24 Eva Longoria The Hollywood A-lister on movies, motherhood and making a difference

Actress, director, mum, charity campaigner and women’s rights activist, Eva Longoria is an inspiration, as Gemma Calvert discovers

Eva Longoria Bastón is fretting. She embarked on motherhood just over a year ago and is already agonising over the prospect of her son, Santiago, leaving home. “I do think about the day that I will have to let Santi fly the nest and I can’t even imagine it,” sighs the actress turned producer and director, who welcomed her first child with her Mexican-born media-tycoon husband José “Pepe” Bastón in June last year.

“We talked about where he goes to college and I’m like, ‘No, we’ll move to wherever he wants to go,’” laughs Eva, 44, before becoming all serious again. Like many new mums, she is prone to worry.

“So much, that I talked to my mum about it,” she confesses. “I said, ‘I’m so nervous about the world in which we live in and so many changes.’ It’s a difficult time in the world, everywhere, and my mum said, ‘I felt the same way when you were born.’ This is a recurring anxiety for parents – just the world that we live in. It was scary for her in 1975 and it’s scary for me.”

It is quite a shock to discover fear is in

Eva’s repertoire. She is one of Hollywood’s pluckiest – and game-changing females – a political activist who uses her place in the spotlight to fight for people with special needs, ethnic minorities and women’s rights. Her charitable organisation, The Eva Longoria Foundation, helps Latinas build better futures and, as one of the actresses who spearheaded the 2017 #Metoo initiative, she is utterly

committed to achieving gender equality in every workplace. Eva launched her production company Unbelievable Entertainment in 2005 and is now behind the lens as often as she is in front of it.

And in a historically male-dominated industry where over the past decade only four per cent of the top 1,200 highest earning studio films were directed by women, her latest project, Grand Hotel, which premiered on America’s

ABC network in June, is a triumph. The majority of Eva’s crew are women, including directors, the cinematographer and director of photography.

“It’s so fun to tap into a different talent pool that is equally talented as the one we’ve been using this whole time,” says Eva. “I created my own production company to produce my own opportunity – but also opportunities for other women.”

Eva certainly understands the frustration of being victimised because of gender. “As a director you really come across a lot of sexism because there are so very few female directors. The director runs the set, you really have to manage 150 people on set so sometimes… not as much now in my career, but early on it was a bit of a problem. Also

I was an actor. [People were like] ‘Urgh, here comes another actor turned director’ and I had to prove myself to many.”

The results speak for themselves. Eva has produced a plethora of shows over the past decade, including Devious Maids, Mother Up! and Telenovela, the documentary Reversing Roe and Universal’s new workplace comedy 24-7,

in which she co-stars alongside Kerry washington.

Eva is even more driven now than she was 15 years ago when she first stepped on to wisteria Lane, the fictional street of Desperate Housewives. “I’m starting to hit my stride and really just beginning to tap into my creative potential,” she reveals.

The work-hungry star barely stopped for breath to have her son. Just before her due date she was tying up loose ends on Grand Hotel and two months after he was born the family relocated to Australia’s Gold Coast to film her latest movie, Dora And The Lost City Of Gold, a live-action remake of the popular Nickelodeon children’s cartoon, in which she plays Elena, Dora’s mother.

New motherhood is daunting enough, so upping sticks to Oz for six weeks with a tiny baby was presumably scary on another level? Not so. “I had to do this movie,” insists Eva. “Dora was such a huge icon in our household and I grew up with her so it was such an important film to do at this moment in time. It was my first time playing a mum while being a mum, so that was really special. I definitely approached the role in a different way. All of a sudden I was like, ‘Oh my God, I would never let my child do that.’”

In between shooting scenes in the Australian rainforest and jungle, Eva had plenty of free time to dedicate to settling into her new role as a mother. “It was such a great experience to be in Australia with my newborn son, breast-feeding. we had a lot of free time to walk and be and everybody was so accommodating. It was paradise working on this film as a new mum.”

Eva agrees that actresses can often become typecast after having had children. “yes, I definitely think things change with the roles that you’re offered,” she says. “You’re just seen in a different way. It goes the other way as well. There were a lot of roles that I didn’t play because I wasn’t a mum. I was like, ‘I can

“I’m so nervous about the world in which we live. It’s a difficult time everywhere”