Here’s a feud you didn’t know you needed this week: Two actors going at it over whether daytime TV is a worthy medium or not. That’s right, The Young and the Restless legend Eric Braeden called out Eva Longoria after she said a few things about the show, and it’s the perfect salve to everything else going on right now.
The whole thing started when Longoria appeared on Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace, and he mentioned that her first acting job was on The Young and the Restless. He then played a clip. Longoria explained that the show “didn’t pay enough for me to live off being an actor.”
She said she worked as a headhunter in the daytime, and that brought in more money, so she hid her soap-acting gig from her corporate clients, because she didn’t want them to think she was just “a dumb actress handling their accounts.”
“And one time one of my clients was like, ‘You look like a girl I’ve seen on a soap opera.’ And I go, ‘No, I don’t know who that is.’ I was like the opposite of a publicist’s dream. I was like, ‘Don’t tell anybody I’m on that show’ because I was still making more money on my day job.”
This seemingly-innocuous, light-hearted, and even self-effacing aresponse was not taken that way by Braeden, who plays the legendary Victor Newman on the show. He went all out on Longoria on Twitter.
First of all, check out how he typed “EVA LONGORIA” in all caps to let everyone know this was serious. The came this hard jab: “You simply weren’t good enough to survive the pressures of this medium!”
Oof, shots fired. He then hit her with “You were very lucky to get on that “housewife” show! You did one show in 8-12 days, with mediocre but salacious dialogue!” Now he could’ve stopped there, but he was obviously very fired up because the tirade kept going.
“Our actresses would run rings around you!!” he said, adding that “they did then.” He then named
“Robert di Nero” [sic] by which we’re assuming he meant Robert De Niro, and cited the actor and others and said “many of them started in the medium you denigrate! It shows a complete lack of class!!”
For some reason, he wasn’t done. He then started responding to comments under his tweets. One person said they watched the clip and Longoria “didn’t say anything bad” or “make any derogatory remarks about daytime actors.” Here was his response:
“Come on now, the whole tenor of that segment was one of embarrassment about her stint in Y&R and HOUSEWIVES! What did you not get about that?” He’s fired up! Someone else also tried to talk some sense into Braden too, reiterating the fact that “She was not talking about Young and the Restless. She was talking about Desperate Housewives.”
“Stop that nonsense, I saw and heard what she talked about!!! And it was derogatory!!!” This is classic. He also called her “a caricature” and also said she simply “wasn’t very good.”
Regardless, this is great press for both The Young and the Restless and Longoria’s new CNN show Searching for Mexico, which premieres March 26 on CNN. We’ll keep you posted if/when Longoria responds.
