Actress Constance Zimmer is quite possibly suffering from the best kind of Hollywood typecasting. “I blame it all on Dana Gordon of Entourage,” Zimmer says of the movie executive character she played on the popular HBO series. “Whatever you do in your job, if you do it well, they’ll continue to want you to do that again and again and again.”
Watch any of Zimmer’s recent acting jobs, and the typecast is easy to identify. She plays the woman many of us dream of being—the woman that is intelligent, vocal and determined. And most importantly, she plays the woman who doesn’t apologize for being who she is. “I’m grateful that the parts are these incredibly strong, not soft-spoken women,” adds Zimmer, who claims that in her own life she tends toward a quieter tongue.
This is the summer of Zimmer. Her film Results, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival this year and stars Guy Pearce, Cobie Smulders and Kevin Corrigan, released May 29. She reprises her role as Dana Gordon in the June 3 release of the much-anticipated Entourage movie, and will also recurring roles on USA Network’s new thriller series Complications and The Marc Maron Show for FX. Then there’s UnREAL, a new scripted series produced by A&E and premiering June 1 on Lifetime that captures the behind-the-scenes making of a reality dating show titled Everlasting. Zimmer plays the demanding executive director/producer. “She is the queen bee of all these strong characters that I have ever played. They keep finding me in different variations of them, and with this new character, I don’t know if I can go much further than her.”
Off screen, life for Zimmer is as quiet as it can be, considering it’s a Los Angeles life, with husband Russ Lamoureux, a producer, director and photographer, seven-year-old daughter Colette, aka Coco, and a dog, two cats and a fish. The couple recently moved into a new LA neighborhood for the sole purpose of slowing down and enjoying moments like walking their daughter to school. “We were living bi-coastal in New York and LA for about six years. We did that more so because I wanted [my daughter] to understand there are cities where people walk everywhere and interact with people on a daily basis. In LA, you are stuck to cars and driving to a park.” Zimmer, who is bilingual thanks to German parents, spent her summers from the age of five until her senior year in high school in Germany. “I really got the mother lode of culture, seasons and walking places and being able to control where I wanted to go without a car. I want her to be aware of that, and I’m going to try to instill that any way I can.”
Of course, the relationship works both ways: Colette pulls at her mom’s heartstrings. “It’s crazy how you learn something new every day about why you love being a mom. It’s gratifying. What I love the most is being able to watch her grow before my eyes. It’s also exhausting and terrifying.”
Zimmer tries to accept roles based on the filming schedule and commitments, while recognizing that she can’t turn too many down. Colette is too young to watch or appreciate many of her mother’s roles, but there’s a new role they both can relish. Zimmer voices Strongarm, the new female Transformer in the animated series Transformers: Robots in Disguise on Cartoon Network. She is happy that Colette will see her in the role of a strong woman.
Zimmer has a solid base of extracurricular activities. She’s an amateur photographer and even brought her own camera to the M&V photo shoot in early April. As a young adult, she took as many trips as possible—Bali, Thailand and Africa— and captured her journeys with a Nikon D70. “This is when I had too much time on my hands, but it was feeding the artist in me. It was a creative outlet. Now with my husband being a director and an incredible photographer, I have a lot more to live up to.”
Photography by Norman Nelson; shot on location at the W Los Angeles Westwood.
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