Rose McIver heads to The CW on Tuesday night in “iZombie,” playing a promising young doctor whose life takes a surprising and supernatural turn.
After a wild boat party goes awry, Rose’s character, Olivia “Liv” Moore, wakes up and finds herself with the kind of hunger that can only be cured by eating brains. But Liv is no typical mindless zombie. While she detaches from some of her loved ones, she manages to find a renewed interest in life through her work at a morgue, where her food supply is abundant. Only, a funny thing starts to happen when she consumes a cadaver’s gray matter.
“It’s so hard to do sound bites on this show ’cause it’s like, ‘Well, I eat brains, and when I eat a brain it has a vision and when I have this vision I can help solve crimes,'” Rose told Access Hollywood. “It’s quite hard to sum up neatly in one sentence, but they have done such a great job in making something so ridiculous and surreal so accessible, I think, and that’s the writers and we’re really lucky to be working with them.”
WATCH: Rose McIver Describes The CW’s ‘iZombie’
Helping Detective Clive (Malcolm Goodwin) gives Liv some purpose, and finding a confidante in Dr. Ravi (Rahul Kohli) helps give Liv reasons to start to break through the walls she put up around herself after being turned into a zombie.
“For me, it’s a story about she has lost her sense of identity,” Rose said. “She thought her life was going one way, and it changed, and that happens to all of us in different ways. It just so happens that her big dramatic change was that she became a zombie. But those feelings of isolation and fears of not being accepted for who you are and questions about where you’re heading in your life are all very, very relatable.”
PHOTOS: ‘iZombie’: Scenes From Season 1
“For Liv, being able to rediscover a sense of purpose and identity and being able to help solve these crimes, that’s kind of her trajectory and where she’s heading and being okay with who she is and being able to incorporate that and not isolate herself from her family and friends,” Rose added.
One of the people Liv isolated herself from was her fiance Major (Robert Buckley). And, as the season goes on, one of the people she starts to get to know, is someone like her – Blaine, another zombie brain eater, played by David Anders.
“I love that these are zombies who know that zombies existed in pop culture and we sort of can look on that and reflect on it and laugh about it,” Rose said. “There’s a real sense of humor that I don’t necessarily think we’ve seen in a lot of zombie shows, but there’s also just this drama and some tragedy. There’s some stuff that happens in the first season where I was tearing up reading the script and I hope that when it’s brought to life it’s even more affecting. So I think it’s really — it’s definitely not like anything I’ve seen before. It’s very original.”
“iZombie” premieres Tuesday at 9/8c after “The Flash.”
— Jolie Lash
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