In ‘Land of Women,’ Eva Longoria leads a trio on the run in Spain

There’s no better place to find oneself than in Spain’s wine country. And no better place to shoot a television series. Just ask Eva Longoria.

After more than a decade, the actor is returning to the small screen in her first starring role with “Land of Women,” premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+.

Longoria, who also serves as an executive producer on the show, had been eyeing a return to acting for quite a while. She’d been spending a lot of time in Spain and found herself daydreaming of a project that would give her the chance to film there. When she called her friend Ramón Campos, the co-creator of such global hits as “Velvet,” “Las chicas del cable” (Cable Girls) and “Gran Hotel,” she had one comparable title in mind: “Under the Tuscan Sun” — maybe in Spain’s own wine country.

Campos returned a few weeks later with Sandra Barneda’s bestselling Spanish novel “La tierra de las mujeres” (Land of Women). With the novel serving as the seed of the concept, Campos and co-creators Gema R. Neira and Paula Fernández spun out the idea of three generations of women arriving at a small town where they’re not quite as welcome as they’d foreseen.

When New York socialite Gala (Longoria) finds out that her husband is on the run from some unsavory characters to whom he owes millions of dollars, she knows there’s only one place to hide: the Spanish town her mother left decades ago in a similar moment of desperation. In a fit of panic, Gala whisks her daughter Kate (newcomer Victoria Bazúa) away from school and her mother, Julia (Carmen Maura), from her retirement home.

The three arrive in Catalonia, where a female-run winery will play the backdrop to their attempts at finding a new lease on life — if only long-buried family secrets, ruinous small town gossip and two men with guns searching for them don’t get in the way first.

In “Land of Women,” Longoria coyly plays a twist on the role that made her famous, with a nod to Maura’s own most well-known film: Gala is a desperate housewife on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Arriving at the town of La Muga in impractical heels and in a broken down car, she soon finds this will be no heartwarming homecoming. It’s a challenge helped in no measure by Gala’s need to brush up on the language after so many years abroad — a challenge the Mexican American actor had to tackle herself.

“It was really fun, and it was really hard,” Longoria recalls. “Because the timing in a different language in comedy is very different. I was like, ‘Oh, my God. Is this funny? Am I funny?’”

“It was terrifying, especially acting opposite Carmen Maura,” Longoria adds, calling her the “Meryl Streep of Spain.” “She’s just the most respected actress. I’m such a fan and such an admirer of hers. She’s my favorite thing in the show.”

Eva Longoria calls Carmen Maura the “Meryl Streep of Spain,” whose work with Pedro Almodóvar made her a star in the country. “She’s my favorite thing in the show,” the actor says of Maura.

(Apple)

Maura can’t quite bring herself to be as effusive about her own work in the series. The Goya award-winning actor — best known for being Pedro Almodóvar’s earliest muse and the star of such films as “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Volver” — has been onscreen for close to half a century.

Though she’s constantly searching for new challenges, Maura still finds working on television dramas a bit of a bore: “Me dan pereza,” … as she puts it, talking with The Times over the phone from Spain. For her, episodic television, where you’re called to follow a character through this kind of long-form storytelling, can be quite a grueling process.

But what drew her to “Land of Women” is not that different from what first drew Longoria to the project: a great character and, perhaps more pragmatically, a great shooting location. Maura has long felt most at home in the countryside. “And this region of Catalonia is divine,” she says. “It has some really special sunsets. And those strong winds give it a kind of wildness that I love.”

Joining Maura and Longoria is newcomer Bazúa as Gala’s trans daughter, Kate, a moody teenager who has to leave her girlfriend and art school behind because of her parents’ ill-fated decisions. The Mexican model-turned-actor, who impressed both co-stars with her poise and talent, arrived on set with little knowledge of who she’d been cast opposite of on her first acting gig, though it turned out to be an asset.

Victoria Bazúa, left, with Eva Longoria and Carmen Maura. The model-turned-actor says she didn’t know of her co-stars before landing the role.

(Apple)

“That’s so Gen Z of me,” she admits. “But it’s just, we’re different generations. I really didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know who Eva was when I got the role. But that actually helped us get along better.”

For Maura, meanwhile, the process of shooting a series of this caliber was overwhelming. “Times have changed a lot,” Maura says. Though she’s wary of talking about “Land of Women” before it runs, she recalls the experience with a mix of fondness and apprehension.

“I remember arriving on set and thinking that it’d be just the director and the actors and that we’d all get to rehearse together,” she says. “But then everyone arrived surrounded by people, by their own teams. And I went up to the director and told him, ‘Hey, so when everyone leaves, we can talk more about the character?’ And he said, ‘Carmen, they’re not going anywhere.’”

