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Sofia Vergara has played some insanely iconic roles over the years but she’s most known for playing the incredibly naive and yet feisty Gloria Delgado-Pritchett on Modern Family. This project helped the 52-year-old find a place in the industry, which also eventually kickstarted the launch of various business ventures that helped her become one of the most successful actresses today.

Sofia Vergara in Modern Family | Credits: ABC

Despite being booked for roles in successful movies such as The Smurfs, Chef, and Despicable Me, while being recruited as a judge on America’s Got Talent, Vergara had one story that captured her heart, the story of Griselda Blanco, a Columbian drug lord.

Vergara ultimately turned it into a passion project and approached Narcos’ Eric Newman to produce the show with Netflix. Little did she know, Griselda would lead to one of her life’s lowest points.

Sofia Vergara was left gutted...

Upon its debut in January 2024, Netflixs Griselda became an instant hit, due in large part to Sofia Vergaras epic transformation into the real-life Colombian drug queen that stunned both audiences and critics. Now, seven months later, the Modern Family star is opening up about the very personal reasons she had for taking on such a role.

Speaking with Variety, Vergara revealed that it was her late brother, Rafael, who inspired her to take on the role of Griselda Blanco. In 1996, when she was just 24, her older brother was murdered following a failed kidnapping attempt by a Colombian drug cartel. "It destroyed my family," she said before elaborating further.

"It destroyed my mom. It changed our lives completely. We didnt know what was happening, why he had been killed."

Griselda BiographyCrimeDrama Where to Watchstreamrentbuy

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*Availability in US Release Date January 25, 2024Cast Sofia Vergara, Orlando Pineda, Jose VelazquezSeasons 1

With her five-year-old son,...

“Why the fuck do you think that Gloria Pritchett is gonna be able to play Griselda Blanco?”

That’s what Sofía Vergara assumed Eric Newman, the showrunner of Netflix’s “Narcos” franchise, would say when she told him she not only wanted to executive produce a series about the murderous Colombian drug lord, but she wanted to star in it.

After all, Vergara had spent 11 years as Gloria, the hilarious, ditzy trophy wife of Ed O’Neill’s Jay Pritchett on “Modern Family.” Gloria had been an important role for Vergara — not only did it put her on the map, but she portrayed the only adult character of color on a show about an affluent white family. She received four Emmy nominations for the part and was a crucial player in the show’s five-year winning streak in the comedy series category. So would audiences be open to her playing a dramatic part?...

Rachel Maddow is getting into the feature documentary business.

The MSNBC host has produced her first feature-length doc through her production banner Surprise Inside, with the cable channel acquiring the project. MSNBC will debut the film next month.

The film, From Russia With Lev, chronicles the scheme that led to former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment. “It follows the much, much larger-than-life journey of Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-born hustler and former small-time mafia operator whose random, almost accidental association with Trump and Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani took him around the world, and ultimately to prison,” per the logline.

The film will have its world premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is playing host to MSNBC’s Democracy 2024 event on Sept. 7. The premiere is one of the signature pieces of the event.

Billy Corben (Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami) directed the film, with Maddow serving as executive producer.

About a decade into its existence, Hulu became a major player in the world of nonfiction cinema, releasing some of the best documentaries exclusively on its streaming platform. Since debuting its first original documentary acquisition in 2016, with Ron Howard's The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, Hulu has received numerous accolades. These include multiple Academy Award nominations in the Best Documentary Feature category and even an Oscar win for Summer of Soul. Hulu's documentaries have also done well at the Emmys and the Grammys.

Additionally, Hulu features many great documentaries in its library that are not Hulu originals. Through its partnership with Disney, which owns a majority stake in the streamer, Hulu is another place besides Disney+ to find National Geographic Documentary Films selections, including more Academy Award nominees and winners. While the platform is lacking in documentaries from before the 21st century, Hulu more than makes up for its...

Exclusive: Rakontur has wrapped production on The Last of the Cocaine Cowboys, a four-part documentary miniseries on Medellín Cartel co-founder Carlos Lehder.

