Interview and Photoshoot – Refinery 29

Zombies have enjoyed a meteoric rise in popular culture for the past few years now, which is ironic given their slow-moving, lugubrious pace. Thanks to shows like The Walking Dead and The Returned and movies such as World War Z, zombies are hot. This, again, is quite counterintuitive, because the skulking carcasses we see on the screen are anything but. The tides of zombie lore are changing, though, and the undead are now getting reanimated with feelings and, well, life. Nowhere is that more evident than in The CW’s new iZombie, starring Rose McIver.

Based on a comic book series launched in 2010, iZombie was adapted for television by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright. Rose McIver stars as Olivia “Liv” Moore (get it?), a promising medical student with a loving fiancé whose life gets turned upside-down when she attends a party and wakes up a zombie. She resorts to a job at the Seattle morgue to satisfy her urge for brains, and soon discovers that she takes on the memories and personality traits of the dead people whose brains she eats, which allows her to act as the Seattle PD’s psychic consultant.

It runs the risk of being over-the-top and campy, but in the hands of the team behind Veronica Mars, it isn’t just a show about zombies. It’s a story of resilience and reinvention, albeit with an occasional venture into “full zombie mode.” What’s that? We spoke to McIver, a New Zealand native with the charming accent to prove it, to find out.