Desperate Times: Eva Longoria is a world away from Wisteria Lane this week, playing a gun-toting woman in black in the Secret Service thriller The Sentinel. Instead of vamping it up as Gabrielle Solis on Desperate Housewives, Eva goes totally hard-core, tracking down a killer with Michael Douglas and Kiefer Sutherland. But the thing that gets us most? We've never met a woman this beautiful who was so not stuck up. We had to get to the bottom of it.

Aren't you too short to be a Secret Service agent?
There's no requirement, legally, about height. It's not like a flight attendant. Plus, a lot of the women are petite in the Secret Service and in police forces all over the country. I've looked into this.

Okay, but aren't you too hot to be a Secret Service agent?
Somebody said, "Who in their right mind would give Gabrielle Solis a gun?" I agree. I wouldn't give her a gun, either. When I was on a show called L.A. Dragnet, I studied with a detective, and I looked like her twin. She was very petite, Hispanic, beautiful. And she was just sharp as a knife. It'd be like, "I don't want to mess with her."

What does it do for a girl's self-esteem to have a ginormous Maxim cover of herself visible from space, way out in the Nevada desert?
To be the biggest celebrity in the world? [The 110-foot-tall magazine cover is] gonna be out there for a while. I'm just worried that an alien's going to come by, see me, and I'm gonna get abducted.

Kiefer Sutherland seems like such a sensitive soul. Were there more tears on the set of Sentinel than Housewives?
First of all, he's my boyfriend's [pro basketballer Tony Parker] favorite actor in the world. When I told him Jack Bauer was gonna play this--I don't think he even knew Kiefer's name was even Kiefer--he was like, "Jack Bauer!" But I was nervous, just because he seems like a very serious human being, and he's a very serious actor. I thought it was going to be a long shoot. But he's hilarious, and he's very silly, and we had so much fun.

We hear that one of the Housewives may be getting pregnant. Could the season climax be that Gabrielle finds out she can conceive after all?
Just like all season finales for all shows, it's a cliffhanger. For our show, for all of the characters--specifically my character, Felicity's, then Marcia's--your jaw's gonna drop. You're just going to say, "I can't believe they went there. Are they really going to go with this storyline?" I think that's the exciting part of our show. Expect the unexpected.