24 S MAGAZINE ★ 11 AUGUST 2019
E
va 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 utterlycommitted 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,Eva
forever
Actress, director, mum, charity campaigner
and women’s rights activist, Eva Longoria is
an inspiration, as Gemma Calvert discovers
2018 PARAMOUNT PLAYERS