See Also: Eva Longoria (Gabrielle Solis) People Guide

It's often been reported that many of the Desperate Housewives characters are based in some way on creator Marc Cherry's mother, but Eva Longoria (Gabrielle Solis) has now revealed that her character was based upon a man that Cherry knew, giving new insight into the creation of the show.

"Marc Cherry grew up with a guy named Gabriel Solis," Longoria told Moviehole.net, "who lived down the street from him and they had the biggest house in the block and they were richer than him but he never noticed there was a difference between them because they lived on the same block, and then found out like later, wow, they were richer than we were. So he knew he wanted a Latin family that was the same as everybody else on the block and their ethnicity never is really in question."

As well as a good portrayal of Latin people, Longoria said the show has also been good for women. "I think, for women in general, that there's a show [...] with four women leads is kudos itself, because you're always as a woman [...] the girlfriend of or the wife of the lead or the partner of the guy that's the lead. So this shows that women can carry a show, and it's also raised the expiration date to a later time where women over 40 can be fun and sexy and entertaining."

Talking about her role in the upcoming movie The Sentinel, Longoria explained that she chose the job as it was so different to Desperate Housewives. "I get to play a lot of colours with Gabrielle and she's really funny and she's really dramatic and she's really big. So it was really hard to pick a script that actually challenged me in the way that Desperate Housewives didn't; because I'm really lucky with the Desperate Housewives. Then when I read The Sentinel I thought it was really clever; it keeps you on the edge of your seat."

She also said she expected Housewives to last a long time, and hit back at critics. "Well, we haven't slowed down," she said. "Critics always go, 'Ratings slump for Desperate Housewives.' We're like, 25 million? Even if we slowed down by half it's still a highly rated show. If we were doing 14 million a week, that's better than 90 percent of the shows on television."

The full interview, where Longoria is given an opportunity to talk about matters other than the usual topics of her boyfriend and vibrators, can be found at Moviehole.net. Longoria chats more about The Sentinel, media attention and what film she'd like to do next.

Discuss this news item at Talk Desperate!
 Add Get Desperate! RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!