Why Eva Longoria, Adweek's First Beacon Award Winner, Is 'Subversive in the Best Way'

The camera loves Eva Longoria, and vice versa, with the Texas-born actor, producer, director and activist filling her social media feeds with a steady stream of snaps that document her life as a Hollywood mom and mogul. But a closer look at those Twitter and Instagram posts, and the pop-culture media coverage that invariably follows her around the world, reveals much more than exotic locations, charity galas and celebrity friends. [kickout id="6" label="cover"] Check out, for instance, the now-viral picture of Longoria directing an episode of Grand Hotel, a midseason drama she’s executive producing for ABC. A few months postpartum, she’s breastfeeding her infant son, Santiago, while marshaling the troops for an action-heavy scene of the nighttime soap. “I wasn’t making a statement by breastfeeding on set,” she says. But by sharing the candid image, “I hoped to normalize” the blend of career and motherhood and celebrate women everywhere who routinely juggle both. The photo came on the heels of using baby Santi’s birth announcement (and his first released photo) as a statement about the Trump administration’s child-separation policy at the Mexican border. “Having my son next to me, I can’t imagine him being taken from my arms,” she wrote to her 20 million social followers. “Families belong together, which is why we must do what we can to reunite them.” “I knew there would be a lot of eyeballs on that first picture,” she says, as her longtime makeup and hair team prepped her for Adweek’s cover shoot in the hills above Studio City, Calif. “I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to do something good with it.” Yet another case in point: Longoria held her 40th birthday party a few years ago at Morgan’s Wonderland in San Antonio, an amusement park designed for people with special needs. Her 250 guests, including entertainment A-listers, rode the Ferris wheel and went on scavenger hunts, paired with special-needs team members. The weekend unleashed a flood of media around the event and donations to the one-of-a-kind venue. “I have a special-needs sister, and I wanted to bring attention to the park,” she says. “I knew there would be all this focus on my turning 40, so that’s how I used it.” These highly ’grammable moments are by no means isolated examples, according to her friend and former talent agent at CAA, Christy Haubegger, now chief inclusion officer at WarnerMedia, who dubbed Longoria “subversive in the best way.” [kickout id="3" label="sidebar pics 1"] “She’s never considered living a life that wasn’t impactful,” Haubegger says. “That’s how she’ll measure herself. Not, ‘Did I win awards?’ or ‘Did I make a lot of money?’ But, ‘Did I have a positive impact?’ There’s her work, and there’s her life’s work.” Those two areas are increasingly and deliberately overlapping these days, as Longoria, an original co-founder of Time’s Up and longtime L’Oréal Paris spokeswoman, cultivates her creative side (multiple projects in the works with diverse casts and crews from production company UnbeliEVAble), her philanthropy ($2 million in micro loans awarded to Latinx startups, one of her numerous causes) and her decades of activism (mobilizing Latino voters, stumping for Democratic candidates and girding for 2020). This whirlwind of activity and initiatives inspired Adweek to make Longoria the first recipient of our Beacon Award, which she will receive on Sept. 8 at Adcolor's 13th annual awards event in Los Angeles. As we went to press with this issue, she was making news yet again with her activism. Reacting to recent ICE raids and the El Paso mass shooting, Longoria joined with more than 150 entertainers, business leaders and human rights advocates in writing an open letter to the Latino community, published in The New York Times, La Opinion and other newspapers. “If you are feeling terrified, heartbroken and defeated by the barrage of attacks on our community, you are not alone,” it read. “But we will not be broken. We will not be silenced. We will continue to denounce any hateful and inhumane treatment of our community. We will demand dignity and justice.” Longoria has a compelling reason for every pursuit. Common threads of breaking barriers, elevating others and giving back run between percolating and existing projects like the Macro Lab she launched with Lena Waithe to produce TV and digital projects from diverse writers, the modern female-led