Lifetime’s ‘Cocaine Godmother’: Catherine Zeta-Jones On Her ‘Obsession’ with Griselda Blanco

[videowaywire video_id=”Q6D1PJ36BRZ1JTGK”]

*Acclaimed actor Michael Douglas, 73, recently took the unusual step of revealing he has been accused of sexual misconduct before the alleged victim(s) went public.

When asked about the allegations against her husband, Catherine Zeta-Jones stated that she supports both Douglas and the #MeToo movement.

“My reaction was that as two people who have been in this business — him longer than me — was that we support ‘Me Too’ and the movement more than anybody, anybody — me as a woman, him as a man,” said Zeta-Jones while promoting her upcoming Lifetime movie “Cocaine Godmother: The Griselda Blanco Story.”

The Academy Award/Tony Award-winning actress led a panel discussion about the film during the TCA winter press tour on Jan. 14, where she dished about playing the queen of all drug kingpins, Griselda Blanco.

“I have been wanting to play Griselda Blanco for over three years, in fact, since I first saw the documentary “Cocaine Cowboys,” which she’s not featured in physically, obviously, because she was deceased when that was in production,”Zeta-Jones explains. “But I found that these men, some of them still in jail, all talked about La Madrina, this woman, the godmother.  And they feared her, and they revered her. And I was thinking, “My god, what do I know about this woman, this woman, in a very dark, dangerous, man’s world and who had so much power” she adds.

“When you find a story like this that has never been done…, I just went all out for it. It wasn’t until I sat down with Tanya Lopez at Lifetime A&E, and she said, “Are you still obsessed with Griselda Blanco?”  And I went, “Yeah.”  And she said, “I have a script.”  And I went, “You are kidding me?”  And it seemed like, the next minute, I was shooting it, and it turned out to be the best four weeks of my life.”

OTHER NEWS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED: Kevin Spacey Accused of Using N-Word on Set of ‘House of Cards’

Griselda, known as La Madrina, the Black Widow, the Cocaine Godmother and the Queen of Narco-Trafficking, was a Colombian drug lord of the Medellín Cartel and a pioneer in the Miami-based cocaine drug trade and underworld during the 1970s and early 1980s. It has been estimated that she was responsible for up to 200 murders while transporting cocaine from Colombia to New York, Miami and Southern California.

When one TCA critic asks how important is it for Catherine to play “strong women” like Blanco, Zeta-Jones replies, “It’s always interesting to play strength and weakness at the same time. I always like to just find the alternative, play someone like Griselda, who is really the polar opposite morally of everything I believe or try to live in a life or instill in my children.”

The mother of two adds, “I applaud my colleagues at Lifetime and my director, Guillermo Navarro. I was adamant that I didn’t want to put her into the cookie cutter that meant, oh, she wasn’t that bad. Oh, she only did it for her kids. Or trying to justify why Griselda became Griselda or was for so many years, in a man’s world, running the show, doing despicable things. I know Medellín now. She came from Medellín back then, which is a really bad place. But there’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men and women who came from Medellín, who came from the same background as Griselda but didn’t turn out like Griselda. So she had a power and a strength, and I do admire that in her.”

On February 20, 1985, Blanco was arrested by DEA agents in her home and held without bail. After her trial, she was sentenced to more than a decade in prison but continued to effectively run her cocaine business from behind bars.

Upon her release, Blanco was deported to Medellin, Colombia. On the night of September 3, 2012, she died after having been shot twice in the head by a motorcyclist outside a butcher shop.

“I don’t want to make everyone like Griselda. I don’t like her. She wasn’t a likable person,” says Zeta-Jones during the TCA panel. “But there is vulnerability. She had so many different layers of being able to see the cracks, and it was known that she was a user herself, and I think that that’s when the cracks got much deeper and the wheels started to come off, because like any addict, eventually, the wheels come off. I had so much to play with. Not just ballbreaking, tough, “shoot them in the head” woman, but the vulnerability. I wanted to show that vulnerability like a little girl that she never was. She never was allowed to be a little girl.”

Zeta-Jones, whose father is Welsh and her mother is of Irish Catholic descent, established herself in Hollywood with roles that highlighted her sex appeal. Critics praised her portrayal of a vengeful pregnant wife in “Traffic” and a murderous singer in the musical “Chicago.”

Despite her box-office success and numerous accolades, the actress says there came a time when she was no longer thrilled or motivated by the lights, cameras and action of acting.

“For a few years there, I lost my kind of mojo in what this was about,” she confesses. But with when the “Cocaine Godmother” script came her way, “it made made me remember why when I was nine years old I left home to go and do theater in London and the feeling of joy and feeling that I’m home and this is what I love to do, I haven’t had that in years.”

Zeta-Jones is now quite optimistic about her future with Hollywood.

“I love how Lifetime stepped up.What I didn’t want to do was sugarcoat her or rose tint the story or make a Lifetime audience like her or root for her. I’ve seen the movie in many of its different cuts, and call me crazy, but I kind of do root for her. It’s like this bizarre, kind of, why do I want this woman not to get caught? This is bizarre, whether it’s because I lived with her for so long. But it’s a fascinating story and it just excites me, and I want to do more now. I want to surround myself with great actors who want to be there, who want to invest as much as me in it, and a director who just wants it all to work, and a crew who go, “I like these people. I want to be part of this,” and really put in the 110 percent. It’s just fun.”

“Cocaine Godmother” airs Saturday, January 20th on Lifetime.

Watch the trailer:

We Publish News 24/7. Don’t Miss A Story. Click HERE to SUBSCRIBE to Our Newsletter Now!