fitting, so her breasts are on her brain.
Sofía: “My boobs are, like, huge.” She gives a representation of said hugeness with her hands. “My whole life, buying a bra was a nightmare. What I used to do when I moved to L.A., I found places like Frederick’s of Hollywood that make bras for streetwalkers.”
Sofía Vergara poses for Annie Leibovitz.
Me (confused): “Streetwalkers? Like, prostitutes? Like, hookers?”
Sofía (shaking her head, laughing): “No, no, not hookers. I can’t think of the word. You know”—doing a kind of hootchy-kootchy shimmy with her shoulders—“dancers.”
Me (understanding dawning): “Oh oh oh, you mean strippers.”
Sofía: “Yes, strippers. Skinny girls with gigantic boobs.”
Me: “Gigantic fake boobs.”
Sofía: “Believe me, I wish I had fake boobs. I lay down and they completely go down like all the way, like here.” Another representation with her hands. “It’s not fun.”
(Note to reader: I don’t claim to have the most discerning eye when it comes to matters mammary, but Sofía’s breasts look plenty good to me. Large, yes, yet high and pert. Oomphy, too.)
Talk of breasts quite naturally segues into talk of babies. Sofía was public about her decision to freeze her eggs two years ago. She recently accepted a marriage proposal from Big Dick Richie, arguably the hunkiest of the Magic Mike hunks. Well, technically, she accepted the proposal from Joe Manganiello, the actor who plays Big Dick Richie. (Like Sofía, Joe is freak-of-nature gorgeous. People don’t look; they ogle.) Says Sofía, “The day that I sent the press release [announcing the breakup with a different fiancé, Nick Loeb], Joe immediately contacted Jesse Tyler Ferguson [Modern Family’s Mitchell Pritchett], like, Please, please, please tell her I want her number. And I’m like, Jesse, no, he’s too handsome. Then, after two days of Jesse trying to convince me, I’m like, O.K., give him my number. I’m thinking, I’m in New Orleans shooting, and he’s in L.A. Nothing’s going to happen. But we started talking a lot, and then he showed up in New Orleans. Since then we’ve been inseparable. There’s nothing about him I’d change other than the fact that he’s four years younger than me [he’s 38 to her 42].” (Another note to reader: Sofía’s love life is, to me, part of her un-ironic sex-symbol side. It’s hyper-volatile—and hyperactive—in that Old Hollywood Lana Turner/Ava Gardner/Elizabeth Taylor way. She was, it seemed, forever getting engaged and disengaged from the aforementioned Nick Loeb, the “Onion Crunch King,” an entrepreneur as passionate about crispy condiments as he is about beautiful women. And apart from Loeb and Manganiello, she’s been reportedly linked to heartthrob pop stars—Craig David and Enrique Iglesias—heartthrob actors—Tom Cruise and Tyrese Gibson—and heartthrob hoodlums—Chris Paciello, a Johnny Stompanato-like Italian Stallion Miami-nightclub owner and made man turned unmade man when he ratted out high-ranking members of the Bonanno crime family, and Andres López López, a former Colombian drug trafficker and cartel lieutenant.)
Now that wedded bliss is just around the corner, it sounds as if Sofía’s seriously considering taking those eggs off ice. “My son, Manolo, is 23 years old, which is going to be really weird if I have another baby. But, you know, Joe wants babies and if it’s going to make him super-happy, then—” She dot-dot-dots, lifting a lovely shoulder.
HOW TO MAKE IT HAPPEN
Before the happily-ever-after, though, the once-upon-a-time: Sofía was 37, a 20-year veteran of the entertainment industry, when she became an overnight sensation on Modern Family. She was just 17, a senior at Marymount, founded by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary—a real live Catholic schoolgirl, a fantasy come true!—the day a photographer got a load of her catching rays in her hometown of Barranquilla, Colombia, and cast her in a spot for Pepsi. The concept of the commercial was, basically, T&A&G (-string): Sofía on a beach in an itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny. The waves weren’t the only things swelling as she jiggled her way across the hot sand to cool off with an ice-cold carbonated beverage. The ad, widely broadcast in Latin America, was a smash, as was she. And, all at once, it was modeling and acting offers galore.
