Eva Longoria says she refused to be a ‘struggling actor’—so she worked part time as a headhunter

Before she turned a multimillionaire TV star, sipping rosé on Wisteria Lane as Desperate Housewives’ Gabrielle Solis, Longoria refused to tough it up like different actors, ready on tables between auditions and crashing on a roommate’s sofa. Instead, she was constructing a headhunting empire from her cleaning soap opera dressing room.

“The first day I landed in LA, I got a job,” Longoria completely tells Fortune. “I was like, I’m not going to be a struggling actor. I’m going to figure this out.”

Figure it out, she did. The 51-year-old star—who now has a net worth north of $80 million, a manufacturing firm, a directing profession, a stake in ladies’s soccer workforce Angel City FC, a $6 million investment in the John Wick franchiseand a new mentoring partnership with Lenovo to assist small enterprise homeowners—landed a function at a temp company as a headhunter.

And even as soon as she’d scored her first actual performing function on The Young and the Restlessshe saved going. She was nonetheless negotiating salaries, screening candidates, and shutting placement offers in between takes.

“In my dressing room, I was doing the headhunting,” Longoria recollects. “I was negotiating 401(k)s and salaries and interviewing and reading resumes and placing people. And then they would be like, ‘Eva, ready on set.'” She’d grasp up mid-call, go act, come again, and decide up precisely the place she left off.

Despite common display time, performing paid lower than headhunting, so she did not give up—she saved up that double life for years, even denying it was her when shoppers finally acknowledged her cleaning soap character on display. She solely walked away from company life in her third yr on the present, after a pay bump lastly made performing financially viable.

“I knew I could always go back to corporate America if acting didn’t work out,” she says. Shortly after, she landed Desperate Housewives—and the remainder is tv historical past.

Eva Longoria’s former boss begged her to keep in company America

Longoria has by no means had to look far for her work ethic. The youngest in a female-dominated family—“nine aunts, three sisters, no brothers”—she grew up surrounded by financially unbiased ladies.

As a teenager in Texas, Longoria began working at Wendy’s for $3.35 an hour and hustled her method up from “fried girl to hamburger girl to the drive-through, to head cashier to assistant manager” from the ages of 14 to 18—juggling her part-time job with highschool.

“If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it well,” she remembers pondering. “I might work additional time. I work weekends. I used to be like, ‘decide me, decide me. I’ll do it.’ “I love the idea of ​​earning money.”

That similar power adopted her to Los Angeles. When she joined the temp company, the CEO gave her a selection: regular base wage or limitless fee. “I didn’t know either of those words,” she recollects. “He goes, ‘Well, base salary means you only make this much, but commission means you can make as much as you want.’ And I said, ‘That one. I want that one.’”

Within one month, she says she was making thrice the bottom wage.

In reality, Longoria received so good at her job that her boss tried to renegotiate her fee construction as a result of it “wasn’t built for the volume” she was producing—and when she finally advised him she was leaving for performing, he even tried to discuss her out of it.

“He never understood why I didn’t stay in corporate America,” she says. “It just wasn’t my calling, but I was really great at it.”

“Everybody was surprised because I built this small business within his business, and he kept saying, ‘Why would you want to be an actress? You’re so good at business, it’s a one in a million chance you’re going to be successful at acting’. And I said, I know—and I’m the one in a million.”

Eva Longoria’s recommendation to Gen Z: ‘Figure it out’

Her mom, for what it is value, wasn’t apprehensive when Longoria stated she was pursuing a profession in performing. Her response was characteristically pragmatic: “You have your degree, so if you need a job, you can get a job… my mom always said that you better figure that out.”

And she says it is that mantra that separates the one-in-a-million who make it in a inventive trade from the hundreds who do not.

Longoria, for instance, did not watch for an agent to uncover her—she went straight to them. “I looked up who the gatekeepers are, who hold the keys to these opportunities, and then figured out when they were speaking at an event. And I would go to the event, give them my headshot, or introduce myself.” That, she says, is how she landed her breakout function on The Young and the Restless.

Longoria is refreshingly clear-eyed about the truth that Hollywood, in contrast to enterprise, would not reward effort with predictable returns. “You could do exactly what I did and not have the same outcome,” she says.

But she additionally thinks a specific form of resourcefulness is non-negotiable—and more and more uncommon. “A lot of people prevent progress because of perfection,” she says. “’I don’t exactly know how to do that, so I’m not going to do that’—that thought process, to me, is crazy.”

“A lot of people prevent progress because of perfection. Like: ‘I don’t exactly know how to do that, so I’m not going to do that’—it’s an odd thought process to me.”

“I remember landing in LA and going, Okay, what do I need to do? I need headshots. Okay, let me figure that out. I need an agent. I’ve got to figure that out… And that’s really a huge trait.”