Eva Longoria Calls the Shots

Back in the mid-2000s, when Desperate Housewives was a staple of the ABC primetime lineup, women like Eva Longoria tended to give a certain kind of speech at the dinners and events their roles required them to attend: short, sweet, grateful. It would be almost a decade before #OscarsSoWhite kicked off wider conversations about inclusion in entertainment. The seismic shifts that movements like Time’s Up and #MeToo would lead to were still unthinkable. But Longoria deviated from the script when she stood up at one otherwise unremarkable event and said a few words about her role as the cutthroat and spoiled Gabrielle Solis.

The series was at its peak in 2007, treating audiences to elaborate drama, dark humor, and the domestic machinations of Wisteria Lane. Longoria had become a household name. When it was time for her to deliver her remarks, she walked up to the podium and said, with a little bravado, how much it thrilled her to be a Latina on television who employed a white gardener.

Now it sounds obvious—that someone like Longoria, 45, would celebrate such a delicious subversion of power. But back then, the room bristled. From her seat in the crowd, Kerry Washington remembers feeling it. “It was like, ‘Who is this woman of color calling out race and class? Who is she to make us uncomfortable?’” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘I want to be friends with this woman. I want to be friends with her forever.’ I just loved it.”

Longoria—actor, producer, director, founding member of Time’s Up, emcee of the first night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, activist, cookbook author, philanthropist, mother, shall we go on?—has made it a point to upend the expectations set for her, not just in front of the camera (and sometimes the rankled audiences), but behind the scenes.

This is the woman who earned a master’s degree in Chicano/a Studies from Cal State while filming Desperate Housewives, racing off to night school twice a week, from 7 p.m. until 10 p.m., and returning to set for a 6 a.m. call the next morning. She loved her homework: “As a student at 38, it’s different than being a student at 18. I would be like, ‘So, I read ahead.’”

This is the same person who, when prompted in a 2017 interview to share the easiest decision she ever made, responded with: “Directing. It was a natural evolution and I knew it.” (Her first credit came in 2014, with an episode of Devious Maids on Lifetime.) When I tell her over Zoom in September that it still thrills me to hear a woman exude such confidence, Longoria shrugs: “I love telling people what to do, and I’m good at it.”

There are some stars who write a check or take a picture for the cause, and then there’s Eva Longoria. When America Ferrera asked her to cohost an event before the two knew each other well, she didn’t just accept but told Ferrera that she could use her house, volunteered to hire a caterer, and had her assistant meet Ferrera at the door, despite the fact that Longoria couldn't be home to attend.

“Her life motto is ‘Mi casa es su casa’ in the most literal sense,” says Ferrera, who has since held countless events at Longoria’s home. For her friends and allies, Longoria is an advisor and a confidante, as much a cheerleader as she was in high school. To the people who underestimate her? Well. “She doesn’t suffer fools,” Ferrera says. “And I wouldn’t bet against her—let’s put it like that.”

Longoria grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas—the latest in a line of proud, self-proclaimed “know-it-all” women. She remembers lighting the stove on her own, at six, learning to scramble eggs. (In retrospect, perhaps her mother’s readiness to empower a kindergartener with matches wasn’t the best idea. On the other hand, Longoria is now an excellent cook.) She paid for her own extracurriculars in high school. She figured out how to take out student loans.

“There were no cell phones, there was no Google Maps, no one to explain how to open a checking account or deposit a check—all of that stuff,” Longoria says. Achieving meant trial and error. It involved fast-food jobs and debt. It was exhausting. It also showed her what she was capable of.

She’d never planned to end up in Los Angeles, but as soon as the former Miss Corpus Christi landed there (the trip came with the crown), the overtures started. “[People] were like, ‘We want to sign you,’ and I was, ‘Sign what?’” Longoria told the Chicago Tribune in 2006. She started landing roles, with the biggest break coming in 2000 when she scored a part on The Young and the Restless. Ever practical, she kept her far more lucrative job as a corporate headhunter while filming the soap.

Even at the time, she knew she should be thankful for even the most modest opportunities. But she also understood that the more control she had, the less she’d have to settle. On the set of Desperate Housewives, she peppered the crew with questions about the process—the better to run it. When she did decide to move behind the camera, headlines told a now-familiar tale of an actor who wanted to give producing and directing a shot.

