Desperate Housewives was chock-full of drama, but Eva Longoria said rumors of offscreen tension on Wisteria Lane were overblown.
Longoria, 48, addressed the speculation during an interview on the Monday, November 27, episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast. Shepard, also 48, asked how much of the on-set feuding was “factual” and how much “we would now see as just, like, this narrative about women, that there’s no way these women could get along.”
According to Longoria, none of the feud discussion was factual. “I remember even back then it was a narrative about women,” she explained. “Because there were all these shows with men on the air, and nobody was like, ‘They’re fighting!’”
Longoria went on to say that her costars Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross and Teri Hatcher helped her cope with the increased spotlight, as they’d all been on “hit shows” in the past.
“They all had such a better handle on fame, on that narrative,” Longoria recalled. “I’m like, ‘[People] are saying we’re fighting.’ They’re like, ‘Well, that’s just a narrative they do on women because we’re over 40 on a television show.’ And I was like, ‘Yeahhh.’ I wasn’t even that smart to understand that.”
Longoria went on to note that she and her castmates “were working so hard” on Desperate Housewives that they rarely noticed what was going on off-camera. “Anything that happened outside the show, we were like, ‘What?’ We could never come up for air to really get outside of ourselves,” she said. “We were only on the set. … I remember that noise being outside of us. We were in such a bubble with our crew and each other.”
The Flamin’ Hot director said that their schedule was so intense that they could barely even enjoy the highs that came with the global success of the show, which ran on ABC from 2004 to 2012.
“All that stuff of ‘we’re fighting,’ even like, ‘No. 1 show, you’re amazing’ — good and bad, it didn’t penetrate, because we were working, and I was exhausted,” Longoria remembered, adding that she often forgets how many stories there were about the women feuding during filming. “People ask me that a lot. ‘Were you guys really fighting?’” she said. “And I was like, ‘God, I forgot that was a thing.’ It was a thing. It was a big thing.”
Longoria previously revealed that she was “bullied” on the set of Desperate Housewives by a colleague but didn’t identify the alleged culprit. She did, however, note that Huffman, 60, stepped in to stop the behavior.
“I dreaded the days I had to work with that person because it was pure torture. Until one day, Felicity told the bully ‘enough’ and it all stopped,” Longoria wrote in 2019 in a letter of support for Huffman submitted while she was on trial for her role in the college admissions scandal. “Felicity could feel that I was riddled with anxiety even though I never complained or mentioned the abuse to anyone. … I know I would not have survived those 10 years if it wasn’t for the friendship of Felicity.”
Huffman pleaded guilty to honest services fraud in May 2019 and served 12 days in jail. She was also fined $30,000 and ordered to complete 250 hours of community service.
While Longoria downplayed on-set drama with Shepard, her former costar Nicollette Sheridan made headlines for filing a lawsuit against Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry. After Sheridan’s character, Edie Britt, was killed off in season 5, Sheridan, 60, claimed that Cherry, 61, wrote her off the show after she complained about an alleged incident where he hit her in the head.
A judge dismissed Sheridan’s lawsuit in early 2017 after a 2012 mistrial. Cherry, meanwhile, denied Sheridan’s allegations.