Except she didn’t want to model or act. She wanted Barranquilla and a nice, simple life. And she got it. At 18 she married her high-school sweetheart, Joe Gonzalez, and enrolled in college to study dentistry. At 20, though, the nice simple life seemed not so nice and less simple than dumb, and it was adios to Joe and bad breath. Packing up her bags, she headed to Bogotá with her new baby. By her mid-20s she was a host on a hugely popular television show in Latin America. She—well, why don’t I let Sofía describe her job? “It was a political kind of thing—serious. I was the fun part. They would put me on to, like, kid around with people, get their real personalities.” She even interviewed the president of Colombia, though she can’t remember which one. (How much you want to bet he didn’t forget her?) In the mid-90s, she packed her bags again, headed to Miami. Took a job with Univision, hosting a travel show, Fuera de Serie, which meant getting back into a bikini so small it made Eve look overdressed in a fig leaf. Says Sofía, “I was recognized by every Latin person in the United States because there were only two TV stations for Latin people. So everybody is watching you no matter what—if you’re good or bad, they’re watching you.”
Sofía then set her sights on the English-speaking market; her first crossover role was as the maid who gets her toes sucked by Stanley Tucci in 2002’s Big Trouble. Big Trouble wasn’t exactly the second coming of Citizen Kane. Still, it was a beginning. And the parts would get larger, the projects more prestigious: stealing every scene she was in as Tyrese Gibson’s girlfriend in Four Brothers, proving too much woman for the little boys of Entourage,pumping sex and sass into a couple of Tyler Perry movies. There were two sitcoms, Hot Properties and The Knights of Prosperity. Neither caught on. Dirty Sexy Money looked promising until the writers’ strike happened, and it was curtains for it too.
And then along came Modern Family. Christopher Lloyd, the show’s co-creator, recalls the initial meeting with Sofía: “She walked into the room. And if you’ve worked in Hollywood for any length of time, you know that people who look like that are never funny. But she was.” (Yet another note to reader: there’s no disputing Lloyd’s claim that great-looking people are rarely laugh-a-minute. I’d argue, though, that self-deprecation is a must for Sofía. She has to trash herself a little, just to make the fact that she’s so scarily beautiful less, well, scary.) Lloyd and partner Steve Levitan had a loose conception of Gloria’s character, but they immediately began tailoring the role specifically to Sofía, giving Gloria a Colombian background and a son named Manny. Modern Family was an instant hit. And thanks to it, Sofía became rich and famous beyond her wildest dreams, and the top-earning actress in television three years running, according to Forbes magazine, a four-time Emmy Award nominee, and a household name not only in Latin America but in America America.
HOW TO REALLY MAKE IT HAPPEN
You tell the story like this, and that’s how Sofía more or less tells it, and it sounds easy. Plus, she makes it look easy. And not just because she looks like she looks—a movie star, no-brainer and can’t-miss—but because she behaves like she behaves. She’s warm and open and generous. (Says Ed O’Neill, “In interviews Sofía will say about me, ‘He’s a sexy guy,’ and I always think, That is so kind of her.”) Dishes it out, though more often takes it. It’s this quality that makes her so great on Conan and Letterman and Ellen. She might be the host with the most, but she’s an even better guest. OnJimmy Kimmel Live! last year she read a mean tweet someone had written about her—“Sofía Vergara sounds like she has a dick in her mouth”—and then, without skipping a beat, shot back, “What’s wrong with having a dick in my mouth?” And then she’s got that whole Gloria thing going on, meaning she projects two equally erotic personas simultaneously: that of a bombshell forever exploding, and that of a peel-me-a-grape baby doll who wants to spend her days curled in luxury’s lap.
