Feature: Desperate Housewives

Star Eva Longoria discusses life on Wisteria Lane, how she copes with the pressures of fame, and she finally gets frank about those numerous whispers of feuds and cat fights on set…

This is Eva Longoria’s world now – glitzy parties, countless press events, sexy boyfriend, memberships in some exclusive television and motion-picture clubs. It’s obviously a far cry from two years ago when she was just another starlet bouncing from project to project with barely a ripple. A soap opera gig (The Young and the Restless) here, a made-for-TV film there. Desperate Housewives, of course, changed all of that, as Longoria’s role as the sultry but troublesome Gabrielle Solis has placed her into the Hollywood stratosphere. Indeed, even among actors such as Teri Hatcher and the Emmy-winning (and Oscar-nominated) Felicity Huffman, it’s arguable that Longoria has become the most visible of the Housewives over the past several months.

So how is the diminutive 31-year-old beauty coping with all of the extra attention? “I don’t think you can ever get used to this,” Longoria says with a knowing grin. “This is always going to be weird to me, people wanting to talk to me about things or wanting to know things. I don’t think it’s something you can ever really get used to. I think you can put it in your mind that tonight’s awards night, and I’m going to go and work and support the show. I’ve been on shows where lead actors, they don’t work, and then the show doesn’t succeed. It fails because there’s no lifeline behind it as an actor. And so for the girls and I, we said from Day One that we would support the show and do whatever we needed to do. We did the European tours, we’ve done international press and the American press – I mean, we really, really believed in it. For me, it’s the same, because I’m still going to continue to work, even through we’re obviously a huge success and globally welcomed everywhere, I think there’s still work to be done, because it can always change tomorrow.”

In some ways, it already has changed for Longoria and company. The second season of Housewives has been marked, perhaps not surprisingly, by backlash from some fans and a lot of critics that the quirky ‘dramedy’ has lost some of the spice that made it such a cultural phenomenon during its first year on the air. Some of those complainers have noted a creative upswing in more recent episodes, and Longoria can stake a claim to that thanks to her increasingly nuanced portrayal of Gabrielle, whose flightiness has been accompanied by an often emotional plotline involving her increasingly passionate quest to have a child. But she also didn’t think much of those who thought the series was in a sophomore slump in the first place.

by Dave Waldon

Read the full interview in
The Works #A07

Desperate Housewives © ABC
Feature © Visual Imagination 2006. Not for reproduction

Taken from

The Works #A07
June 2006
ships from May 31 2006
News-stand Price
UK £3.50 / US $5.99

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