Ghost movie is all about Eva
Posted on Sunday, January 27, 2008
DALLAS — In the new movie Over Her Dead Body, Eva Longoria Parker plays a bride who is bludgeoned by a falling ice sculpture on her wedding day. Several months later, Kate, her character, reappears as a ghost to sabotage the blossoming romance between her former fiance and a new flame, a psychic who is the only person who can still see Kate. One of the tactics Longoria Parker’s character employs is mimicking, when the amorous couple are supposedly alone, the sound of flatulence.
“It’s kind of a great template for a romantic comedy — I would go so far as to say Shakespearean, with the ghost,” Longoria Parker said the other day of the film, which opens Friday. “I think there’s a classicness to it,” she added, agreeing with herself with a purred “mmmhmmm.” The diminutive and raven-haired actress was seated at the end of a conference table in a Dallas hotel suite, where she had flown from her home in San Antonio to talk about the movie. She was dressed in a strapless, belted tangerine dress, over which she shrugged into a black trench coat to fight the chill in the room. ’ “Thank God we’re on break, or I wouldn’t have been able to do the press tour,” she said. By “break” Longoria Parker meant the strike by the Writers Guild of America, which has shut down production of Desperate Housewives, the ABC series on which she plays Gabrielle. She said that she read an interview with Marc Cherry, the show’s creator, in which he said he considers this season of new episodes, the series’ fourth, to be over.
“I’m being a housewife, as opposed to playing a housewife,” Longoria Parker said, a reference to her marriage to Tony Parker, point guard for the San Antonio Spurs. “I’ve been home with my husband, doing nothing, actu- ally. Now, I’m going to Paris Fashion Week, I’m going to New York Fashion Week. It’s just so fun. Usually, I can’t do anything.” Someone in the room noted that the actress had inspired one of the more creative picket-line slogans used by the Guild: “We write the story-a, for Eva Longoria !” “You thought that was creative ?” she asked, sounding dubious. “I thought for writers, they could have done better. They did one for Felicity, where they rhymed it with complicity.” Felicity, of course, is Felicity Huffman, who plays the plainspoken, spread-thinly Lynette. Longoria Parker added that she had cozied up to the writers long enough to ask that when she becomes pregnant in real life, that her character be pregnant also. “Were they cool with that ?” asked her assistant. “Um, no,” the actress confessed. An argument in Longoria Parker’s favor is that a pregnancy not in the script can be difficult to conceal, especially for a performer who considers herself a physical comedian. When Longoria Parker was first sent the script for Over Her Dead Body, she was offered the role of the romantic lead, the psychic who falls in love with the bereft fiance, played by Paul Rudd. The role of the scheming ghost appealed to her more. “I love people who move the story along, and I thought she had all the funny reactions, plus she was the most physical,” Longoria Parker said. “It was hard, because, as a ghost, you had to think about everything. If I moved my dress, I would think, would I really move my dress ? If I knocked at the door, I would think, would I really knock ? Wouldn’t I just come in ?” The obligatory ghost-movie question: Does Longoria Parker believe in them ? (Ghosts, that is — not ghost movies. ) “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I definitely believe there’s energy and spirits around us. Angels. Angels protecting us.” In the afterlife, she added, “well, I would haunt Tony. And that’s about it. I’d just want to hang out with him.” In Longoria Parker’s next film, titled Lower Learning, she will play a school superintendent who teams with an elementary-school vice principal to save a school on the verge of closing. The vice principal is played by Jason Biggs, a co-star of Over Her Dead Body. The villain is played by... “character actor, so funny. Ah ! What’s his name ?” Longoria Parker said, sounding tortured. “When you see it you’re going to be like, that guy is hilarious.” She strained her memory for a moment more. “Rob Cordry !” she finally blurted.
Lower Learning won’t be released until next year. For now, Longoria Parker is concerned with the performance of her ghost movie.
She said she was particularly spooked by the idea that another film opening the same weekend consists of footage from a Hannah Montana concert, edited into a theatrical release. Upon hearing that a visitor to the suite had already seen Over Her Dead Body, by virtue of a sneak preview, she turned to him and, in a very serious tone, said, “Go see it again !”
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