Constance Zimmer gets her shot at ‘UnReal’ directing

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, makes her TV directorial debut in the “UnReal” episode titled “Recurrent,” which airs April 16.

The following is an edited transcript. 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 theater.”

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.

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.

A: I did, and then they halted production, and then I was like, “I don’t know. What am I doing?” And I kind of had to lay it to rest because nobody knew what was going on. And so, when they called me and said that Janine was still coming back for the final season, I was very excited because that’s definitely a character that I missed.

A: Isn’t it sad that you have to have a fall of a man to uplift a woman? That show was a duet; it was a couple . ... But (“House of Cards”) has still so much to tell.