workplace comedy (24-7) with co-star Kerry Washington that will be her feature directorial debut and her nearly 15 years with L’Oréal. The documentary she produced called Reversing Roe, which debuted last year on Netflix, was just nominated for two Emmys, and her current film as a co-star, Dora and the Lost City of Gold, is the first live-action feature based on the bilingual animated heroine. “It’s so exciting to see that the first Latino superhero is a little girl,” Longoria says. “And she’s not a cartoon. She’s flesh and blood. All these little girls everywhere will be able to look up to her.” [kickout id="2"] ‘Producing with purpose’ Longoria, who cut her TV teeth on soap operas, hit the mainstream in the early 2000s with her breakout role on ABC’s Desperate Housewives, using the stint there as her film school and subsequently launching her own production banner. Mark Pedowitz, president of The CW network and former chief of ABC Studios, recalls that she was pitching him ideas while starring in the massively popular dramedy, which aired for eight seasons. “It was clear that she had ambition and she was a force of nature,” he says. “She wanted more” than an acting career. During that time, she also earned a graduate degree in Chicano studies, becoming “probably the first person to ever send her master’s thesis for us to read at CAA,” according to Haubegger. Desperate Housewives showrunner Marc Cherry recalls seeing Longoria “tucked in a corner of the set surrounded by her schoolbooks. She has this amazing intellectual curiosity.” [kickout id="4" label="sidebar pics 2"] Fast forward to today, with at least a dozen UnbeliEVAble projects in the hopper and Grand Hotel drawing about 3 million viewers a week on ABC’s Monday-night schedule. She populated that Miami-set show, an upstairs-downstairs premise where the Latinos are the affluent, well-heeled characters, with a 50% female writers’ room and directing lineup. The director of photography, two assistant directors and the stunt coordinator are women, a rarity in Hollywood. “I’m consciously hiring women instead of unconsciously ignoring them,” she says. “Instead of the usual suspects—Tom, Dick and Harry—I’ll ask for women and people of color and underrepresented groups every time. My goal is to produce with purpose.” Alison Kelly, director of photography on Grand Hotel, often uses the word “inspiring” to describe Longoria and notes that it’s a more hospitable environment today for high-ranking women on television crews. [kickout id="5" label="BTS video"] “This was not always the case, but thanks to executives and producers like Eva leading the way, women are given the same consideration [as men] for these jobs,” Kelly says. Longoria “knows the mechanics of television so well,” Kelly says, making their collaboration “a fun adventure. She is one of the most observant people I know and is an astute scholar of human behavior.” Decisive but open to suggestions, Longoria is “a wonderful example of a woman who has power and uses it well,” Kelly says. “She is a kind, compassionate and graceful leader but also gets the job done the way she wants it done. I find it a very inspiring kind of strength.” Can’t be what you can’t see Longoria, who produced Devious Maids for Lifetime and Telenovela for NBC, has stepped behind the camera for shows like black-ish, The Mick and LA to Vegas. She also directed a pivotal episode of CW’s Jane the Virgin (the one where newly married Jane finally loses her virginity). “She is so meticulous. And she’s calm and confident and collaborative—it’s a magical combination,” says Jennie Snyder Urman, Jane the Virgin’s executive producer. “Spirits could not have been higher the week and a half she was directing for us.” [kickout id="1" label="breastfeeding"] Urman also noted Longoria’s enviable time-management skills, where she used her 45-minute lunch break to shoot public service announcements between ripping through multiple Jane scenes—“All while wearing a white outfit,” Urman says, “and she wasn’t even dirty at the end of the day.” (That’s par for the course for the former beauty queen, who flipped burgers at Wendy’s before she was technically old enough to work and balanced six jobs at once to repay student loans.) Longoria also appeared on the critically lauded (dearly departed) Jane, as an exaggerated version of herself, squeezing it into her schedule because, as Urman says, “When the community calls, she shows up. And there’s nothing jaded about Eva. She’s