CWSeason one of The CW's iZombie saw Rose McIver embody a Romanian prostitute, an agoraphobic hacker and a straight-talking radio host. Don't worry—season two will have even more ridiculous personas for our favorite reluctant zombie to take on.
In the season two premiere, medical resident-turned-zombie medical examiner Liv Moore (McIver) will investigate the death of a grumpy old man, and will get pretty cantankerous herself when she inherits his cranky personality for a while. The following week, she'll go into party mode after she eats the brain of a murdered frat bro. But the week after that is what co-creator Rob Thomas calls her best week ever.
"[Episode three] is the best Rose has ever been—it's a Real Housewife brain and she is spectacular. She looks great and she has every mannerism down," he tells reporters. "It's so good!"
Frankly, McIver is great at whatever type of brain the writers feed her. This season she's mastered magic tricks, basketball lingo—it's almost annoying, jokes co-creator Diane Ruggiero-Wright. "She can do anything," says Ruggiero-Wright. "Instead of picking brains that are fun, I'm now just going to pick a brain that I think she won't be able to do and it'll be bad for the show, but screw it. I'm sick of it. She can't be that perfect."
But the New Zealand-born star doesn't just magically absorb the skills—she actually works hard. Sometimes even too hard. "She studies," Thomas reveals. "I know for grumpy old man brain, we had her watching all these All in the Family episodes, and the craziest thing is she does a line in the show in this Queens accent. She studied it so hard and, you know, she's a Kiwi, and she actually learned it with an accent. We didn't need her to go that far with the Archie Bunker, but she did!"
The premiere will see Liv trying to patch things up with her family, while Major (Robert Buckley) will be attempting to come to terms with the fact that not only did his former fiance turn him into a zombie, she also cured him.
iZombie airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on The CW, following new episodes of The Flash.