Before she became a multimillionaire TV star, sipping rosé on Wisteria Lane as Desperate Housewives’ Gabrielle Solis, Longoria refused to rough it like other actors, waiting tables between auditions and crashing on a friend’s couch. Instead, she was building a headhunting empire from her soap opera dressing room. 

“The first day I landed in L.A., I got a job,” Longoria exclusively tells Fortune. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to be a struggling actor. I’m going to figure this out.’”

Figure it out, she did. The 51-year-old star—who now has a net worth north of $80 million; a production company; a directing career; a stake in women’s soccer team Angel City FC; a $6 million investment in the John Wick franchise; and a new mentoring partnership with Lenovo to support small-business owners—landed a role at a temp agency as a headhunter. 

And even once she’d scored her first real acting role on The Young and the Restless, she kept going. She was still negotiating salaries, screening candidates, and closing placement deals in between takes. 

“In my dressing room, I was doing the headhunting,” Longoria recalls. “I was negotiating 401(k)s and salaries and interviewing and reading résumés and placing people. And then they would be like, ‘Eva, ready on set.’” She’d hang up mid-call, go act, come back, and pick up exactly where she’d left off. 

Despite regular screen time, acting paid less than headhunting, so she didn’t quit; she kept up that double life for years, even denying her role on TV when clients eventually recognized her soap character on-screen. She only walked away from corporate life in her third year on the show, after a pay bump finally made acting financially viable. 

“I knew I could always go back to corporate America if acting didn’t work out,” she says. Shortly after, she landed Desperate Housewives—and the rest is television history.

Eva Longoria’s former boss begged her to stay in corporate America

Longoria has never had to look far for her work ethic. The youngest in a female-dominated household—“nine aunts, three sisters, no brothers”—she grew up surrounded by financially independent women. 

As a teenager in Texas, Longoria started working at a Wendy’s for $3.35 an hour and hustled her way up from “fried girl to hamburger girl to the drive-thru, to head cashier to assistant manager” from the ages of 14 to 18—juggling her part-time job with high school.

“If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it well,” she remembers thinking. “I would work overtime. I work weekends. I was like, ‘Pick me, pick me. I’ll do it.’ I love the idea of earning money.”

That same energy followed her to Los Angeles. When she joined the temp agency, the CEO gave her a choice: steady base salary or unlimited commission. “I didn’t know either of those words,” she recalls. “He goes, ‘Well, base salary means you only make this much, but commission means you can make as much as you want.’ And I said, ‘That one. I want that one.’”

Within one month, she says she was making three times the base salary.

In fact, Longoria got so good at her job that her boss tried to renegotiate her commission structure because it “wasn’t built for the volume” she was producing—and when she eventually told him she was leaving for acting, he even tried to talk her out of it.

“He never understood why I didn’t stay in corporate America,” she says. “It just wasn’t my calling, but I was really great at it.

“Everybody was surprised because I built this small business within his business, and he kept saying, ‘Why would you want to be an actress? You’re so good at business; it’s a one in a million chance you’re going to be successful at acting.’ And I said, ‘I know—and I’m the one in a million.’” 

Eva Longoria’s advice to Gen Z: ‘Figure it out’

Her mother, for what it’s worth, wasn’t worried when Longoria said she was pursuing a career in acting. Her response was characteristically pragmatic: “You have your degree, so if you need a job, you can get a job … My mom always said that you better figure that out.”

And she says it’s that mantra that separates the one in a million who make it in a creative industry from the thousands who don’t. 

Longoria, for example, didn’t wait for an agent to discover her—she went directly to them. “I looked up who the gatekeepers are, who hold the keys to these opportunities, and then figured out when they were speaking at an event. And I would go to the event, give them my headshot, or introduce myself.” That, she says, is how she landed her breakout role on The Young and the Restless. 

Longoria is refreshingly clear-eyed about the fact that Hollywood, unlike business, doesn’t reward effort with predictable returns. “You could do exactly what I did and not have the same outcome,” she says. 

But she also thinks a particular kind of resourcefulness is nonnegotiable—and increasingly rare. “A lot of people prevent progress because of perfection,” she says. “’I don’t exactly know how to do that, so I’m not going to do that’—that thought process, to me, is crazy.

“I remember landing in L.A. and going, ‘Okay, what do I need to do? I need headshots. Okay, let me figure that out. I need an agent. I’ve got to figure that out’ … And that’s really a huge trait.”