Even as someone who needs the horror genre 365 days a year, I still have that increased itch for fun-loving, feel-good fare during the holiday season. This year, one of the biggest delights paving the way to the holidays and spreading good vibes every step of the way is the new CBS sitcom, Ghosts.
Inspired by the British series of the same name, the CBS show stars Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar as Samantha and Jay, a couple who opt to leave their city life behind when they inherit an old country estate, hoping to renovate the place and turn it into a bed and breakfast. However, much to their surprise, soon after moving in, they come to learn that the house is actually occupied — by ghosts. And much to the ghosts’ surprise, they discover that Samantha is the first living person they’ve ever met who can actually see and hear them.
With Ghosts currently powering through its first season, McIver joined us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night. As always, we did focus a good deal on her latest accomplishment, but also took the time to look back and revisit her most pivotal moments and discussed how they influenced her career path and her craft moving forward. An especially big moment for McIver during her earlier years in television? Working on Xena: Warrior Princess.
“When I was nine, I did an episode of Xena, it was when Lucy Lawless was pregnant and she needed a light episode, so they wrote this episode where her soul gets put into the body of a little girl. I can’t even remember quite what the conceit was but, anyway, I played Xena but in the nine-year-old girl’s body. It was the first time where I was really taking something on. I remember Lucy generously recorded all of these cassettes that I still have of her doing the war cry or her talking about choices that she’s made as the character, and just was really generous … I just found that taking over something and really getting lost in somebody else and building a character, it wasn’t just saying words. There was kind of a lot of planning and I liked that, that sort of structuring a character and coming up with ideas for it. That was the first time mimicking her, I was able to try to do a bit of impersonating. It was really kind of eyeopening and I thought this is so deeply creative. Because I think I’d often thought of acting as you’re channeling somebody else’s creativity, you’re bringing somebody else’s words to the screen, you’re a vehicle for somebody else’s idea and this was the first time I was like, ‘Oh, there’s very significant creative input you can have as well.’”
McIver accumulated quite a few credits working in New Zealand, but a different level of notoriety came with the release of her first major Hollywood film, Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. While the project is largely considered a “break out” film for McIver, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was smooth sailing the moment she booked the role of Lindsey Salmon. Here’s how McIver described the experience after filming:
“I went home and life just kind of goes on. The film didn’t come out for another year after that and I remember people saying to me, ‘You should stay in LA now.’ And it just all felt so strange and kind of whimsical and I didn’t really buy that it was gonna go anywhere. I don’t know! I didn’t want to count my chickens before they hatched. So I went back home and started at university, and didn’t have very much discipline at university, and kind of stuck around there a bit. Worked in retail for a year or two, the equivalent of Forever 21 or whatever. I just got a job. Just had a sort of weird year where I was first year out of high school, learning how to be an adult and then the film came out and then I sort of started getting a few more opportunities. I moved out to LA a year after that. It wasn’t like I swanned in and every door was open. I was so lucky that it did create definitely some opportunities, but I still got out here and had to battle to find a flat and take weird music video jobs in the desert and just try to cobble something together and work out why I had left home.”
Clearly the work McIver put in to finding her place in Los Angeles paid off big time. She headlined the hugely popular CW series, iZombie, appeared as Tinker Bell in the beloved ABC show, Once Upon a Time, and then some. But again, those successes don’t alleviate the pressure to keep the momentum going — and the way McIver looks at it, that’s not necessarily a big thing!
“I never really am convinced that it’s like all sorted now and now my career is gonna be great. I keep kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I don’t think anything’s a given and I think it’s a nice way to feel. I feel really appreciative that everything that comes along still feels so exciting to me, that I’m aware of what a privilege it is to do this job and that it could go away because these things can. It’s nice. It’s really important to me.”
Now that deep love McIver has for her work extends to Ghosts, which scored its full season order in late October. The show is the most-watched new comedy of the fall season and is also tied for second biggest new series overall. So clearly McIver and the team behind Ghosts got there eventually, but getting this one off the ground was an especially lengthy process. McIver broke it down:
“We did our read-through, our big table read — we hadn’t cast Jay’s role, my husband’s role. We did a read-though on a Friday and we were due to start shooting on the Monday, still missing three characters I think, trying to worry about getting them cast over the weekend. And after the read-through, that afternoon was when national emergency was declared and everything shut down. And so everybody said at the time, ‘Aw, it’ll be two weeks,’ and then we all know what happened.”
Any show can come with a “long gestation process” when making a pilot and then waiting to learn its fate, but that process for Ghosts was especially significant. But again, McIver highlighted the good that came of it! She continued:
“This was like read-through in March, shot the pilot in December, got picked up the next March, started shooting the next July. By the time we got on set to shoot the first season, it felt like a sort of six year reunion or something. Everybody had been communicating so much. Everybody knew each other in a way that I know really served the show because especially in a first season, you’re normally building a rapport still with your fellow actors and finding your dynamics, and we had all, whether it was just on Zoom or texts or whatever, we kind of had really started to get a rhythm between us. We all understood a little bit about how we each work and what’s funny and who we each kind of play as the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle. So that was a weird, very positive element of it.”
If you’d like to experience that very special rhythm and cast chemistry for yourself, be sure to get that Ghosts binge going! The first eight episodes are available to stream on Paramount+ and Episode 9 is due to air on Thursday, December 2nd.
And if you’re looking to hear more about McIver’s journey in the industry, including her time working on Power Rangers RPM, Once Upon a Time, iZombie and more, be sure to catch our full Collider Ladies Night conversation uncut in podcast form below:
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