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Eva Longoria said she "put on her male privilege pants" to land latest project

Photo credit: Philipp Schmidli - Getty Images
Photo credit: Philipp Schmidli - Getty Images

From Harper's BAZAAR

Eva Longoria said she acted like "a white man" to land her latest project after being told "to put on her male privilege pants" by a producer friend.

The actress was pitching her biopic Flamin' Hot, which centres on the life of Richard Montanez, a former Frito-Lay janitor who went on to create the famous Flamin' Hot Cheetos snack for the company.

"I was practicing pitching [for the job] with him [Desperate Housewives producer Brian Tanen] and he said, 'Stop right there, put on your male privilege pants and stop asking to do this movie," the star told The Sun on Sunday.

"Walk in the room as if that movie's yours and you're directing it and tell them this is how you're going to cast it, this is how you're going to shoot it.'"

Photo credit: Getty Images
Photo credit: Getty Images

Longoria added: "And I thought, 'Oh my gosh, yeah! I'm not a man and I'm not white, so I wouldn't think to do that. It was a change in approach to every sentence that came out of my mouth."

Longoria said that being demanding isn't in her nature because "as women we want to be amenable" and "be seen as cooperative", to avoid being dismissed as 'difficult'.

Meanwhile, the star revealed that the real-life characters in her upcoming film are almost as unbelievable as the ones in Netflix hit Tiger King.

"I wanted to make a movie about a man who had an amazing life, who happened to invent the number one snack in the world. I gravitate to real life," she disclosed.

"There's so many characters that you couldn't write, like you couldn't have written Tiger King. You couldn't have written a character [Joe Exotic] that crazy. People would go, 'Oh, that guy doesn't exist.'"

The film follows Montanez, the son of an immigrant, who grew up as a migrant farm worker picking grapes in the fields of Southern California before he becomes a janitor at Frito-Lay. He ascends to millionaire status after turning the brand into a pop culture phenomenon by creating a wildly popular category of crunchy snacks.

Longoria is also directing and producing 24/7, in which she co-stars with Kerry Washington.

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