Not so, rules Longoria: “I’m a producer and director who fell into acting.”

After Desperate Housewives wrapped, Longoria served as an executive producer on its creator’s next project, Devious Maids. And when Nina Lederman, who then was head of scripted development at Lifetime, asked her to direct an episode of the series, Longoria didn’t hesitate. She would do it, she told Lederman.

“Later, I was like, ‘Oh shit,’” Longoria says. But she swallowed her uncertainties, determined to channel the white men she saw all around her whose first instinct—no matter their qualifications—seemed to be, “Of course I can.”

In the end, of course she could.

After Devious Maids, Longoria directed an episode of The CW’s Jane the Virgin, two episodes of Fox’s sitcom The Mick, and three of the ABC sitcom Blackish. Were it not for the pandemic, she’d be making her directorial film debut, shooting back-to-back features—Flamin’ Hot, a biopic about the Mexican American janitor who invented the most iconic of Cheeto flavors, and 24-7, a modern riff on 9-to-5 about a group of women accountants who join forces to solve a fraud case and save their jobs.

With 24-7, which she landed before Flamin’ Hot, the plan had not been for her to direct it. She is both a producer on the film and one of its stars, alongside none other than Kerry Washington. She and Washington—who have indeed been friends ever since Longoria gave that fateful speech—developed the concept and were determined to find a woman to helm it. Ten interviews later, it was Washington who stated the obvious: Longoria should direct.

But this time, unlike with Lederman, she demurred. Washington needled her. She was made for this! And Paul Feig, the creator of Freaks and Geeks and director of Bridesmaids, who was attached to produce 24-7, promised to mentor her. Plus, Longoria did have opinions about how the film—which she describes as “an exploration of women in the workplace post Time’s Up”—should take shape. The film is her response to women-led comedies that are “still a little too formulaic.” (She is less and less interested in blockbusters about “bumbling spies” and remakes that boil down to “let’s just change those men to women,” as she puts it.)

When it came time to meet with Universal Pictures, Longoria was about to launch into her well-rehearsed presentation when Washington preempted her. Longoria remembers Washington telling the executives that she’d worked with the best directors—Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay. And still, she maintained, “no one’s better for the job than Eva.”

Longoria cried in the boardroom. “If she hadn’t gone to bat for me, I don’t think they would have had as much confidence,” she says. “I got the job. And getting that job helped me get Flamin’ Hot.”

To Washington, it didn’t feel like some great risk. As she and Longoria went about their search, she had started thinking, Why are we out here looking for what we already have? Our producer has the immense talent and the experience and the capability to get this done.

“It was like those old romantic comedies,” Washington says. “The woman is dating and looking and looking and then it was her best friend all along!”

Anxious as she is to return to set (more than once she has texted her producing partner, speculating about whether Flamin’ Hot or 24-7 will film first), Longoria appreciates that the pandemic-induced production pause has given her time to focus on getting out the vote ahead of a critical election. This summer’s gig at the Democratic National Convention marked her third convention cameo. (In 2012, when she served as cochair of President Obama’s reelection bid, her speech included one of the event’s most memorable lines: “The Eva Longoria who worked at Wendy’s flipping burgers—she needed a tax break,” she said. “But the Eva Longoria who works on movie sets does not.”) Through the political action committee she cofounded in 2014, she has raised millions of dollars to support liberal candidates and impress upon them the importance of courting Latino voters. Last month, with all her spare time, she and Ferrera teamed up on She Se Puede, a digital media platform to elevate Latina voices.

She’s heard the rumblings since the start of her career—that actors shouldn’t have political opinions, that entertainers should keep their positions to themselves. Longoria waves them off. “This is what we do. This is not who we are. Who we are is people who want change and progress.”

Directing has not just solidified that conviction but given her an even greater stake in the political process. Longoria remembers working on Telenovela, a short-lived sitcom that aired on NBC in 2015. She starred in and executive-produced the series. She also directed one of its episodes—her first TV job after Devious Maids. On set, she took a walk with one of her mentors. “The construction was going up,” she recalls. “And he goes, ‘Isn’t this insane? This is wild, right?’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he goes, ‘You had an idea, and now 300 people have a job.’”

