Eva Longoria stars as Gala in "Land of Women" on Apple TV+.
While working on her latest series, Eva Longoria says that she had, “Wine at the end of every day, sometimes during the day,” and now she admits, “I’m really upset because now that I’m back in America, there’s no wine. I want to get back to Spain.”
As the executive producer and star of Land of Women, Longoria plays Gala, a high-society New Yorker whose life is turned upside down when her husband implicates the family in a financial scandal, forcing her to flee alongside her mother and her teenage daughter. To escape the dangerous criminals to whom Gala’s now vanished husband is indebted, the three women hide in a charming wine town in northern Spain that Gala’s mother fled some 50 years ago, vowing never to return. The women want to start fresh, but gossip in the small town quickly spreads, exposing their deepest family secrets.
Longoria, who starred on Desperate Housewives, says that that series was her ‘film school.’ She recently directed the feature film Flamin’ Hot.
“I wanted to get behind the camera to have more control of my career. I wanted to tell the stories from my community, from a woman's perspective. And I started doing that during Desperate Housewives. They were amazing gracious with me, and I shot two films and then I produced [the series] Devious Maids and that's when I started my episodic directing career.”
She adds that, “It's been an amazing journey, but I've never lost my desire to be in front of the camera, but I have been really choosy with what I decide to get in front of the camera with. It’s been a minute since I've been on that side and I wanted to do something new, but I've never acted in Spanish. I have never shot in Spain. It was just something I couldn't pass up.”
Describing what her character goes through, she says, “Gala is in an identity crisis at the beginning of the show. Her whole life has been a lie, and she has to flee suddenly to a country she doesn’t really know, and a language she doesn’t really speak with her mother, who may or may not have Alzheimer’s, and her daughter who’s in a rebellious phase, and she can’t find her husband. So, she’s in this insane crisis, at the same time, a fish out of water, and she has to be the provider. She has to be the one who figures out where do we go, what do we do.”
Gala is very outspoken as well, a trait Longoria enjoys. “I do love those characters that say what people wish they could say and do. Gala, in particularly, does it more than anybody I’ve ever played because she truly does not understand how things work in Spain. She’s like, ‘This wine is shit. Why would you sell it? Wait, you sell it and people pay for it? Like, I don’t understand.’ It’s part of who she is.”
She recalls something Desperate Housewives executive producer Marc Cherry said to her about this. “He’s like, ‘I can write anything that comes out of your mouth and people still like you.’ I was like, ‘It’s a gift. It really is a gift.’”
In this series, she says that she and her creative team, “just found more and more of those opportunities [for Gala to] say what she thinks. I don’t think we see enough women like that in television.”
As for working in a, truly in all senses of the word, foreign, environment, Longoria feels that it helped her get into the mindset of her character. “What I was experiencing as Eva was what Gala was experiencing. It was definitely a different culture.”
In an interesting move, the series was shot in both English and Spanish and will be available to watch in each language, with subtitles for the language that is not selected as the primary source.
Ruminating on the uniqueness of the dual language concept and how audiences will perceive it, Longoria says, “I think we used to have this fear of subtitles. Now it’s very normal because we live in a global community. And I think, especially thematically, when you’re dealing with themes of love or parenting or divorce or pain, these are universal themes [and] you don’t really need the language to understand.”
“And,” she adds, “It makes for a very rich, fun environment, because it's one of the big sources of comedy is miscommunication, so this is ripe for that.”
The tone of the series is strictly a ‘dramedy,’ explains Longoria, saying, “I feel like anytime you have drama, there's comedy because it's funny because it's true, but the truth is sometimes painful. So balancing all of that in a show is very hard and when you do it right, it's pretty spectacular.”
One aspect of the series that Longoria and the creative team agreed was important to examine was women’s empowerment. “We agreed [that] a man will not save [Gala] at the end of this, you know, or her arc will not be, ‘I'm going to go to this guy and all my problems are solved.’ We wanted to make sure that Gala learns how to save herself, and that’s something that you'll see throughout the series; that she has to figure it out. I think women will see the show and go, ‘yes, good for you.’”
In her attempt to coax viewers to select Land of Women amid some many other series, Longoria says, “This show is so escapism. I felt like we've had a wave of dystopian shows and I'm always like, ‘Ugh, I'm so depressed.’ And when you watch this show you're like, ‘I want to go to Spain and drink wine.’ So if I could just inspire you to do that, we've done our job.”
‘Land of Women’ is available for streaming beginning on Wednesday, June 26th on Apple TV+