“I’ve never been so charmed by anyone in my whole life,” says Reese Witherspoon, her co-star in the upcoming comedy Hot Pursuit, a cross between Thelma & Louise and Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, with a little It Happened One Night thrown in. And that’s exactly my experience. Sofía’s pretty much impossible not to like. There’s a force-of-nature quality to her. You get swept up in the beauty and the glamour and the magnetism, the sense of fun and mischief. It’s hard to keep your wits about you, to remember that she and Gloria are not the same woman, even if they seem like they are. That she isn’t the trophy wife of some who’s-your-sugar-daddy? geriatric who’s dedicated his few remaining years to making her every wish his command, though she easily could have gone that route. That everything she’s got she’s earned, and that she can peel her own grapes, thank you very much. Which means ultra-feminine, glowingly carnal, charm-itself Sofía, all sumptuous smiles and curvaceous softness, has a tough-hombre side, a macho side, even if it isn’t visible. Has to because she overcame so many obstacles: early divorce, single motherhood, a brother kidnapped and murdered in Colombia, another brother deported from the U.S. after 30-plus arrests on drug-related charges, thyroid cancer at 28, and, finally, her stranger-in-a-strange-land-English-as-a-second-languageness.
“People who look like that are never funny. But she was,” says Modern Family co-creator Christopher Lloyd on casting Vergara. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
That last one alone would have been enough to do in most people. It’s just a fact: if you aren’t a citizen of this country, you get treated differently. (Sofía didn’t become a U.S. citizen until 2013.) And by “differently,” of course, I mean worse. Says Sofía, “At the time [the 90s] there were no managers for TV personalities in the Latin market.” According to Luis Balaguer, the man who would become her manager, the lack of representation was due, in large part, to Univision, which had a virtual monopoly on Spanish-speaking talent: “You needed to be careful. You needed to behave, because if Univision fired you, people would never hear from you again.” And Univision did more than discourage the hiring of managers. It also insisted that talent sign a contract—written in English, even though so much of the Univision talent could only habla español—in the room and on the spot, no lawyer to run a magnifying glass over that fine print. (Univision, incidentally, declined to comment for this article.) Sofía remembers, “I trained one of my interns to make calls for me and tell people how wonderful I was. Just so I wasn’t the one saying it.”
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And, a few years later, when Sofía attempted to break out of Univision and into mainstream Hollywood, her first order of business was eliminating her accent. Only it wasn’t so easy to shake: “I hired the speech coach, and you have to work so much. It’s exhausting. It’s also boring. And I have a bad ear, you know? I’ve been in this country for 20-something years and I still sound like this. I still get confused, and it’s like, Is that girl retarded? So I was going to auditions and the only thing I could focus on was the position of the tongue. I was not acting. And then I thought, If I can’t get a job with my accent, this is not a job for me.” That was a major moment for her. It changed everything, because instead of continuing to try to Americanize, blend in, she hyper-Latinized, emphasized the ways in which she stuck out. And it was the making of her since, with the accent, she’s Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo in one. Without the accent, she’s—well, she’s unimaginable without the accent. Like Marilyn Monroe without the mole, Madonna without the gap tooth.
So, through a mixture of determination, nerve, shrewdness, and desperation, Sofía turned a liability into an asset. And staying true to the accent wasn’t her only move. She dyed her hair, which grows out of her head a dark shade of honey, so she looked more Latin, or at least what English-speaking America thought of as Latin. And though she’s no doubt naturally fiery and spicy and zesty and all other adjectives Taco Bell might use to describe its Crunchy Taco Supreme, i.e., adjectives so clichéd they practically qualify as ethnic slurs when applied to an individual of Latin heritage, she also exaggerates those aspects of her personality.
Her decision to go broad, though, does have its consequences. For example, she’s had to contend with the criticism that she perpetuates a stereotype. “If Gloria is a stereotype, so what? Who wouldn’t want to be Gloria?” So she pooh-poohs the charge, but she doesn’t, you’ll notice, deny it. And you could argue that on Modern Family she’s playing not so much a Colombian woman as a cartoon of a Colombian woman; that Gloria’s a dumb-blonde joke only brunette and with a racist twist; that Sofía got rich by exploiting her own people. And you’d have a point—a not-my-point point and a missing-the-point point, but a point. Not that it would be of any use to you since, point or no point, you’d be wrong.
