Eva Longoria

0:00Hi, I'm Eva Longoria from Mother Up, and you are watching MSN Exclusives. There's your buster. What about my watch? And you eat dry food, wet food, people food. Correct. You've got that correct. So this is a change? Change. An animated show? Rudy Wilson. Rudy Wilson. Mother Up. Mother, so how come? Why animation? You know, it was something I hadn't really done. I mean, I've done a little bit of voice over work, but never carried a series. And I thought, oh, my God, after Desperate Housewives, I said, I would love to go in a sound booth without hair and makeup and just, you know, kind of sit back and do the voice of this character. But then I didn't realize how much work it is. It is much harder to do this series in Desperate Housewives.

0:48Why is that? To be in a sound booth, you don't have the animation, you don't have the look, you don't know what the scene is going to look like. You have no other actors to act off of. You're just kind of in the booth creating the world with your voice. And it involves a lot of overacting because you've really got to make it as big as possible so that when the animator gets your voice, he knows like, oh, yeah, she screamed and then she jumped and then she gasped. And then so it's exhausting when you come out of the sound booth. Okay, I'd much rather be in hair and makeup than acting. From the little clips I've seen in the show, it sounds like it's your voice, but did you try and put on character, did you try different voices to try to find room? Yeah, yeah. When, then, thank you, ma'am. Yeah, we tried different, little different things and came up with a very narcissistic character.

1:37Is she narcissistic? No, she's a narcissistic character. And her narcissistic condescending voice of, you know, always feels like you're an idiot. However she talks to, she's cutting down. Yeah, you know, I play the character of Rudy Wilson who's this high powered music exec who loses her job and has to move to the suburbs and raise her children, which she's never done. She's always had help and she's had, you know, nannies and housekeepers and so this is the first time she realizes, oh, okay, I can do this. I mean, by ran a boardroom, I can definitely run the house and she doesn't understand how the business skills that she has does not transfer over to parenting skills. And it does not. You know, she wants to run the household like she runs a business and the kids are, you know, four and seven. I mean, I mean, they're good names for a cartoon.

2:23Oh, they're horrible names, but I like them. There's a lot of jokes played on them. And she's, you know, she's, this is her first hand at being a mom and so she's going to stumble along the way and we get to laugh at her as she does. Where did you create the character? Where did you come up with Rudy? The writer, Michael Shipley, had a lot of experience with these mommy bloggers. So there were these blogs of women complaining about what they did wrong and how they're always judged and how, you know, they made these mistakes and, oh, God, did I ruin my child for the rest of his life? Did I scar my child? So Rudy is kind of the embodiment of the mother you don't want to be or you wish you will never be. You know, she gets to make all the mistakes so that, you know, you don't have to. Is it true that you came up here to voice it up in Canada?

3:11Yeah, uh-huh. Where was that? Here or Vancouver? Here, Toronto. Oh, nice. Our whole cast is from, is Canadian. You know, the show's homegrown here in Canada and it's been a lot of fun. I love Toronto. I've only been to Toronto. You know, people say, do you like Canada? I go, I like Toronto. Where are the epicenter in Canada? Does approaching animate a character change from approaching a live action character? Oh, yeah. When you're getting the prep work and everything going on. Totally, yeah. I mean, like I said, it's harder when you don't have an actor to react to so you're just kind of, you know, creating your own little world and your mind. I want to talk about your degree. My degree? Yeah, it's so exciting. Like, it's so different and amazing. So what made you want to go back to school up? Well, I come from a family of educators.

3:56So everybody in my family has masters. I was like the last one. So I was the underachiever. So I was wanted to go back and get it. But because of my political activism, I wanted to explore more of the history of policy and politics behind the Latino communities. And so that's why I decided to do Chicano Studies as my master's degree. That's awesome. Yeah. You can't go through life putting everybody else's needs above yours. You know what happens to people who do that? What? Wow, what I know.