truly excited to be making art.” Cherry, who worked with Longoria on Devious Maids, says she was a hands-on executive producer, helping shape the story of Latinas with lowly jobs and big dreams. “It could’ve been eyebrow raising because we had Latinas as houseworkers,” he says. “But she guided me through the cultural pitfalls, explained Latino communities and helped find writers and actors.” #MeToo Along with Reese Witherspoon, Brie Larson and other high-profile women in Hollywood, Longoria co-founded Time’s Up in the wake of revelations about Harvey Weinstein, saying that the prime movers “couldn’t just let this be about a sex scandal.” Longoria became one of the first content creators to take the 4% pledge (north of 100 producer-artists have now signed on to hire a female director within 18 months), and she helped spearhead the “wear black” effort at the 2018 Golden Globes to draw public attention to sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. “It’s not just that we can count on her, no matter where she is in the world or what she’s doing,” says Rebecca Goldman, Time’s Up interim CEO. “She’s leading and driving this movement forward. And I have no doubt that she’ll still be doing it five or 10 years from now.” The nonprofit group, which houses a multimillion-dollar legal defense fund for women battling discrimination and abuse on the job, will focus on women’s issues ahead of the 2020 election, asking candidates to discuss pay equity, family leave, child care, reproductive health and other key (but often ignored) topics. Longoria, who counts legendary civil rights leader Dolores Huerta as a mentor, says she considers it her responsibility to be politically engaged, even in a divisive climate and at the risk of turning off right-leaning fans because, “This is too important to think about ratings or box office.” High bar for brands Turning down far more offers than she accepts, Longoria says there’s a “high bar” for her brand partnerships, set in part by a L’Oréal alliance that started in 2005. (Under her own brand, she’s debuted everything from a New York Times best-selling cookbook to fragrances to a clothing line at JCPenney.) “I remember the L’Oréal slogan, ‘Because you’re worth it,’ from when I was a little girl,” she says. “That’s not just about hair color and lipstick—it’s about female empowerment.” The beauty-products giant, while supporting her favorite causes and enlisting her to direct global ads, has recruited her for its initiatives like Women of Worth (honoring community leaders across the country) and a Cannes Film Festival program that puts standout women on the red carpet. “A lot of endorsement relationships are short term and transactional, and that’s the opposite of what we have with Eva,” says Anne Marie Nelson-Bogle, deputy general manager, L’Oréal USA. “She’s a true ambassador and the total embodiment of our brand values.” Consumer-facing messages play a part in her brand decisions, as do the inner workings of the companies themselves. If Indra Nooyi hadn’t been CEO of PepsiCo in 2012, Longoria might not have agreed to star with chef Michael Symon in a Lay’s potato chip campaign dubbed “Do Us a Flavor.” “She’s so impressive and smart and kind, and she had a great vision for the company,” Longoria says of the former CEO. “I’m looking deeper than ‘How much?’ and ‘What do I have to hold?’” Foot on the accelerator There’s no slowing down in her future, though Longoria says she’s cherry-picking projects to be able to spend as much time as possible with her 14-month-old son. She has another directing job on tap, a Fox Searchlight biopic about janitor-turned-business maven Richard Montanez who created the Mexican spice-inspired Flamin’ Hot Cheetos snack, along with activity around the upcoming presidential election as part of a jam-packed schedule that makes her friends and colleagues marvel. “I want to know what she’s done with the time-space continuum,” Haubegger says, only half-jokingly. “I’m astounded by the scope of her imagination because that’s where it all starts—with ideas and a desire to change things,” Cherry says. “She’s fearless, she has a lot of tools, and she knows how to use all of them.”

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Why Eva Longoria, Adweek's First Beacon Award Winner, Is 'Subversive in the Best Way'

Fearlessly using her star power to make a difference—in Hollywood, politics and beyond

T.L. Stanley

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T.L. Stanley