Eva Longoria Covers TOWN & COUNTRY’s April 2023 Issue

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Eva Longoria covers TOWN & COUNTRY’s April 2023 issue photographed by Ruven Afanador and styled by Bernat Buscato.

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On the unspoken sense among outsiders that when everybody else is producing at 100 percent, they have to deliver at 150: “I’ve never let my foot off the gas. I’m like, ‘Great, we got a show on the air. Where’s the next one? Great, we’ve got two movies being made. Where’s the next one?’” Longoria tells me this as if stating the obvious, Latino to Latino, Texican to Cuban. I grew up in Havana, she in Corpus Christi, but we share more than a common language… “You can’t take your foot off the gas.”

On how Longoria herself is not interested in being a candidate, though some Texas Democrats plead with her to take on Republican governor Greg Abbott: “I don’t want to be a politician, but I want to be political. Once you run for office, you have less power.”

On the growing number of Latino voters who might not be exercising their power or influence: “Politically we’re a sleeping giant. In corporate America our buying power is a sleeping giant. In media we’re a sleeping giant. When are we waking up and taking a hold of that?” she says. “That’s why I started producing and directing. I wasn’t getting cast in things, and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to do this myself.’”

On why she wanted to move into directing: “As an actor, you really don’t have any power over anything. You stand on a mark. You say your line. You go home. You don’t cast who’s opposite you. You don’t get to pick the take you liked best or the poster,” she says, with the confidence of someone who now has a say over lots of things. “I want to control the final product of anything I do.”

On understanding the current lopsided economics of entertainment, which are especially clear to someone in her position, who 20 years ago might have made more in residuals from a single show than any combination of streaming series put together today could net: “When you go to the streamers there’s no back end. The studios always owned the intellectual property, but you participated in it as a showrunner, as a content creator,” she says. “Now you don’t.” Everyone I talk to shares a similar frustration with the state of play, and the more I hear it the more it sounds as if everyone in Hollywood is just now learning to hustle the way Latinos always have. “If you want something done…” she says, finishing my thought. Longoria took matters into her own hands the second she could, and after a turn in the director’s chair gave her a taste of the future, she only wants more for her next act. Her template is film­makers like Rodriguez, who own the rights to their work and can monetize it, in perpetuity, however they wish. “That’s the goal,” Longoria says with a glint in her eye. “You want to have ownership.”

[Photo Credit: Ruven Afanador for Town & Country Magazine]

• Bernat Buscato
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