PEOPLE’s Beautiful Issue 2024: A Letter from the Editor

Sofía Vergara first captured America’s hearts on Modern Family. As Gloria Delgado Pritchett, she showed us a mom who unabashedly supports her kids’ uniqueness (weirdness!) and made us laugh with her unparalleled mix of biting sarcasm and go-for broke goofiness. “I’m not afraid to look silly or dumb or ugly. That’s the way to do comedy. You cannot be thinking about whether your hair is perfect. If you can let go of your insecurities, you can be funny,” she said back in 2010, as the show was racking up ratings.

Letting go of your insecurities doesn’t just make it easier to be funny; it allows you to be brave and decisive. Sofía, who’s mom to Manolo, 32, has been honest that one of the reasons she and Joe Manganiello made the painful decision to divorce is because she didn’t want to have more kids. “I know what it means to be a good mother or to try to be the best mother that you can, and that takes a lot of sacrifices,” she told editor at large Julie Jordan. “I didn’t think because of my career, the way I live my life, the way my marriage was, that it was fair to bring [another] kid into this world.”