In PEOPLE’s One Last Thing feature, Longoria was asked about the last time she watched Desperate Housewives. She said Santiago has been finding YouTube memes of Gabrielle Solis, her character from the series, and has become a little obsessed with them.
“So lately I’ve been seeing a lot just because of him discovering it,” Longoria said.
Santiago has asked about watching the show itself. “He asks, ‘Mom, when can I watch it?’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Never.’”
Santiago turned 8 in June. Longoria shares him with her husband, José Antonio “Pepe” Bastón.
Longoria Says She Hasn’t Gone Back to Desperate Housewives
Longoria had been asked about watching the series herself three months earlier. On Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me podcast in May, Ferguson asked whether she had gone back and watched Desperate Housewives.
“No,” Longoria said. He asked whether she watched it when the show originally aired. “No.”
Longoria said streaming services now recommend Desperate Housewives to her as other viewers rediscover it. “I’m fine,” she said. “I made it.”
Santiago Asked Why Everybody Knew His Mom
@taoualitamar #evalongoria avec son fils à #cannes ♬ son original – AMAR TAOUALIT
At a Nespresso event in Cannes in May 2025, Santiago asked Longoria, “Why does everybody know you?” At another point, he told the photographers, “Everybody knows my mom, just stop taking pictures of her!”
After spotting images of Longoria nearby, he also asked why she was “on books.” Longoria told PEOPLE during the festival that she had brought her “whole circus” of a family with her to Cannes.
During a March 2025 appearance on Good Morning America, Longoria said he had watched Dora and the Lost City of Gold, the 2019 movie in which she played Dora’s mother. “He saw Dora the Explorer and he was very confused that I was Dora’s mom,” Longoria said.
She remembered him asking, “Wait, you’re her mom?” Longoria started to answer. Santiago kept going. “Where is she? Why doesn’t she live with us?”
Santiago Was With Longoria in Australia
Santiago was with Longoria in Australia when she made Dora. “He was in my trailer,” Longoria told Extra in 2019.
Santiago was only 2 months old during the Australia trip. Longoria later said she had been anxious about taking him on such a long flight. He slept through it. She also took him to the zoo while they were there, though she said he was too young to remember any of it.
By the time he was 3 months old, he was boarding another flight, this one to San Antonio. A flight attendant had noticed the pattern. “That baby has platinum status,” Longoria recalled in a 2023 Parade interview. “He gets a free drink coupon if he wants it!”
By February 2019, Santiago was 7 months old. Longoria brought him to the set of Grand Hotel, the ABC drama she was producing and directing. “When I was directing, I had just had Santi and I was breastfeeding as I was saying action and running around,” she told Entertainment Tonight at the Television Critics Association press tour.
Longoria had returned to directing when Santiago was 7 weeks old. She initially thought working behind the camera would make the return easier. “This will be easy because I’m not in front of the camera!” she recalled to TV Insider. Once she was doing it, her assessment was shorter: “This is worse!”
When Grand Hotel premiered in June 2019, Longoria also posted photos of herself breastfeeding Santiago while directing and thanked the crew and cast for supporting both her new motherhood and her career.
Acting in the series created another problem. Longoria recalled directing and producing when somebody reminded her that she needed to go to hair and makeup. “Oh! I forgot!” she said.
Later, she was filming a scene with Roselyn Sánchez and found herself waiting because nobody had called action or cut. “Oh! Somebody should say action, somebody should say cut,” Longoria recalled. Then she realized why nobody had. “It was me. I’m supposed to do that.”
In August 2019, Santiago was beside Longoria again during a Dora press day. Longoria posted a photo of herself sitting on the floor with him bouncing on her lap. “Press interviews while being a mommy #workingmommy,” she wrote.
In another photo, the interviewers were on the floor too. “All the interviewers sat on the floor with me. Thank you,” Longoria wrote. Santiago stayed with her through the interviews.
Longoria also used the day to salute other working mothers, saying the juggling was hard and giving them credit for getting through it.
Santiago Made His Red Carpet Debut in Paris
Five years later, Santiago joined Longoria at the Global Gift Gala in Paris. It was his first red carpet, and he arrived in a black suit and white sneakers with a bright pink cast on his left arm.
“Santi didn’t want to leave the red carpet,” Longoria wrote afterward. Inside the gala, she filmed him enjoying Matt Pokora’s music. “I don’t know who the star is, Matt Pokora or Santi,” Longoria wrote.
Longoria said taking Santiago to see Bruno Mars could earn her “extra mom points.” “No way, oh my God! We gotta find a date to go,” she recalled him saying after he saw Mars was touring. She said he immediately got online to look for one.