Showrunning or directing—“it is like running a microcosm of what government should look like, of what Fortune 500 companies should look like,” as Longoria puts it. One project at a time, she wants to prove that there are alternatives to business as usual.

Later, as she was gearing up to produce and direct the mystery series Grand Hotel for ABC, a stack of résumés for the show’s director of photography landed on her desk. “I get sent Bob and Harry and John to interview, and I said, ‘Bob and Harry and John are great, but are there any female résumés I can look at?’”

In the end Longoria hired cinematographer Alison Kelly. Once Kelly started, she tapped a woman to be her camera operator. That camera operator chose a woman to be her first assistant. All three have gone on to other jobs, bringing with them the experience of having worked under a woman and on a set full of other women and people of color.

Longoria takes enormous pride in the skills she’s developed as a boss. She loves finding new talent. She likes making decisions and problem solving. But she also prizes knowing who to turn to when she has questions. It is a mark of her poise and charisma that she has no problem admitting what she doesn’t know or still hasn’t mastered. She is confident in her abilities—the rest is knowing who to call.

When the script for Flamin’ Hot crossed her desk and Longoria decided she wanted to direct it, her agent leveled with her—Searchlight Pictures seldom hired first-time directors. She could make the case, but the odds weren’t in her favor. Undeterred, she reached out to the director Ron Howard, who gave her pointers on her pitch over lunch. Longoria is much too much of a pragmatist to make a whole lot of black-and-white proclamations, but her work is rooted in a simple principle: “There is nothing more powerful than being armed with information.”

In 2018, when the Me Too movement demonstrated just how consequential information sharing could be, of course Longoria wanted in: “I found this insane sisterhood when we founded Time’s Up with Natalie Portman and Reese Witherspoon, women I would have never otherwise had access to, much less interaction with.” Earlier in her life, she might have held back, internalizing the notion that success for one woman comes at a cost for others. She had heard—as Witherspoon and Portman and scores of others had—that there wouldn’t be room for all of them. “The second Time’s Up started, I felt like people went, ‘Uh-oh, the women are talking,’”

Now curious clauses in contracts are shared among them. The women compare notes about who gets paid what or the fine print on inclusion riders. When one of the group’s members was dealing with a studio that claimed it couldn’t commit to a pledge to hire a diverse cast and crew, Longoria remembers Brie Larson explaining to all of them how she’d wrangled one.

Portman, who attended the first Time’s Up meeting held at—where else?—Longoria’s house, has celebrated her friend’s move into directing and the insider-activist role she’s undertaken in the business. “The best directors are basically amazing parents—showing the way while letting the ‘kids’ explore,” Portman writes in an email. “She is exactly that.”

When Portman decided to invest in a new venture that would launch a professional National Women’s Soccer League team in Los Angeles, Longoria was the first person she called who wanted to be part of it. Later, Ferrera, Uzo Aduba, Jessica Chastain, and Alexis Ohanian and Serena Williams joined too. Portman notes that the seed for the team was planted at a Time’s Up conference, as she and others listened to some of the most celebrated women in soccer detail the persistent inequities that athletes in the sport face.

“We realized how powerful a culture shift it would be if we could support the great women athletes of our time,” Portman says. The team is due to arrive in Los Angeles in 2022.

Longoria has been working since she was 13, so the past few months have given her more time off than she’s had in over three decades. She’s been spending a lot of it at her house in Mexico. Her sister is there. Her son is two, which means she’s freed from navigating homeschooling for now. Save for the occasional work trip—the Biden campaign dispatched her to all-important Florida a few weeks ago—she has spent much of this period with him.

At some point, in 2021 or 2022, she’ll shoot Flamin’ Hot and 24-7. The soccer team will touch down in Los Angeles. There’s also the next steps for Time’s Up to contend with, not to mention scripts to review and a foundation to run.

When I ask Washington how her friend does it all, she pauses to think: “It takes a certain level of strength to be who Eva is in a world that hasn’t shown it knows how to hold space for her. But she allows people the grace to catch up.”

Originally Appeared on Glamour