Magazine: Emmy Magazine Issue 6 2023 – Scans + Transcript

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Rose has been featured in ‘Emmy Magazine‘ Issue 6 – 2023. ‘WATCH Magazine‘ partnered with CBS to feature some of their Emmy Awards contenders on the cover of their special FYC issue.

• Living: Samantha Arondekar
• Played by: Rose McIver
• What do you like best about your character? “Sam is incredibly motivated and caring. She’s a real initiator and she pushes Jay out of his comfort zone in ways that have been really exciting.”
• Finest moment? “The scene in the kitchen at the end of season one, where she finally recognizes that the ghosts have become the family she always wished she had. It spoke to her commitment to the house and to standing by them through thick and thin.”
• Are ghosts treated differently in New Zealand? “Halloween was not a big deal growing up in New Zealand. That was something we saw in the movies, like white Christmases. We had Christmases on the beach. Halloween always stood out as something that was pure Americana. And there’s not as much comedy around ghosts in New Zealand. It’s more like a visitation from a deceased relative.”
• Say something nice about your castmates. “Brandon and Richie are incredibly well-trained improvisers. Between setups, Brandon pretends he’s an actor who’s dating Jennifer Lawrence and Richie pretends to be a focus-puller. They just really finish me off.”
• Favorite pop-culture ghost? “Myrtle from Harry Potter. She’s a misfit who has been loitering around the toilets of Hogwarts because she’s felt bullied. I think she’d find a few like-minded friends if she came to Woodstone Mansion.”

There have been ghostly comedies on TV before, but the Kerbys of Topper weren’t cult members, the spectral seafarer on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir never came out of the closet and the “car ghost” on My Mother the Car didn’t have a shard of glass protruding from her head. And, for sure, they weren’t as naughty as the deceased denizens of the hit CBS
sitcom Ghosts.

Based on the popular British series of the same name and adapted by coshowrunners and executive producers Joe Port and Joe Wiseman, Ghosts tells the story of freelance journalist Samantha (Rose Mclver) and her chef husband, Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar), who leave New York City to become innkeepers when she inherits a rundown manor house upstate.

What makes the show work, though, is not the ghosts’ outrageousness, but their “verisimilitude,” Wiseman says. “Everyone is adept at doing their character, but in a way that you don’t feel like it’s someone in a costume on a sketch show.” Plus, Port adds, “Rose and Utkarsh do a great job of grounding the show.”

For the eight main ghosts, this success has been the answer to a prayer.

“We’re a cast of veteran actors who have been working for a long time, and this is our first big break, so there’s a lot of humility,” says Sheila Carrasco, who plays the darling-but-daft hippie, Flower. “We’re all isolated together up in Montreal,” adds Rebecca Wisocky, who portrays the Gilded Age ghost, Hetty Woodstone. “From the very first table read, we were all amazed at how much we just naturally enjoy one another’s company.”

In fact, the camaraderie of these ghosts is so genuine, it’s scary.

A near-death experience grants Samantha the power to interact with the departed, from an eleventh-century Viking to a ’90s Wall Street player, all of whom passed away on the property in their respective eras. Thanks to these flamboyant phantoms, things
around Woodstone Mansion are never dead.

Ghosts is executive-produced by coshowrunners Joe Port and Joe Wiseman with Mathew Baynton, Jim Howick, Simon Farnaby, Laurence Rickard, Ben Willbond and Martha Howe-Douglas; Alison Carpenter, Debra Hayward and Alison Owen for Monumental Television; and Angie Stephenson for BBC Studios. The series is a production of CBS Studios in association with Lionsgate Television and BBC Studios’ Los Angeles production arm.