Here’s how Sofía got rich: by exploiting the people who exploited her people. First, though, two deceptions. Number one was perpetrated by Forbes, because calling Sofía the “highest-paid TV actress” is sneaky phrasing, as it implies that she makes most of her loot from her TV show, which she does not. She earns a reported $325,000 per episode, serious cash, but nowhere near serious enough to get her to $37 million, which, again according to Forbes, is how much she raked in last year. Number two was perpetrated by moi because earlier I described Luis Balaguer as Sofía’s manager, and he is, but that’s only half the story. He’s her business partner as well. They founded Latin World Entertainment (LatinWE) in the mid-90s as a talentmanagement company. Says Balaguer, a former music manager with a silky voice and lovely manners, “You know how people say they started from zero? We literally started from zero.”
LatinWE got off to a rocky start. Its first client, Fernando Fiore, Sofía’s co-host on Fuera de Serie, was let go by Univision when word leaked that he’d acquired representation, his contract not renewed. “It was a scary time,” says Balaguer. “We camped out in the parking lot and signed everyone who walked in and out the door.” The refusal to back down or off worked. Says Fiore, “Univision didn’t want to deal with us, but now they had to deal with us. LatinWE changed things. We paved the way for those younger. What [Charlie] Chaplin and [Douglas] Fairbanks did for the general talent in the 20s or whenever, we did for the Spanish-speaking talent in the 90s. We were pioneers.”
Sofía’s first celebrity endorsement deal was with Bally Total Fitness, in 1998. The commercial, featuring Sofía, was in Spanish, and, after it aired, an ecstatic Bally executive informed Sofía and Balaguer that, suddenly, Spanish-speaking people were lining up outside gym doors all across the nation to sweat off those love handles. The pair’s ears pricked. They’d been spoiling for an opportunity. Well, here it was. Says Balaguer, “It was clear that brands did not have a clue how to reach Hispanic people. A lot of the time their commercials were just English commercials dubbed in Spanish.” Basically, Sofía and Balaguer recognized that Latins in this country were overlooked, not to mention underserved, and that there wasmucho dinero to be made on this blunder, though even they didn’t guess how mucho.
LatinWE would go on to become a licensing, marketing, production, and new-media juggernaut. And when Sofía hit, as she says, “the jackpot,” with Modern Family in 2009, her value as a celebrity endorser went through the roof. “I’m the perfect candidate for any endorsement,” Sofía explains, “because they hire me and hit the English and Spanish markets at the same time.” And it’s through these endorsements—she’s the face of Diet Pepsi, Head & Shoulders, CoverGirl, and AT&T—that so much of her fortune comes. I should mention, too, the fragrance she launched for HSN and her line with Kay Jewelers and— Actually, I’ll stop there, because the list goes on and on and we don’t have all day.
HOW TO MAKE IT LOOK EASY BREEZY
Sofía takes justifiable pride in her business savvy. About her theatrical talents, though, she’s far more modest. “I never wanted to be an actress,” she says. “I take acting as a gift, because it was nothing that I ever dreamed about growing up.” That she’s short-shrifting makes a certain kind of sense. She’s had, after all, no formal training, and getting laughs is easy for her, her comic timing every bit as super-abundant and God-given natural as her 32F breasts. She doesn’t have to go to Dustin-Hoffman-in-Marathon-Man-stay-awake-three-days-in-a-row lengths in order to believably embody Gloria. And Hot Pursuit, described by Witherspoon as “a culture-clash comedy,” looks like a hoot but not like a stretch. Sofía will be playing another hot-tamale Latina with an imperfect command of the English language. And, listen, I get it. She sticks with the same role for the same reason she sticks with the same outfit: because through sheer force of will she’s turned herself into a brand, and the characters she portrays and the clothes she wears are part of that brand. (“Sometimes you read in the press like, oh, Sofía is wearing again the same shape dress, and I want to answer them and say, What the fuck do you want me to wear? Obviously there’s a reason why that’s what I go for.”) Playing a hot-stuff Latina works for her just like playing a cuddly dumb-bunny blonde worked for Marilyn Monroe, or playing a cheekbone-y upper-class gamine worked for Audrey Hepburn. And why mess with a good thing?
