By Bonnie Siegler

Dressed in a fuchsia sleeveless Rebecca Taylor mini-dress, low V-neck and mile high gold brocade Charles Loubitan heels, Eva Longoria Parker looks every bit the Hollywood star that she is. But what’s with the small pink baby blanket wrapped around her shoulders? The petite dynamo explains she’s nursing a cold and doesn’t feel all that warm this cool morning in Santa Monic The “Desperate Housewives” star is here to promote her new movie “Over Head Dead Body” alongside Paul Rudd, Jason Biggs and Lake Bell, but it’s her role as sexy housewife, Gabrielle Solis, that she will always be remembered.
With the Writers Strike over two months along, most of Hollywood production has shut down and that includes “Desperate Housewives”. Turning a negative into a positive, Eva has taken this opportunity to play a real housewife to basketball star husband Tony Parker at their home in Texas. But today, the TV and film star, wants to gush about her new role in this romantic comedy playing Kate, a beautiful yet exceedingly demanding and controlling woman who obsesses over every little detail in her perfect life. On her wedding to Henry (Paul Rudd), Kate is accidentally killed by a falling ice sculpture of an angel. A year goes by and still Henry is unable to move on with his life until, upon the urging of his sister, he seeks permission from a psychic to contact Kate’s spirit so he can start a new life. But Kate says “Over My Dead Body” will he move on.

Would you admit to being anything like the control freak part of your character or is that not you?
Yeah, it’s definitely me in my business life…it’s me in my career and my business or my restaurant or whatever I’m doing, I’m a control freak. I want to know what’s going on, what’s the process, what’s the timeline, what’s the next step, but when it comes to my personal life, I’m the opposite. I don’t have a care in the world and Tony is more that person. Tony plans dinner, Tony plans our vacations, Tony buys our cars, Tony does our house stuff…he’s like this is what we’re doing today, this is what we’re doing tomorrow, this is what we’re doing next week. He’s a big planner, and I’m not in my personal life. And I definitely wasn’t like that at my wedding. I was stress free the day of our wedding.

With everything going on and the opening of your restaurant, too, the director mentioned you filmed locally because of the Housewives schedule. Still, how crazy is it going sometimes from the Universal set of DH to Long Beach where this movie was filmed?
The great thing about that was that Tony was here so it was nice to have him here. I love television, I love the medium of television, I love that it’s fast and we do 14 pages a day, you’re barely in your trailer. You have time to eat and go back on set. It’s so fast that we’re basically doing a movie a week. So on my days that I was doing this movie, it was like vacation (laughs). Shoot 2 pages a day, watch a movie in my trailer, Tony was there, we could go and eat dinner then come back and they’re still not ready. So it was nice to venture out and do another character, to have a different cast, to play off a different director…it was bliss for me, so fun.

Your character is likeable and then again, she’s not. Did you find it was a fine line that you felt you had to walk with this character?
Yeah. I said to the director/writer, Jeff (Lowell) I just don’t want her to come off as not justified in her anger. We only had that one scene at the beginning of the movie with Paul and me to see our relationship. So you had to see in that one scene that he really adores me. The big thing was why would he love me so much if I was a bad person and you never got to see the relationship so you had that one scene to see how much I loved him, how much he loved me and how great I was and that we were really great together and that’s why he was so sad that I was gone. So that one scene you see, OK, she loves him a lot and that’s why she’s kind of bitter and hasn’t moved on. It was a fine balance to justify it and particularly for me to bridge Gabrielle and how she day to day with her kind of being more egotistical and conceited; Kate is more on a mission to protect Henry.

If you had some of her fun abilities and powers as an apparition, what would you be doing with them if you weren’t protecting people and guiding them?
Oh I would totally haunt Tony if I passed away. (laughs) Definitely staying around, sabotaging anything. I told him that you’re not moving on until I move on. Yeah, I don’t know, what would I do. I’d scare people. I love scaring people. I always hide behind a door or something and then I jump out and scare my girlfriends. We love scaring each other. I think scaring people is the funniest thing ever. I would definitely use my powers to make voices too.

You should be in a horror movie. Do you like scary movies?
No. I like thrillers. I’m not so much for the blood and guts, hands cut off. Like “Saw” and Tony loves that.

Between marriage, the TV show, movies, it’s got to be busy for you yet you do charity work. You do some work for cancer awareness in the Latino community. Can you talk about why that attracted you and why that’s so important to you?

Thank God I haven’t experienced anybody in my family with a child who has cancer because I can’t imagine anything more difficult. But I was asked to go to an event that Padres Contra el Cancer was having one year, which was 6 years ago, and I met Michael Valasquez, the CEO at the time. He said I should come to the Children’s Hospital. I don’t know if any of you have ever visited the Children’s Hospital in that wing, but once you go, it’s life changing. It changed my life. To meet the parents, the family and talk to the kids…there is more hope on that floor than you will see in your whole life. These kids really are resilient and they’re almost the parents saying ‘mom, it’s going to be fine…mom, we’re going to kill the monster.’ I got involved with Padres because 70% of the kids in L.A. in the children’s hospital are Latino and the reason there are so many more Latino children with cancer is socially we’re not a culture to go the doctor early enough to catch it so usually the death rates are higher because they go too late. There’s also the language barrier. And finances – if you don’t have insurance and you can’t pay…they don’t understand chemotherapy anyway. I think understanding cancer is hard enough in English…it would be like you in China and them explaining it to you in Chinese. `You have cancer and this is what you have to do’. But I don’t understand what you’re saying. So those barriers are preventative. You can have financial education courses, you can have a translator with you at the hospital, and socially to educate our culture to get check-ups and take your kids…everything can be prevented and these kids don’t have to be there so that’s why Padres really is important to me. It’s work that has to be done and somebody has to do it.