“And then knowing it would be shot to be broadcast all over” — “hasta el quinto coño,” as she colorfully puts it — added a layer of concern. “But, you know, I have a sense of humor. It almost made me want to write it all down. It was all just so funny. I do miss how we shot things back then, though.”

She found the most joy in scenes that asked her to dive deep into the no-frills, go-for-broke kind of filmmaking she enjoys. She recalls being most at ease during a sequence that required her to swim out — fully clothed — into a body of water by the road. The scene finds Julia, who’s battling dementia, lost in her wild, youthful memories, when she’d skinny dip in those very waters with gorgeous boys whom she wasn’t supposed to be frolicking with.

For Maura, it was another moment where her character, a fearless outcast in her hometown then and now, was living out a wistful vision of a vibrant, uninhibited past. And she was the only one enjoying herself while shooting. Surrounded by crew members in full scuba gear and her fellow cast members, they couldn’t believe she was comfortable in those frigid waters.

But this is what Maura does best, bringing a degree of daringness and authenticity to her work. “What’s preoccupied me all of my life is that, whatever it was, it had to be true,” she insists. “Whatever road I’d take, I’d have to find the truth in it. Because if I play something and it sounds false, well, that irks me a lot. For that, you have to work hard.”

“Whatever road I’d take, I’d have to find the truth in it,” says Carmen Maura, left, with Victoria Bazúa in a scene from “Land of Women.”

(Apple)

In her hands, Julia is as spry as she is playful. Often donning a child-like smirk that drives the tightly wound Gala crazy, Julia finds she’s in dire need of being mothered herself the more she loses her grip on reality. As an acting showcase, it’s another reminder of the wry honesty Maura conjures with her performances. And, in turn, how well matched she and Longoria prove to be.

Having seen both actors at work, Campos knew he’d struck gold.

“They’re very different,” he says. “But they both know themselves quite well. I think of them as Ferraris. Or as Messi, the soccer player. If you’re in a scene with Carmen and Eva, you could start it with some comedy, then see them jump over to drama, it could all get quite moving and then they’d get you right back into comedy — in the same sequence. To have two actresses from different generations who can do that was wonderful.”

It’s what made Bazúa’s casting all the more pivotal. She’d have to match Longoria and Maura, yet bring a younger-skewing sensibility to the series as Kate.

“Land of Women,” Campos knew, had to cater to the entire family. Viewers would get their melodrama with Julia, and her prickly relationship with the town of La Muga. They’d get their romantic comedy with Gala and the crackling chemistry she soon develops with the sole guy at the winery (played by the dashing Santiago Cabrera). And with Kate, the series would offer a coming-of-age story that would come to refract both her mother’s and grandmother’s.

From the start, Campos knew the role called for a trans performer. Moreover, he wanted a teen who’d already transitioned and could pass when plopped in the middle of a rural town in Catalonia. Thankfully, for the “Land of Women” crew, Bazúa fit the brief to a tee. “It was the perfect, perfect role,” she recalls. “This was a trans girl. And she’s Mexican American. She’s a teenager with dark humor. She’s sarcastic. I was like, ‘That is literally me. Like, I need this job.’”

Victoria Bazúa is transgender, like her character Kate. “It was the perfect, perfect role,” she says.

(Apple)

Just don’t think Bazúa is merely playing herself onscreen. “I mean, first of all, she’s a lesbian. I’m not,” she says.

And unlike her character, who is shy and reserved, Bazúa says she doesn’t really get nervous and is confident speaking up.

“She goes through this space of learning how to stick up for herself,” she says. “I don’t feel bad if anyone says something about me. Kate is going through that process of learning how to be strong, which she learns from Gala.”

For Bazúa, learning to be strong came at an earlier age for her compared to her character, saying she was bullied regularly by both teachers and students at school. “Something that I realized is that even though people aren’t always going to talk about you, it’s up to you to know that it doesn’t matter what people say about you but rather what you think and know who you are as a person.”

It’s a bold message that runs through “Land of Women.” Unmoored from the comfort of their lives in the United States, these three women are forced to stand up for themselves and find, in time, who they truly wish to be.

“The pilot sets it up that we’re hiding,” Longoria says. “We run out and we have to go hide. And the irony is that we are found, but in a different way than you would think. We find ourselves. We find our voices. We find our superpowers.”

That powerful message is smuggled within a sun-dappled romcom-cum-melodrama that aims to be a balm amid our current television landscape.

“I watch TV right now, and it’s all dystopian futures and the world is going to end and governments are going to collapse and robots are gonna take over,” Longoria says. “It stresses me out and gives me anxiety. I want to watch something to escape. I want to see romance. I want to see beautiful backdrops. And that’s what we’re doing.”

“And then, you get wine porn.”