Eva Longoria Talks “Disrupting the Industry” by Co-Founding Hyphenate Media: “Hollywood Makes You Stay in Your Lane”

Eva Longoria wants people to know she’s much more than an actress.

The Desperate Housewives star-turned-director-producer spoke with her co-founder and CEO, Cris Abrego at Content London on Wednesday about their production company, Hyphenate Media Group (Ready for Love, Telenovela, Grand Hotel), to service creator-entrepreneurs.

“We’re both multi-hyphenates,” Longoria said of her and Abrego, also explaining she found herself bored of “reading lines off a page.” She added: “I’m an actress, producer, director, philanthropist, entrepreneur, and we both really saw our industry in Hollywood doesn’t service that mission. It really is an industry that makes you stay in your lane — ‘you’re an actress, not a producer, just keep doing that.’ Let’s start something that’s going to disrupt the industry.”

CEO Abrego concurred, saying: “The truth is this is not for everybody, but some are incredibly ambitious. They want to do multiple projects in multiple formats, not just selling them. They want to write plays too, they want to write limited series.”

Director-actor-showrunner-producer Gloria Calderón Kellett (How I Met Your Mother, Jane the Virgin) who the company recently announced as its first creator partner was in attendance to further discuss the relationship and plans ahead for her GloNation Studios. “One of the things when I joined Cris and Eva, my remit was to really provide the infrastructure to grow Glo’s business and our other acquisitions business, while also growing the Hyphenate slate and the Hyphenate Original slate.”

Kellett touched on how the industry has changed: “If you were able to break being a showrunner in 2016 or 2017, you were able to actually produce your episodes, like writers on staffs would produce their episodes of television. So I worked on hundreds of episodes of television before I was a showrunner.” But, she said, “that doesn’t happen anymore, the writers are hired and siloed, and then once the writing is done, executive producers will go to set.”

“And the mentoring is also a really important part. So we’re building the next brand of showrunners, creators, because we’ve done it already.”

The company is hoping to soon head make deals in France having had a focus on English and Spanish-speaking projects since its conception. Longoria said of their decisions so far: “We’re showrunner-driven, talent-driven. If somebody’s really passionate about a story, a project, we are that home for them. And you know, we’re IP driven as well. We really have amazing book scouts. We have amazing partnerships in all of the agencies that [say], ‘What about this book?’”

There was, of course, a moment for Desperate Housewives amidst the discussion — “I’d be the first one to sign up. I miss Gaby!” she added when Abrego joked about rebooting the series.