Described by the U.S. Department of Justice as “the Henry Ford of the cocaine industry,” Lehder co-founded Colombia’s infamous drug cartel alongside Pablo Escobar, Jorge Ochoa and Jose Rodriguez Gacha in the 1970s. He conspired with heads of state to corrupt entire nations and open cocaine smuggling routes in the Bahamas, Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua and Mexico, also buying his own Bahamian island, Norman’s Cay, and transforming it into an air and sea cocaine shipping hub. Lehder simultaneously rose to political power in Colombia as head of the National Latin Movement and helped elect Pablo Escobar to Parliament, with the cartel at its peak smuggling 300 kilos of cocaine per day, and generating 20 billion a year.

Lehder in 1987 became the first Medellín Cartel leader to be captured and extradited to the United States,...

Netflix’s dominance in the streaming television market is holding strong: 10 of the streaming service’s titles populated the latest Nielsen report on the most-viewed streaming television shows of the week.

Nielsen’s latest report on the 10 most-viewed streaming shows, which was based on viewership from August 9 through August 15, was entirely populated by Netflix titles. “Outer Banks,” the teen drama that premiered its sophomore season on the streamer on July 30, was the most-viewed show on Nielsen’s list, with 1,160 million views. The show was a massive hit during its premiere window and was viewed for an impressive 2.1 billion minutes in Nielsen’s previous report. “Hit & Run,” which premiered on Netflix on August 6, came in second, with 549 million minutes viewed. “Grace and Frankie,” which stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, premiered its seventh season on Netflix on August 13. The comedy series was the third most-viewed show on Nielsen’s latest report,...

Fifteen years after the release of his cult-classic film, Cocaine Cowboys, director Billy Corben is returning to Miami’s cocaine wars with a new docuseries. For Corben, this subject matter comes naturally: a lifelong Miamian, he grew up seeing the headlines and hearing the tales from local reporters. Where his previous work looked broadly at the […]

The post ‘Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami’ Director Billy Corben on Revisiting the Drug Trafficking World in a Netflix Docuseries [Interview] appeared first on /Film.

One to hit the market that is creating the sniff of an auction for film and TV rights: The Last Kilo: Willie Falcon and the Cocaine Era That Seduced America. The book proposal is about to hit the market through Verve, and it is written by T.J. English. His previous work, The Corporation: The Epic Story of the Cuban-American Underworld, sold to Paramount in a seven-figure deal with Benicio Del Toro attached to star and Appian Way producing.

The Last Kilo tells the story of Augusto “Willie” Falcon, who, along with partner Sal Magluta and a crew known as Los Muchachos, became the biggest cocaine smugglers in American history — more than $20 billion worth in a two-decade run. The book is based on exclusive interviews with Falcon, who, after serving a 27-year prison term, is currently living under an assumed name in an undisclosed country — to be revealed for the first time in the book.

We’re deep into the dog days of summer, but Netflix’s list of new releases for August 2021 feels like fall.

That is to say that Netflix has some really good library TV titles this month that harken back to the glory days of the fall TV network calendar. August 1 sees the arrival of two of the best NBC shows of all time: Tina Fey comedy 30 Rock, and life-affirming (American) football drama Friday Night Lights. If you’ve not seen either, catch up with them both. That’s an order.

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As for original offerings, Netflix has plenty of those this month as well. Intriguing TV series such as Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified (Aug. 3), Brand New Cherry Flavor (Aug. 13), The Chair (Aug. 20), and Clickbait (Aug.

its August 2021 release schedule on Wednesday, revealing a number of new original movies and series will debut next month, alongside the arrival of numerous library series and films.

The full list of arrivals as well as departures is below, but here are some highlights for what’s new on Netflix for August 2021.

30 Rock and Friday Night Lights

The full series runs of both beloved NBC shows will arrive on Netflix in August.

Catch Me If You Can and Inception

While “The Departed” is among the big movies leaving Netflix at the end of August, the platform will have more than enough to keep Leonardo DiCaprio fans from scrolling endlessly through the app.

The Kissing Booth 3 and He’s All That

Netflix has increasingly programmed to the youth demographic with its slate, and August will feature a pair of movies that double as Gen Z bait: “The Kissing Booth 3...