IZOMBIE: Rose McIver Previews Seattle’s New Zombie World Order

It’s a whole new zombie world when IZOMBIE’s fourth season bows tonight.

With the existence of the undead no longer a secret—and with a good portion of Seattle now infected with the zombie virus—the city is walled off from the rest of society when The CW zom-com-rom-dram returns. “We have a couple of very different opinions about how zombies and humans should interact,” Rose McIver (Liv) previews of some tension within the core group. “The whole show is pretty different now that people know about zombies.”

In Monday’s season opener, Liv consumes the brain of a Seattle Seahawks super-fan (“That was a lot of fun,” McIver says with a laugh. “A lot of face paint!”), but also has to navigate the increasingly complicated new way of life. “Throughout the course of the season, Liv takes a very specific route about how she thinks it should be approached—she’s very compassionate as an individual, for better and for worse,” she says. “What I like is that it’s very nuanced. There’s not one great solution about how to deal with these problems, it just raises questions around it. Major takes the other side of it. He and Fillmore Graves are very hardlined about what they think needs to happen.”

“It mirrors what’s happening in the [real] world: to watch these two very different opinions clashing and people who are getting hurt in between,” she continues. “IZOMBIE is a lot of fun as a show, but it’s also very powerful to be on a zombie comedy that has issues people need to be thinking about right now. We don’t have any solutions, but we’re asking questions so people might think outside their own perspective a little bit.”

The practical cost of isolating the zombies also becomes a factor: “A brain shortage becomes apparent,” McIver teases. “The idea we can wall off a place and it will take care of itself—all the cracks start to show very early on in the season. Liv thinks we should be able to coexist. In some ways, she’s actually very naive about that. It’s very well-meaning, but she realizes very early on some of the hiccups to come.”

However, there is an added perk for Liv, personally. “She embraces that now she doesn’t have to hide [her zombie identity],” McIver notes. “That’s the good part, actually. She’s not lying about what she’s doing anymore, and that takes off a little bit of pressure. But, ideally, she would still not want to be eating brains!”

IZOMBIE, Mondays, 9/8c, The CW

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