Your look in the movie is so different than the way you look now or even Gabrielle. Do you have input into your wardrobe, makeup and hair?
I dyed my hair lighter and blonde for the movie because I wanted to look different than Gabrielle. She was obviously, very more conservative with a type A personality. We wanted her to be in white as opposed to black. White is angelic. It’s hard to keep white clean, though. (laughs).

Can you talk about a specific thing you did improvise that made it into the movie?
Well you know when I rattle off all of those numbers, colors, dogs, pet names…because there was so much time we had to cover with those scenes, I had to improv a lot of that. I was making up colors and the pet I had when I was young and how he died. Sometimes I would say things and Lake couldn’t laugh but she’s turn to me and say `you had a what named what?’ (laughs)

One question about the Spurs, as a fan. The team has been in a little bit of a slump lately – brutal. Can you comment on your version of handicapping and our chances for a league win?
Well we have a lot of injuries now so that’s why the slump. We hit this wall last year because it’s right before trades, everybody gets all nervous, and we’re not playing as well as we can be. And the West is way more competitive than the East. The East has Boston and Detroit. The West has Phoenix, Utah, New Orleans, Lakers are doing great, Denver which is amazing and…. Dallas…I hate the Dallas Mavericks and always blank them out of my mind. (laughs). So we’re in a slump and you can’t be too long in the West because you’ll get run over pretty fast. But we usually hit this wall every year around this time…everybody’s tired, particularly Tony. He’s been playing with an injury. He’s not 100% so every time he hits a lay-up by this much (holds up her fingers about an inch width apart) it’s cause he can’t jump…swollen ankle. He plays year round because of the National Team, the French team, so his body is tired. To play that hard, that long, it catches up.

Have you seen the Spanish version of Desperate Housewives?
I have not. I’ve heard about it, but haven’t seen it. I don’t know who plays me, but I hear it’s in Argentina, Columbia, Venezuela, Mexico…it’s interesting because they use the same exact scripts.

You have a lot of downtime right now so what are you doing?
I’m being a Texas housewife as opposed to playing a housewife. Nurse Tony back to health.

If the writers go back to work, would you finish the season or do you think the season is pretty much finished?
Well, I would hope we finish season 4 because it was a weird way to end it but I did read an article where Marc Cherry was being interviewed in USA Today about 3 days and he thought that was the last episode of season 4. Even if the strike ended, he needs 2 months to write and he hasn’t written anything so if that is the case, then there’s no point in filming because after May and in the summer, the ratings just aren’t there. So we’ll just start season 5. I was kind of bummed that we aired that last episode because that tornado episode was such a great cliff-hanger. It would have been great to end season 4 on that as opposed to airing the episode we did film that answered a lot of questions. Now there’s really no suspense.

You were working on the film “Lower Learning”, though.

I was doing that at the same time as Desperate Housewives so we were trying to wrap that also before the writers strike. I play Rebecca, a superintendent coming to shut down the school with Jason (Biggs). Jason and I become allies and try to save the school. It was fun.

How do you adjust to doing film and TV and now suddenly there’s nothing? Do you wake up thinking you should be somewhere?
Yeah, I should be somewhere. Absolutely. I like routine and I like to work. I have an incredible work ethic so that’s why I love working on film, TV…I love juggling everything at once so to kind of stop…the only nice part is that I have been able to enjoy marriage and being a newlywed. So I’ve kind of accepted that and think it’s a sign from God that he just wants us to just be together at this time. Especially at the holidays it was nice to be off, but there are just too many people out of work to be like this for too long…camera guys, hair and makeup people, electricians, grips… we were such a family and being together all the time, sharing pictures, and it’s like now `any word?’ Not on my end…

So you’re going to more basketball games now, I suppose. Are you ever afraid to go and watch your husband play because the Jessica Simpson thing going and they’ll start losing?
I had that. Once Tony and I started dating you’d think I was the Yoko Ono of the Spurs (laughs). If Tony had a bad game, it was my fault. If Tony had a good game, it was because of me. If Tony got injured, it was my fault. Anything that happened…if Tony did anything, it was Oh, Tony is Hollywood now. Believe me, he’s not thinking of me when he’s on the court. And I don’t think Tony Romo is thinking of Jessica with 10 linemen coming down, you know. I think is was player, Antonio Davis when his wife was in the stands and got in a fight with a fan and he went into the stands, then he got fined. I was like `oh honey, would you come rescue me if I got in a fight with a fan?’ and he said ‘no’. (laughs). `No, I’m not getting that fee.’ Those fines are really steep and then get suspended, he’s like ‘no you’re on your own.’

Does that stuff stop over time?
Yeah because you’re not just some girl distracting him, you’re actually in a long term relationship. And sports is such a subculture. The fans of Cowboys, Spurs…that’s their team and who are you to come in and mess up with their boys. The fans have ownership. And I totally understand it. They’re very protective of their teams.

How did that Funny or Die video come about?
Oh my God, I know. Will Ferrell’s company – Chris Henchey, Brooke Shield’s husband came to me and said will I do Will’s website. They wanted to know if they wrote something really funny if I’d be interested in doing it. I said Yeah! We went and filmed it. Tony thought it was totally hilarious. When it came out I was hoping it didn’t cause too much backlash. Now everybody really got it, thank God cause it could have gone either way, but now everyone is saying that sex tape is so funny. And it was funny to do, too.