Director adds a little tact to bosses on UnReal
LOS ANGELES — For Quinn King, the gruff executive producer of a Bachelor-like reality show in Lifetime’s UnReal, a normal day of boss-dom includes manipulation, shouting into walkie-talkies when scenes don’t have enough drama, and dressing down the crew with words of “encouragement” like, “Why don’t you go and be useful?”
Not exactly the approach Constance Zimmer, who plays the acerbic honcho in the weekly drama, adopted when she made her move into directing during the show’s current third season.
“I definitely was not as intense as Quinn would be,” Zimmer, 47, says while seated on the front patio of her Hollywood Hills home. “I saw Greta Gerwig [an Oscar nominee for her directorial debut of Lady Bird] on a panel recently and she said, ‘When it’s your first time, that’s when you can fail.’ That was my approach. If you don’t go big, you don’t know if you could have done better.”
Zimmer, who has directed a few one-act plays in recent years as part of the Blank Theatre Company’s Young Playwrights Festival, made her TV directorial debut in the UnReal episode titled “Recurrent,” which aired Monday.
The actor, who has made a career out of playing caustic characters on shows such as Entourage, House of Cards, and The Newsroom, talked about going behind the camera, her brief stint as a gymnast, and Hollywood’s reckoning with sexual harassment and assault. Later this year, Zimmer will return as hard-nosed reporter Janine Skorsky in the final season of Netflix’s House of Cards.
Q: We’re seeing a lot of actresses in recent years branch out into producing and directing as a way to take control of their career and create opportunities that might be lacking in Hollywood. Was that part of your motivation?
A: I had always wanted to direct. I directed a bunch of plays through the Blank Theatre Company. It was then that I thought, ‘Ooh, I really like this, but I wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to do it beyond theatre.’ Obviously, at the time I didn’t have a lot of female directors that I was looking at and going, ‘Oh, wow, look at them, they’re working all the time.’ Instead, female directors were such an anomaly. So when Shiri (Appleby, her co-star on UnReal) directed an episode in Season 2, I thought it would be the best place to try it out.
Q: What was your experience like directing something you were also acting in?
A: I found that I really liked directing, and I want to do more of it, but I’d like to not be acting in it. There’s a lot of people that do it, and they’re really good at it. I’m just still too new at it that I would like to be more confident in my directing skills before I start directing myself. When I’m in the scene, I’m worried about everything — I’m worried about my acting, and the other people’s acting and if it’s the right look or if it’s the right lens or if it’s the right lighting. I mean my scariest thing for me was the day I had to shoot 12 pages and there were 13 actors in one scene. And the other challenge with UnReal is you also have to do “Everlasting” (the show-within-the-show) takes.
Q: Did you learn anything while being in director mode that you never realized when you were in actor mode?
A: Oh, God, yeah. From the casting, to looking at the wardrobe, to doing rehearsals. There’s probably a lot of directors that are mad at me and have been mad at me because I tend to not do a full-out performance at rehearsal because then I feel like it’s gone. Being the director, it was the first time I realized, “Oh, I get it now. I get why they need it.”