“Griselda” executive producer breaks down the explosive episode 5 party scene

Eric Newman, who also serves as the series' writer, shares how the intense penultimate episode was carefully formulated.

Sofia Vergara has been a household name for well over a decade thanks to her hilarious and heartwarming performance as Gloria Pritchett on Modern Family. The Colombian star’s comedic chops are quick and so natural that turning her into Griselda Blanco — the cocaine madrina of Miami who terrified anyone in her path — seemed an impossible task. Unless you knew Vergara personally, says writer and executive producer Eric Newman.

"Griselda came about because Sofia reached out to me in 2015 and said, 'I want to play Griselda Blanco,'" Newman tells Entertainment Weekly. "I had one meeting with her and her [producing partner Luis Balaguer] at her house, and I left that meeting convinced based on her determination, her fearlessness. I was convinced from then on that she could do it, that she had to do it, and so I never doubted [her]. The challenging thing to do in a story like this is when you see someone go off the rails and become monstrous, and to kill a child the way that she does in episode 5. It's an accident, yes, but to turn on loyal friends and to humiliate people, it's easy to lose them."

Newman is referring to the intense and explosive 25-minute party scene in episode 5, the limited series’ penultimate episode. The episode is a lesson in pacing and elevating anxiety, and it's an episode that truly puts Vergara’s dramatic skills to the test.

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"The way the party was written, and brilliantly directed by Andy Baiz, and phenomenally acted by our cast, it was this sort of cliff that we drive over," says Newman. "What I've always loved about the episode is it is a brilliant escalation of things and how quickly things go from bad to worse. To start off, it's a celebration for a ‘we did it’ moment, and they don't keep it together for very long. It collapses in the span of a few hours."

When the party begins, Griselda and her underlings are celebrating. They have finally become one of the top "families" in all of Miami. But as the night goes on, and the drinks (and plenty of drugs) flow heavier and heavier, Griselda becomes increasingly paranoid. The rage that she has been holding onto under the surface starts to seep through as she questions the loyalties of her boyfriend Dario (Alberto Guerra), attacks Carmen (Vanessa Ferlito), the only friend who may still care for her, and starts to go off the deep end as she orders her party guests to do things like get naked and bark like dogs, while forcing others to have sex on command (as seen in the NSFW clip at the top of this article).

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Newman explains how this was the moment the creators had been building toward. "We were looking for, as you do when you tell these stories, the best way to represent a total emotional, mental collapse. You have, at this point, all the ghosts and the paranoia and the rage all sort of coming out at once. At some point, the thing that allows you to rise is the thing that will also bring you down. It's something you can't turn off."

He continues: "So to design an episode where we see all the things that allowed her to become Griselda Blanco —the success story, cocaine queen pin, her friends, her family, her wiles— this sort of protective quality she had. Seeing all of it on an overdose of all those components, watching her destroy all the things, the friendships, the relationships that allowed her to become Griselda, to do it in a party, like similar climatic party scenes in films in that era like Shampoo and Boogie Nights and where things — particularly Boogie Nights, when things just went off the rails and it wasn't fun anymore, when the drugs had taken over and the paranoia was everywhere. And that was always the design, to reach a point where she has everything, she is the queen, and this is where it becomes clear to everyone, including her, that that's not enough. Getting what you want is not always getting what you need."

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The party also represents an "off-ramp" of sorts for Griselda, a last chance at a happy ending with her Dario, the father of her youngest son. Though when they met he was a vicious hitman who carried out her bidding without a care in the world, Dario feels compelled to protect his son and asks Griselda to leave her high-stakes life behind to give their family a chance at happiness with a simple life, which Griselda furiously opposes. "This is someone who cannot turn it off, who can't stop," says Newman. "I love to present those characters with off-ramps, happy endings even. From the moment they get offered money from the Ochoas to get out of the business and all her dreams, the dreams that she had had so far would come true. She could go off with this man who loves her and have the money to give her kids a life that she never had and the life that she claimed she was trying to give them, which is why she was doing any of this. And so when Dario is saying, ‘Hey, I love you. We don't need any of this,’ she can't see it. In fact, she can't even trust it. She subverts it and she twists it into something, into a betrayal."

The episode also fills in a few gaps in Griselda’s story. While running a cartel, Griselda is the head, the madrina, but all her workers and the people she is surrounded by are men. That doesn’t mean she didn’t have women around. Griselda was bisexual, a point that isn’t addressed directly throughout the series, but Newman chose to explore that part of her, as well as her friendships with women, as one of the elements of the party sequence.

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"She was bisexual [and] there’s a challenge when you can't speak to someone about their identity,” Newman shares. "There was an element of sex — certainly that was power. This was a woman who was abused. She was a prostitute. She was very much victimized, sexually abused, and that became a certain measure of power — in the same way the abused becomes the abuser, that was as much about power as it was anything else. It was not an emotional gratification or even maybe even a physical gratification. It gratifies a longing for control."

He points to Griselda's relationships with Carmen and Marta as examples. "Marta [is] the new fancy friend and Carmen [is] the sort of old, 'remember where we came from' friend," Newman explains. "That happens often in people who become successful as they cast away the people who knew them when they were struggling in favor of this new reality." In this case, the class system of Latin America also plays a role. "Prior to the drug trafficking business, it was almost impossible for someone born into a lower station in life to find wealth and success and to find themselves in proximity to people like Marta Ochoa, who, though her family had made its money in trafficking or made a lot of money in trafficking, the Ochoas were already an established Colombian family of note prior to drugs," he says. "So her making that choice was an evolution of character that I am now one of these people and I'm no longer one of those people. We also see that in the way she treats her friends, the former employees. She is, at this point, to the manor born; I think she has forgotten where she came from."

But despite all the wild things that Griselda caused during the party, the final nail in the proverbial coffin of her humanity comes at the end, after she orders a hit on one of her men...and ends up killing a young child by accident.

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"Having felt versions of this before," Newman adds, "where she wakes up from a stupor, a bacchanal drug-induced frenzy. And Rivi says to her, 'I missed.' She asked if he did it, and it's such a great performance because she's relieved. She knows she didn't want that. Then she finds out that while they missed Chucho, they killed his son. What it does so effectively is it shows that even though she didn't want it, now she's got it. It's just the fact that she shows some regret instantly. It's such a beautiful moment and I think it is the perfect way to end that party."

Griselda is available to stream on Netflix.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.