All About EVA

Eva Longoria was never desperate. She was just playing the long game to become a triple threat: producer, philanthropist, and political powerhouse. Say hello to Hollywood's new stream queen.

- ERIK MAZA

Eva Longoria is miles and miles away from Wisteria Lane. She’s in Barcelona when we first speak. Well, an hour and a half outside the city, if we’re splitting hairs, but it’s all a bit of a blur. She’s been furiously hopscotching all over the continent for months, shooting a series for Apple TV+. “I popped over to Paris. I popped over to Perpignan, to Marseille. I popped over to Lisbon,” she says, rattling off pit stops like a chipper Formula One champion. It’s 8 p.m. and she’s been up since 3 a.m. “I popped over to, you know, all of Spain.”

It’s a typical marathon for the actress. Except to call her just an actress is to overlook her quiet, steady rise as a producer, philanthropist, and political powerhouse. The Apple dramedy Land of Women, which sounds ripped from the universe of Pedro Almodóvar (and in fact co-stars his former muse, Carmen Maura), is one of a handful of projects Longoria has set up with every major player in streaming just this year. She’s producing a children’s show for Disney+ and an adaptation of Isabel Allende’s classic novel The House of the Spirits for Amazon. Her feature film directorial debut, the spicy rags-to-riches comedy Flamin’ Hot, is set to open at the South by Southwest Festival and lands on Hulu later in the spring. And then there’s the bread-and-butter work in front of the camera: She’s hosting Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico, a travelogue co-produced with Stanley Tucci that was originally developed for CNN+ and survived the implosion of that service to land on the flagship cable channel. (Tucci’s eating-my-way-through-Italy show got the chop earlier this year, but Longoria’s premiered with much fanfare in March.)