Every single one of the 24 hours in Eva Longoria’s day is meticulously scheduled, down to the minute. “Including sleep,” she said with a laugh. “I get eight hours a night, every night, because I budget for it.” It’s clear Longoria is a control freak — a fact she will proudly tell you herself. And after watching her at work on the set of her new NBC series Telenovela, a behind-the-scenes look at a Spanish-language soap, it’s easy to understand why.
The 40-year-old actor, producer, and — on this day — director literally ran to set, where she made quick work of a scene before tossing on a hoodie (her de facto “director’s cap”) over her all-white ensemble and sprinting to a brief wardrobe consultation. She needed to test how well co-star Amaury Nolasco’s shirt tore away for a gag later in the episode. Then, she hustled back down the hall, strands of hair caught up in the wind created solely by her gait, to confer with the throng of producers who had been discussing a pacing issue in the scene from behind a bank of monitors in video village.
There, two conversations were carried on simultaneously: Longoria and the writers tightened the scene, and Longoria and the camera operators established the speed of an accompanying camera movement. After everything was to her liking, she threw the hoodie on the director’s chair she rarely finds time to sit in, tossed back a sip of water, and walked in front of the camera to tackle the revised scene once more.
“There's not a prop, a line change, a lighting setup, a camera move, or a sofa that I don't touch or have a say in,” Longoria told BuzzFeed News a month after that set visit while reclining in a lavish suite at New York City’s famed Plaza Hotel.
But this is more than Longoria flying her "control freak" flag; she is simply not leaving anything to chance when it comes to her long-anticipated television return.
Longoria in the middle as Ana Sofia Calderon on Telenovela, with, from left, Jose Moreno Brooks as Gael Garnica, Diana Maria Riva as Mimi Moncada, and Zachary Levi as James McMann.
Vivian Zink / NBC / Getty Images
Although Longoria was incredibly drawn to Telenovela as a producer from the get-go — "It was a world I had never seen on TV. It was your basic sitcom characters, but it’s the first kind of general-market sitcom that could appeal to Latinos"— she didn’t originally plan to star on the series.
That is, until writers Chrissy Pietrosh and Jessica Goldstein took a pass at the pilot script. “I read the first draft and I said, ‘Oh my god, I want to play Ana Sofia,’” Longoria said, smiling at the memory. The lead character she couldn’t resist is a telenovela superstar whose reign is threatened by the arrival of a new co-star, Xavier Castillo (Jencarlos Canela), who also happens to be her ex-husband. “She was so funny. I laughed out loud every time she was on the page, and that's what made me want to go back to television,” Longoria said. “I was on the greatest show in the last decade and people always say, ‘You can't compare it,’ and I say, ‘No, I can. I'm not going back to TV unless it's a role as good as Gaby.' Why shouldn't I measure it to that?”
Gaby is, of course, Gabrielle Solis, the materialistic ex-model who traded the runway for suburbia that Longoria played for eight seasons on ABC’s Desperate Housewives. It was the role that made the then-unknown Longoria famous and the one that helped her foster the work ethic that’s still with her a decade later on Telenovela. “Hourlong dramas are the hardest. Your life is not your own. You can't schedule a dentist appointment; you can't schedule anything, because you're totally at the mercy of their schedule,” she said, comparing her first TV experience to her current half-hour comedy. “I loved it, but we'd have four to six weeks off every summer and that was it. It was just not long enough to unplug before you were plugged back into the machine of television.”
Photographed at The Plaza Hotel on Dec. 10 in New York City.
Jared Harrell / BuzzFeed News; Hair by Cynthia Ramirez; Makeup by Deanna Mellsuo
Longoria was 29 years old when she first auditioned to play Gaby in February 2004, and, according to creator Marc Cherry, the role was hers for the taking long before they even met. “I was interviewing four casting directors, and they were starting to give ideas about people they saw in the various parts to indicate that they were thinking the same way I was, and all four — independently of one another — said