Eva Longoria was well on her way to convincing us that her petite, perfectly formed self makes a credible Secret Service agent in her first major film, "The Sentinel."
Wearing an off-the-shoulders top, with cascades of intricately waved hair, she didn't need to explain why, as the perversely passionate Gabrielle Solis in "Desperate Housewives," she's television's top-ranked sex symbol.
We were suitably awestruck. Then she reached behind her back and started tugging at something.
"A tag," she said with an exasperated sigh. "I always do this, I have tags on my clothes when I go out."
Nice to know that even someone as formidably put together as Eva Longoria has her doofus qualities. But when you want to talk about the 31-year-old actress's fascinating contradictions, that's just the start.
Some are so monumental that, well, they should be in a record book somewhere. As mentioned, Longoria is literally a walking definition of diminutive. Yet, to mark its 100th issue, men's magazine Maxim painted a football-field-size reproduction of a recent Longoria cover — a best seller, natch — just over the Nevada state line. It's so big that it can reportedly be seen from space, like the Great Wall of China.
"So, I'm the Eighth Wonder of the World," Longoria said with a self-mocking laugh. "It's flattering and very, very funny."
Back down on Earth, slightly, Longoria's breakout success on TV's biggest hit of the past two years has made her one of the best-known Latinas in show business. She takes the position seriously, with a great deal of pride and responsibility. Yet she did not speak Spanish fluently before studying it in college. And by any measure, Longoria is far more authentically Texan than a certain president we could name.
"Something like eighth, ninth, 10th," she says of her generation, which includes three older sisters, that grew up on the family ranch outside of Corpus Christi. "We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us. We've got the same Spanish land grants our Mexican ancestors did."
And it was on that property that little Eva's dad started teaching his daughter to shoot when she was 6 years old. Imagine the surprise of her he-man "Sentinel" co-stars, Michael Douglas and Kiefer Sutherland, the day the movie's ex-Secret Service adviser took the three of them to a gun range for some training.
"Well, it was off the charts," co-star Douglas said of Longoria's ballistic skill. "It was humiliating, to be quite honest. We were kind of patting Eva on the back beforehand, saying, 'Relax, you'll get into it.' She was, 'OK, thank you so much.' Then, ka-pow ka-pow! She shoots better than 90 percent of the police officers in our country."
As for other aspects of Longoria's persuasiveness in the role of rookie presidential protector Jill Marin, technical adviser Gerald Cavis was all seal of approval.
"We had very many confident, attractive, capable, intuitive female agents," the retired fed said. "You look at 'em, they knock your socks off in terms of their capabilities. And, quite frankly, there are many that are good-looking individuals, too."
You may have detected a certain preoccupation in Cavis' descriptions there. But, indeed, Longoria makes capable and knock-your-socks-off go together like Gabrielle knows how to match bustiers with high heels.
Longoria had just earned a bachelor's degree toward a planned career in sports medicine when she became Miss Corpus Christi. Part of her prize package was a trip to L.A. for a talent competition, which she won. Agents made offers, and though she'd never even considered acting before, she decided to stay out here a little while and give it a shot. Realizing that said shot was long, she figured she'd better find a decent day job between auditions. Still in her early 20s, Longoria was making $200,000 a year as a corporate headhunter, a position she held onto even after getting her first regular acting gig on "The Young and the Restless."
"It was, like, almost minimum wage," she said of the daytime soap's pay scale. "But I had a great time on it, and it obviously led me to better things."
That's for sure. Though she likes to describe her overnight success as "eight years in the making," Longoria said that she's still astounded by how popular her Sunday night soap satire instantly became. She does have a sound theory as to why "Housewives" is so hot.
"It's the first show that actually exercises the voice of the modern woman," Longoria reckoned. "It's not 'Leave It to Beaver,' it's not 'The Brady Bunch,' it's not 'The Cosby Show.' It really reflects the current status of women in today's society. You can be married, you can be divorced, you can have children, you can not have children, you can go to work, you can stay at home; you get so many choices.
"And because of that, I think women identify with one or all of us. I think that's truly why the show's successful, and why it's universally successful, because every country deals with those issues."
Speaking of countries and issues, Longoria devotes a lot of time to causes that affect America's Latino communities, such as voter registration and health care.
Has she gotten any flak for playing an oversexed, child-snatching adulteress every Sunday night?
"Y'know, I'm surprised I haven't," Longoria shrugged. "I'm really surprised. I think my people see Gabrielle as a good person who does bad things. And they're just excited that she's the richest person on the block — with a white gardener!"
Excited doesn't begin to describe the way the little actress feels about her big basketball player boyfriend, San Antonio Spurs point guard Tony Parker. Several years Longoria's junior, France-raised Parker, raised in France, obviously means more to her than all the money and football field-size attention in the world.
"I'll talk about my Tony all day long," she happily gushed. "He's probably the kindest human being, just in the sense of he's very responsible, he's very family-oriented, he's very shy, and he's very romantic. And he's very funny. I love humor in men and he makes me laugh."
Longoria understands that most people think sex when they hear her name. And that's not something she really wants to discourage, even though she appreciates casting agents thinking of her as, well, a sharp-shooting G-woman who never steps out of her navy-blue business suit.
"I haven't been pigeonholed at all; I've gotten very few sexy offers," she said of potential movie roles. "It's to a point where I'm getting annoyed! I'm going, 'Hey! Where's the sexy stuff?' Of course, I'm glad about that. I'm not really adamant about going against sexy, though. I'm going with sexy as long as I can do it. You know, women have an expiration date in this business." Often true. But we don't expect hers to come up for quite some time.
After all, she's still pretty fresh at this babe game — which may be the most mind-boggling contradiction in the Eva Longoria story of all.
"My whole family called me Prieta Fea, which is 'ugly dark one,"' she recalled. "I've told my mom, 'You really could have screwed my self-confidence up for life, but you didn't.' I was the only one with dark hair, dark skin and dark eyes. All of my sisters are blond, light-eyed and light-skinned. They used to tell me that they switched me at the hospital, they found me in a Dumpster. They were so mean to me when I was little!"
How does she deal with those sadistic sisters now? "Every time I'm on any list of Hottest, Sexy, Most Beautiful anything, I just send 'em the magazine," Longoria says with a laugh.