Longoria a mix of contradictions

Eva Longoria was well on her way to convincing us that her petite, perfectly formed self makes a credible Secret Service agent in her first major film, "The Sentinel."

Wearing an off-the-shoulders top, with cascades of intricately waved hair, she didn't need to explain why, as the perversely passionate Gabrielle Solis in "Desperate Housewives," she's television's top-ranked sex symbol.

We were suitably awestruck. Then she reached behind her back and started tugging at something.

"A tag," she said with an exasperated sigh. "I always do this, I have tags on my clothes when I go out."

Nice to know that even someone as formidably put together as Eva Longoria has her doofus qualities. But when you want to talk about the 31-year-old actress's fascinating contradictions, that's just the start.

Some are so monumental that, well, they should be in a record book somewhere. As mentioned, Longoria is literally a walking definition of diminutive. Yet, to mark its 100th issue, men's magazine Maxim painted a football-field-size reproduction of a recent Longoria cover — a best seller, natch — just over the Nevada state line. It's so big that it can reportedly be seen from space, like the Great Wall of China.

"So, I'm the Eighth Wonder of the World," Longoria said with a self-mocking laugh. "It's flattering and very, very funny."

Back down on Earth, slightly, Longoria's breakout success on TV's biggest hit of the past two years has made her one of the best-known Latinas in show business. She takes the position seriously, with a great deal of pride and responsibility. Yet she did not speak Spanish fluently before studying it in college. And by any measure, Longoria is far more authentically Texan than a certain president we could name.

"Something like eighth, ninth, 10th," she says of her generation, which includes three older sisters, that grew up on the family ranch outside of Corpus Christi. "We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us. We've got the same Spanish land grants our Mexican ancestors did."

And it was on that property that little Eva's dad started teaching his daughter to shoot when she was 6 years old. Imagine the surprise of her he-man "Sentinel" co-stars, Michael Douglas and Kiefer Sutherland, the day the movie's ex-Secret Service adviser took the three of them to a gun range for some training.

"Well, it was off the charts," co-star Douglas said of Longoria's ballistic skill. "It was humiliating, to be quite honest. We were kind of patting Eva on the back beforehand, saying, 'Relax, you'll get into it.' She was, 'OK, thank you so much.' Then, ka-pow ka-pow! She shoots better than 90 percent of the police officers in our country."