One Life to Liv: Rose McIver Talks iZombie (Video)

The CW’s new series iZombie premieres on Tuesday night, March 17, after the series return of The Flash, and like The Flash, it’s based on a series that was published by DC Comics.

iZombie originated as a DC/Vertigo title from Chris Roberson and Michael Allred, and while some aspects have been changed for television, the TV show is just as good as the source material, and has a very likable star in Rose McIver who plays the lead character Olivia “Liv” Moore.

You’d think that having your hair turned white and skin going pale would be something that would get attention, and the friends and family notice a change in Liv fairly early on. This was one of the topics we spoke about with McIver when we visited the Vancouver, BC sets of iZombie late last year.

“Her family understands that she went through a trauma when she witnessed this massacre that happened on the boat,” McIver explained to us about why people accept Liv’s new look. “I mean, it’s a little bit of a sell, we know, that this is a distinct look. But actually, walking around Vancouver, I have seen a couple of people that post-shooting this, I’m very suspicious of. There’s some amazingly fair skin and white-haired kind of combinations so… Liv has kind of embraced it as her new look. She doesn’t try to dye it or hide it. This is who she is now. And she does get a few….there are a few snarky comments made by new people we meet in the script that kind of allude to her coloring. But we play it off as humor rather than investigate that too much,” she said.

Initially, Liv has no idea that there are other zombies out there. “I mean, I guess she knew she potentially contracted zombieism from someone, but she doesn’t really know that there’s a community out there at all. Throughout the first few episodes you’ll start to kind of get hints of whether there are [other zombies], what they look like, how they manage to hide it, all those sorts of things,” McIver revealed.

All in all, becoming a zombie has changed Liv’s life – and probably not in the ways that the audience would expect. “I think it gives her a sense of purpose. It feels, to me, like the fact that she is a zombie is… that wasn’t what drew me to her in the first place. It was the fact that coming out of college and relationships fall apart or things change and you have massive questions about your identity and changes in circumstance make that happen. And she now has to rediscover herself, and in the course of the pilot, she does. She finds this way that she can use who she’s become and where her circumstances have landed her to kind of contribute to a community and to have some fulfillment in life. I think we all do that. It’s just a fairly bizarre example of it, which brings a lot of novel fun,” she said.

You can see Rose’s interview below, where she gives us some more clues about what’s coming up, and also discusses whether or not there are some Power Rangers RPM fans in CW casting (really!) Enjoy: