Everything changes in season 3! It’s been nearly two years since season 2 of UnREAL ended, and Constance Zimmer is ready for Quinn to take over again! The actress, 47, spoke exclusively with Us Weekly about the intense next season.
“In the beginning she’s a little off balance and it was an interesting thing to play, having played her for two seasons, so in control,” the star told Us Weekly exclusively at the UnREAL and Mary Kills People Anti-Valentine’s Bash on Tuesday, February 13. “The end of the second season kind of threw her out of whack, falling in love and not being able to have a kid. We do come into this season a little off and how to stumble and not fall, but stumble and build yourself back up.”
However, Zimmer says it was a struggle for her to find the right way to take on Quinn’s state of mind. “I was like, how do I keep her strong but keep her humble, vulnerable and affected by big, huge life changes? And the deaths,” the Entourage alum explained. “It’s nice that you’re going to get to see how that affects all of us and what happens to the family. The family is really Rachel, Quinn, Chet and Jeremy, and now it’s kind of like, where do we go from here? It’s interesting and then you’ve got this strong woman coming in who’s like, I know exactly what I want and I’m going to go get it. We’re saying, OK, well let’s direct you, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”
Zimmer also spoke about a new strong woman who comes in this season: Tracie Thoms, who plays Quinn’s lesbian friend Fiona.
“She starts out one way and she ends up another way,” she said, carefully avoiding any spoilers. “Even though it was a very male-centric kind of episode, we had less women than men, the women’s power overrode the men, even though there was more of them. That, to me, felt like a pretty incredible message, that it’s not the number of you in a room, it’s the confidence and the power that you can kind of exude.”
The actress also took on directing this season, which brought on a whole new battle!
“I think what I didn’t realize is how meta it was going to be on the show because as Quinn, I yell at people and I tell people what to do, and so when I was acting in the scene and I’m dressed as Quinn and I’m in my Quinn makeup, but I’m also directing, a lot of times I improv. So you would have a lot of the actors in the scene like, wait are you directing?” she explained. “It was very confusing, I think, for a lot of people at first. Everybody was like, ‘It’s like Quinn is yelling at me but you’re really nice so it’s a little confusing.’”
However, the former Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. star says there’s no other place she’d want to try directing for the first time. “The second season was a little bit harder just because the episode was so ginormous, but again, I don’t think I could have done it without the cast being so supportive, the crew, and everybody was out to help everybody. That’s what makes it fun!”
UnREAL returns to Lifetime Monday, February 26, at 10 p.m. ET.
With reporting by Antonia Blyth.
