Judy Greer, Hollywood’s Favorite Co-Star, Turns Filmmaker

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Ms. Greer, though, was nervous. She had directed only a short before. She somehow figured the confines of the script, by Gary Lundy, would help. “I loved that it all took place in one day,” she said, “because, as a little bit of a scaredy-cat first-time director, I thought it would be easier to edit, because everyone was wearing the same clothes.”

Yeah, not quite. “Isn’t that so dumb?” she said. “It was very hard to edit.”

But in many ways Ms. Greer was well-suited to juggling the emotional arcs of so many characters in tailspin. She’s a crier herself, and if she sees you tearing up, “she goes right there, she’s in it with you,” Ms. Garner said.

Jason Reitman directed both of them in “Men, Women & Children” (2014). “There’s a reason we all feel so close to Judy on screen,” he said. “There’s an unspoken understanding and humor in the way she responds to life.” Directing, he wrote in an email, requires a sense of “rhythm, tone and human behavior. These are qualities evident in all of Judy’s work.”

Her goal as a filmmaker was diverse casting, and keeping production for the 19-day shoot around Los Angeles, so her players could get home easily (and so they’d be more likely to take the job). And she wanted to highlight every actor’s performance. “Having played small supporting roles for my whole career, I was like, I want each one to have a nice moment,” she said. Even the school security guard (Mary Birdsong) gets a chance to shine.

That guides her when she’s picking her own parts, too. She’s now graduated from the wry rom-com best friend to the mostly put-upon ex-wife (currently, in the Showtime series “Kidding,” where’s she’s estranged from Jim Carrey). When she reads a script, she said, she has her own co-star scale.

“Am I always in the kitchen on the phone, is first what I look at now,” she said. “Like, I think you could pretty much rename most of my roles ‘exposition.’ That’s something I look for, how much explaining does my character do? Are you furthering the plot or explaining the plot?”

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