Rose McIver is ready for all kinds of new personalities on ‘iZombie’

Liv Moore is just your average young professional, trying to balance family, work and romance in the big city. Well, average in the sense that she’s also a zombie who can solve crimes by gaining the memories and skills of murder victims whose brains she dines on. But that’s just the world of “iZombie,” which begins its second season tonight. Last season saw Liv (Rose McIver) getting ever closer to the mystery of how she became a zombie — in a modern twist, it seems to involve a bad batch of a party drug getting mixed with an energy drink called Max Rager. Despite those gains, she also struggled with how and to whom to disclose her condition among her family and friends, and butted heads with a fellow zombie named Blaine (David Anders of “Alias”) whose zombie instincts were just a little less altruistic than Liv’s. Here’s what McIver has to say about where Season 2 is going.

Where do things stand with Liv at the start of Season 2?

I think in some ways, she’s in a similar predicament to the start of Season 1. Liv, through no means of her own, has managed to isolate herself and push away the people that she loves and so she’s pretty alone. The great thing is, starting with Season 2, she already has the companionship of [colleague and zombie cure researcher] Ravi. And almost like a therapist or something, he’s able to kind of talk her off the ledge, with things that would almost ruin anybody.

Will she and Ravi still beworking hard on finding a cure for being a zombie?

They certainly will! Liv is tired of eating gelatin.

Does she feel any ambivalence about getting cured, since she’s doing important work as a zombie?

Absolutely. That’s actually something that’s very much discussed. But I think it’s tough, because it’s given her a newfound purpose and it’s wonderful that she’s able to contribute to society in a fantastic way, but it still means that she can’t have kids. It means that she seemingly cannot be with the love of her life. It means that she gets these traumatic visions all of the time. It’s a sense of obligation in many ways as well and she’s always be an altruistic person so it’s hard to know whether she needs this the same way.

What personas or skillswill we see Liv take on this season?

In the first episode, I’m a grumpy old man, so I don’t get any skills, but I get a lot of Archie Bunker style opinions. In the second episode, I get a frat boy’s brain and so you should have seen me and the four boys on set, they were just loving it, they were in their element. They were like, ah, this all makes sense. The third episode is a real housewife, and that’s really fun because we actually get a bit of a physical transformation there too, which is kind of the first time Liv’s done that. And then the fourth episode is a country music singer, so I get to pick up the guitar and we have a lot of fun with that one too.

Last season, Liv dated a fellow zombie. Will we see her bond with any other zombies this year?

In some ways, this season because there’s a super villain of Max Rager and what’s going on there, she ends up having to team up with the person she would never want to — that’s Blaine. And obviously he killed her boyfriend. It’s a difficult hurdle to overcome as friends and I don’t think friends is in the cards at the moment but she definitely is aware that for the greater good of mankind and zombiekind, they need to work together. So you see some really interesting interactions between those two, and kind of a sense of two zombies chatting about things and having companionship in each other in some ways. It’s a very fraught and tense friendship, but it’s an interesting one.

Last season, Blaine got one of the two existing doses of the zombie cure. How’s he adjusting to his new life?

Blaine is, he makes situations work for him. He’s an opportunist. He’s not struggling as much as anyone else would, given what he’s gone through. There’s pros and cons for him, but we see definitely some of the pros very early on.

Someone who’s that adaptable is also good as an ally, right?

Yeah! Although I wouldn’t trust him as far as I can kick him.

Will [series creator] Rob Thomas ever have you use your realNew Zealand accent?

We’ve talked about it. There’s a couple of cool ideas about how that could work. We will see if the people we would require can come together.

There are so many great Kiwi actors out there, but they never get to use their real accents.

Yeah, that’s the thing. We’ve gone out to a few people seeing if there’s any world in which that could work. A lot of my friends live out in the States. We’ll see!

I’m hoping for a giant Flight of the Conchords crossover.

You’re not too far off!