Yahoo News Zara McDermott celebrates career milestone and reveals director plans
Zara McDermott fronts documentary The Idaho Murders: Trial By Tiktok
What did you miss?
Love Island's Zara McDermott has said she is taking her career in a new direction as she sets her sights on becoming a director.
Her career is worlds away from her reality TV beginnings. She made her name on Love Island in 2018 when she entered the Mallorcan villa as a bombshell who caught the eye of Adam Collard. While she was dumped from the villa after 10 days, she waited for her summer soulmate to leave the villa and they rekindled their relationship. However, just seven months later their relationship ended.
McDermott isn't ashamed of her reality TV beginnings but now she has been making her mark on the documentary spheres. The Strictly Come Dancing star spoke about her new step her in career on Lorraine after she fronted documentary The Idaho Murders: Trial By Tiktok.
What, how and why?
She said: "I started developing Revenge Porn, my first documentary in May 2019. So it's coming up to five years I've been doing this now. I've made quite a lot of documentaries now. I've got a bit of a portfolio together.
"A lot of which are being shown in schools as part of the PSHE curriculum which is incredible. This is my career. This is my life. I throw everything into these documentaries. The Idaho one is my first creator credit on a documentary.
"So I actually pitched this and and wrote the treatment and everything myself. And I work really closely with the BBC, so this is kind of a new step in my career. I hope to be a director one day."
The Idaho Murders: Trial By Tiktok
Documentary maker McDermott revealed why she decided to tackle The Idaho Murders with her latest TV project. It was a case she personally become completely consumed with after seeing it plastered all over social media.
"How social media algorithms work is that they kind of feed you the same topic and the same information that you've been consuming," she said.
"So my social media was completely full of this case, and I think the issue was with the police as well. They were really stuck in a situation where any bit of information that they released everyone online was jumping onto it. Two billion hits on social media. That is a lot of people, a lot of eyes on this case. And it essentially was a kind of Wild West for the armchair detectives."
McDermott admitted it was "scary" to see how the accusations played out on social media. She said: "It was quite scary watching on and seeing person after person each day get accused of this is a quadruple homicide.
"This is not just a small crime, and it's quite scary to think that you Google anyone's name now who was in the frame at any point on social media, and this will forever come up with their name. It's really scary."
The documentary maker met with one sleuth who would make eight videos a day about the case on YouTube. "There's actually literally not that much information out there on this case," she said. "So the fact that they were churning out all of these videos content after content, how much of that was misinformation? How much of that was Clickbait?"
She added: "And also it kind of begs the question, what incentivises them and realistically, this is their career. This is how they make their money and how they make their living... They call themselves truth seeking sleuths. They say they want to get to the truth and they want to get to the bottom of it. But how much are they a help or are they a hindrance? I think that's an interesting question."
