A Woman You Should Meet: Necar Zadegan

While she normally plays tough, hard-as-nails characters on TV, in real life actress Necar Zadegan is as warm as can be.

Zadegan began her career on Broadway in productions like “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”, but lately, she’s made a name for herself on shows like 24, The Shield and Emily Owens, MD.

Now, the gorgeous Iranian-American spends her summers filming Bravo’s Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce in Vancouver and spending time with her one true love: her dog.

How are you liking Vancouver?

Are you kidding? I love Vancouver, it’s stunning.

Do you ever take part in outdoor activities?

As a matter fact, that’s the benefit of not having friends and family in town — you end up doing a lot of that outdoorsy stuff. I ride my bike all over town and go hiking sometimes. I surf, too, but I don’t do it here because it’s too cold. I actually don’t even surf in California — I only surf in Hawaii because the water is really, really warm. I’ve skied in Whistler, but we don’t shoot the show when it’s snowing so we don’t get to enjoy the slopes.

Speaking of the show, tell me about your character, Delia.

I love playing Delia — she’s a wonderful character. To play a character who’s completely self made, hard-working, successful and full of ambition is amazing. She’s a modern woman with modern ideas about partnership and what marriage really is in modern society. Those are kind of the things she messes with all the time.

Becoming an actress seems it’d require a similar level of determination and drive. Do you think you and Delia have a lot in common?

You know, I have, thankfully, a great relationship with my family. They’re always incredibly supportive of my career choices, even though my parents aren’t in the business. You’re right in that it’s hard when you come to a business that is foreign to you and there’s no handbook for becoming an actress. You can go to med school and you can go to law school, but acting school teaches you nothing about the business — zero. You learn a lot of wonderful things, but you definitely have to figure it out on your own. Delia is a woman who doesn’t have strong family ties or a strong family base and is the caretaker of her own father. I don’t have that in my life, so I don’t share that part of it with her. I think that part of it is what creates her anxieties and psychosis.

Do you get to do a lot of stage work still? Do you have any time while you’re filming?

I love stage work. I mean no, when I’m filming I don’t have any time to do anything. Definitely not while we’re shooting. The stage demands your time, so it’s not like you can just pop in and do a show, pop back and shoot your other things. But I came from the stage, I started in theatre, and I always go back to the theatre. I’m always keeping my eyes open for what’s happening in New York during the show’s hiatus. I can’t wait to go back.

How does your prep work differ between your stage work and your television show?

I don’t know if the prep work is different. You’re always using the same set of tools, more or less. In a stage show, you have one piece of material and you work on that endlessly and you get to know it backwards and forwards. It isn’t like that with TV because we work methodically, so once you’re done with a script the next one comes in. You’re not constantly working on the same scene. That’s the greatest difference, certainly.

When you first made the transition from theatre to television, were you ever waiting for some sort of gratification from people behind the cameras? Were you waiting to hear people to laugh or clap?

That’s funny that you ask that — I was surprised by the difference of the crew in the beginning, but that’s the best. You don’t want them to react one way or another because you don’t want it to be like a play. It actually makes your job easier because the raise of an eyebrow on camera is a moment, but on stage it might be missed by many. I was surprised at first by it, but I think you get to really work in the space when that space is very, very focused.

Before I let you go, I wanted to talk about something that I read was a passion of yours: rescue dogs. 

I am really an animal lover. We have a responsibility to these animals that we’ve domesticated. They depend on us. I had three, now I only have two. I now have Charlie, a bull dog, and Michi, a Norwich Terrier, who comes up with me to Canada. Michi was a rescue. That’s why I brought her with me, she was terrified. She’s been abandoned and she’s been abused, and when I rescued her I really didn’t have any intention of keeping her. But I fostered her for a while, and if you have dogs you know they get in your heart and you can’t give them back.

I found her in a garbage can when I was walking the other dogs. I heard this little whimpering and I didn’t know what was in there. I honestly thought it was a baby — you know, you hear those stories about babies — and anyway, I opened the lid and I saw this tiny little doggy in the garbage all muddy and it’s arm was broken, I don’t know how it got in there. I took her to a hospital and I’ve shown her she can trust me, and I’ve never looked back.

Photos courtesy of Benjo Arwas