She did, however, come close to messing with it once: 2012’s The Paperboy, a pulp noir set in the South during the summer of ‘69, the weather sultry enough that you could practically see the sweat beads popping out on the camera’s lens, and directed by Lee Daniels (Precious). Sofía was originally cast as Charlotte Bless, an in-heat bottle blonde with fake lashes so long and so thick and so dark it looks as if a black-widow spider were dangling its legs off the end of each eyelid. The part involved a lot of secreting: perspiration, masturbation, and, most notably, urination. Charlotte wriggles out of her bikini bottom and pees all over Zac Efron’s chest and face after he’s swarmed by jellyfish. (“If anyone’s gonna piss on him, it’s gonna be me,” she snarls at a trio of concerned young beach bunnies.) A scheduling conflict forced Sofía to drop out of the movie. Nicole Kidman took her place. Kidman’s never been sleazier—or better. Still, though, I would’ve loved to have seen Sofía in the role, seen Miss-Universe-looks-but-Miss-Congeniality-personality, off-the-charts Q score, wholesomely sexy Gloria playing the nastiest piece of work below the Mason-Dixon Line. A jailhouse groupie and bit of swamp trash with a lewd curl to her lip—pure raunch.
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We talk about The Paperboy fairly early in the conversation, and the only regrets expressed are mine. “I was lucky I was even on the list,” says Sofía. “If it worked, it worked. If it didn’t, it didn’t. It’s not something that I am thinking I have to show that I can also do serious things.” Subject closed.
Except not. We return to it in an indirect way just as we’re getting ready to wrap up. I ask Sofía about her behind-the-camera work on Hot Pursuit (she and Witherspoon are not only co-starring but co-producing), whether it’s a one-off or the first of many, and her response indicates that her earlier words about the missed opportunity of The Paperboy were more casual than her feelings. “I’m limited because of my accent, the way I look. And if I want to do more serious stuff I think I’m going to have to end up producing it myself.” She pauses, thinking a thought through, and then says, “There is one thing that I want to do one day, and my son is the one that has encouraged me. He said that I should do a movie, and the character should be a crazy woman. Abusive or bipolar—a scary person.”
I don’t quite know what Sofía, or her son, has in mind, but I have a feeling that the next time Zac Efron—or any other up-and-coming hot young stud actor, for that matter—tangles with a school of jellyfish, Sofía will be ready to answer the call of duty by answering the call of nature.
HOW TO MAKE AN EXIT
Coda: The interview is over. Sofía walked out five minutes before, her exit causing even more of a stir than her entrance, since the room is semi-crowded now. I’ve signed the check, but I’m still sitting at the table. Am busy fooling with my two tape recorders, making sure that there were no mid-dialogue shutoffs or battery poop-outs. A hand touches my shoulder. Startled, I look up. It’s Sofía. She says, sounding slightly embarrassed, “I didn’t mean to just leave you. Do you have enough money?” I flash back to my conversation with Luis Balaguer, him telling me about LatinWE’s early days, how he and Sofía would arrange business lunches and then, when the meal was done and the potential client on his way, immediately start scrambling to pay the bill, inside-outing their pockets, digging for loose change at the bottom of their wallets. She must’ve been worried that that was what was happening to me now. Smiling, I promise her that I have it covered.
I expect her to turn away again, only she doesn’t, just stands there. She’s waiting for me, I realize after a few slack-jawed duh-duh seconds. Gathering up my recorders, my notebook and pen and cell phone, I jump to my feet. Then I fumble to cover my eyes with sunglasses because I know I don’t have what it takes, that I’ll crack under the pressure of all those gazes, will blush or nervous-laugh or break into a trot or, worse, trip. At last the sunglasses are in place, my bag hooked over my shoulder. Sofía and I exchange a nod, and then, together, we walk out of the room.
