she almost didn’t end up with fiancé Joe Manganiello for
one reason: he was just too good-looking. “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,” Vergara tells Anolik. “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].” The story is accompanied by a sexy photo shoot by contributing photographer Annie Leibovitz that plays up Vergara’s role as what Anolik calls “hubba-hubba incarnate.” In a video interview on VF.com, Vergara says of working with Leibovitz, “It’s amazing when you work with somebody that you trust so much. She told me things that maybe with other photographers I would have felt like, What? No bra?! Like what? With that dog on top of me?! Like here I was just doing it because I knew she was going to take care of me.” Vergara also talks about transitioning from fame in the Spanish-speaking entertainment world to international superstardom, telling Anolik she decided to turn the very traits that many Hollywood insiders would consider liabilities into gold. She says, “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 . . . So I was going to auditions and the only thing I could focus on was the position of the tongue.