Eva Longoria: Desperate Housewives actor wanted her to lobby for his pay raise

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When EW gathered some of Hollywood’s top actresses together last month to talk everything from social media to sexism, the conversation naturally included discussion of the industry’s gender pay gap.

And Eva Longoria, who became a big star courtesy of Desperate Housewives, the hit ABC television soap that ran from 2004-2012, relayed an anecdote about negotiating for a pay raise with her female costars. The four women on the show — Longoria, Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman, and Marcia Cross — presented themselves as a united front before the network.

But apparently, at least one of the male actors wanted in too. Rather then fight for a “second-tier” actor as Longoria referred to him, the 40-year-old multi-hypenate chose to do what a man would do in that scenario: fight for herself.

“I thought, ‘When would a man, the lead man of a show go, ‘I think the second-tier women should get a raise like us,'” Longoria said during the Beyond Beautiful roundtable discussion alongside Reese Witherspoon, Kerry Washington, and Elizabeth Banks. “I thought, ‘No, this is called Desperate Housewives. And we worked really hard to have the pay we had on that show.”

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