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On ‘UnREAL,’ Constance Zimmer Leans In to Darkness
Quote:
In the first five minutes of the new season of “UnREAL,” beginning June 6 on Lifetime, Constance Zimmer’s character, Quinn King, gets a vulgar tattoo, plies executives with cocaine in a Las Vegas hotel room and makes potty-mouthed plans to turn racism into ratings gold.
“The standards-and-practices lady at Lifetime told me, ‘I’m trying to approve as many of your dirty words as I can get away with,’” Ms. Zimmer recalled recently, sitting in a Lower East Side bistro. “And I was like, thank you, because Quinn cannot be filtered.”
This from an actor who not long ago was ready to move away from the hardened, caustic characters that had come to define her in shows like “Entourage,” “House of Cards” and “The Newsroom.” But by embracing those qualities and turning them up to 11, Ms. Zimmer has found, in her mid-40s, her first leading role. In the process, she helped elevate “UnREAL,” an acid satire of reality dating shows like “The Bachelor,” into a surprise breakout for Lifetime, bringing critical acclaim and the first Peabody Award to a channel known for soapy dramas, reality shows like “Dance Moms” and 1990s TV movies with titles like “My Stepson, My Lover.”
Quinn, the baroquely profane mentor and nemesis to Shiri Appleby’s mercurial protagonist, Rachel, wields her walkie-talkie like a weapon as she oversees “Everlasting,” the fictional dating show within the show. The competition’s producers push the genre’s routine manipulations, like casting for conflict and orchestrating outbursts, to monstrous extremes. They cajole, threaten and otherwise torment the striving beauties with whatever is handy — last season a contestant with bipolar disorder killed herself after her handler tampered with her mood-stabilizing medication.
“They’re the mole people living behind the walls, preying on the butterflies under the light,” said Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, the former “Bachelor” producer who created “UnREAL” with Marti Noxon.
In Season 2, the bachelor character (B. J. Britt) is African-American — unlike any “Bachelor” lead, over 20 seasons — which Quinn and Rachel exploit by turning the gaudy mansion set into a racial powder keg. (The cast in “Everlasting” includes a black activist and a Southern belle who has a thing for Confederate flag bikinis.)
But beneath the phony glamour and skulduggery is a more searching story about modern romance, gender roles and the price of ambition, one that is exceptional in its primary focus on two flawed and complicated women. Quinn and Rachel are the kind of capable but tormented antiheroes generally played by men, and while various love interests hover at the margins, the women’s convulsive relationship is “the real love story of this show,” Ms. Appleby said.
“It’s a female ‘Breaking Bad’ set on a reality TV show,” Ms. Shapiro said.
The first season of “UnREAL” drew modest ratings, bringing in an average of 1.3 million viewers per episode when DVR viewing is factored in, according to Nielsen. (The actual “Bachelor” draws 9.5 million viewers.) But the show has been “a game-changer show for us,” said Rob Sharenow, executive vice president for programming and strategy at Lifetime, its acclaim and narrative boldness helping to both redefine the channel and reach a younger, wealthier audience. Ms. Zimmer’s “unique combination of smart, funny, sexy” is a key component of the show’s appeal, he said. “There’s something classic about her, like a Katharine Hepburn.”
Initially, however, she wanted nothing to do with the show. Ms. Zimmer was the first choice to play Quinn, because she can be fiery but also “vulnerable without melodrama,” Ms. Shapiro said. But she turned down the role multiple times, wary both of playing yet another no-nonsense career woman and of starring on a Lifetime show. (“I’ve said this to Lifetime, so they won’t be upset if I say it again,” she said.) The producers hired a different actress but were unsatisfied with the initial pilot, so they went back to the drawing board and renewed their pursuit of Ms. Zimmer.
Cornered at her daughter’s school by Nina Lederman, at the time a Lifetime executive whose child also attended it, Ms. Zimmer agreed to meet the producers and was eventually won over by the show’s “darkness and desperation,” as well as the feminist themes. Quinn’s slovenly, entitled boss and sometime lover, Chet, played by Craig Bierko, is a sloppy, sweatpants-wearing embodiment of gender double standards among TV honchos. “If Quinn was a man, she’d be Chet,” Ms. Shapiro said. “But she’s not, so she’s having to march around set in Louis Vuitton dresses and heels, indignant about the fact that those women get the short end of the stick.”
Ms. Zimmer was also drawn to the complexities of a character whose brashness masks a deep sorrow over what she has sacrificed for her professional success. “If you put her in a room alone with a drink, there’s going to be tears,” she said. But all of the series’s angst and outrageousness aside, she added, “I would just hope it shows strong women that it’s O.K. to be strong.”
Tart and sardonic as Quinn, the actress in conversation is more prone to smiles that seem to swallow her entire face, and her distinctive raspy voice softens. Perhaps because of her reputation for sharp-edged characters, colleagues are quick to stress Ms. Zimmer’s warmth; Ms. Shapiro called her “the den mother” of the “UnREAL” set. Ms. Zimmer recalled that, after being hired to play a hard-charging journalist on “House of Cards,” she asked the director and executive producer David Fincher why she “always gets cast as these bitchy women.” He replied that “it’s because I’m not one in real life,” she said. “So then I started thinking, O.K., I’ll take it as a compliment.”
Ms. Zimmer was born in Seattle to German immigrant parents and still speaks fluent German. But her family moved often, and she grew up mostly in Southern California feeling misunderstood and out of place, an edgy inner goth “disguised as this weird bleached, permed Newport Beach girl.” She discovered acting in high school, moving on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena. Plays in Los Angeles gave way to commercials and bit parts in sitcoms like “Ellen” and “Seinfeld.” (She played a waitress in the show’s famous coffee shop.)
In 2002, she got her first role as a series regular, as a sarcastic assistant on the sitcom “Good Morning Miami.” The show lasted less than two seasons, but soon after she joined the Hollywood lad fantasy “Entourage,” in perhaps still her most well-known role. As the film executive Dana Gordon, her main job was to clash affectionately with Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold. The character solidified her smart-sexy-tough type, leading to roles as a lawyer (“Boston Legal”), a withering political operative (“The Newsroom”) and a shady bureaucrat (“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”).
The string of supporting parts established her as a fan favorite, even if she often didn’t stick around for long. Her appeal stems from an ability to “be very stern” but still “slay the comedy,” Mr. Piven said. “She’s kind of a rare bird.”
Asked why she thinks it took so long to get a starring role, Ms. Zimmer took a sip of water and shrugged. “I don’t know, why does it take women so long to get what they deserve in general?” she said.
But she couldn’t have played someone like Quinn earlier in her career, she said. Ms. Zimmer credits marriage and motherhood — her husband, Russ Lamoureux, is a director, and they have an 8-year-old daughter — with giving her the security, perspective and confidence to dive into the darkness without “being afraid that I wouldn’t be able to come back out of it.”
“She’s a woman who is flawed and has struggles and is insecure but is at the same time confident and independent, and it’s incredible that this is what I get to play at this time in my life,” she said. “There’s so much more about her that we have yet to learn.”
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When I saw his face pop up on Rachel's phone in the preview for season 2, it made me hopeful that he would be back. I hope it's towards the end of the season b/c I want him around in season 3. 
