On a recent September morning, Jeff Zucker is standing by the rink at Rockefeller Center checking his phone, looking like any other loafer-sporting 60-something. Only he basically used to run this place. “I’ve had a whole lifetime since I left here,” he says, “but this was 25 years of my life.” Here he rose from wunderkind executive producer of the Today show to the top executive of NBCUniversal. His dentist is nearby, and he attended a taping of Saturday Night Live last year, but otherwise, he rarely comes around these parts.

The setting has particular resonance because he’d recently relived, if only for a few minutes, his days behind the NBC desk in a cameo in Lance Oppenheim’s new movie, Primetime. Zucker plays himself as a hard-charging network chief in the film, which centers on the Dateline series To Catch a Predator and its host, Chris Hansen. In the scene, Zucker radiates power in a cream suit, surrounded by mahogany walls and Emmy awards. “I don’t really like your show, but America loves it,” he tells Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson. As a result, they’re reorganizing the lineup — taking on Lost — and need more high-profile predators to juice the ratings. The scene never actually happened, though NBC News would have reported to Zucker in 2006, when the film is set.

“Everybody has asked me, ‘Why did you do it?’” says Zucker. “And my response to it is ‘Why not?’” He made cameos in two TV shows during his time atop the network — in a bathtub with Kirstie Alley for a Showtime series called Fat Actress and in NBC’s My Name is Earl — but never a film. “And I thought, When is somebody going to ask me to be in a scene opposite Robert Pattinson again?”

Oppenheim went to Harvard with Zucker’s son, Andrew, and asked him whom he should get to play his dad. Why not my dad? Andrew wondered. After Oppenheim reached out, Zucker told him to send pages of the script, and before long, he was down in New Orleans, shooting for a full day with Pattinson and........

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