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The series, based on the cult-hit Vertigo comic from Chris Roberson and Mike Allred, features Rose McIver as Olivia “Liv” Moore, a med student who wakes up after a particularly unpleasant party to discover that she is, in fact, a zombie. Eating human brains from the morgue to keep her baser urges at bay, Liv finds that she gets psychic impressions of the lives and deaths of the bodies, and that she can play a role in helping murder victims find justice.
The procedural tone makes perfect sense for Veronica Mars producers Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggierio-Wright, who are heading up the project for The CW, but it’s not entirely like the comics, in which Liv was called Gwen, she was a gravedigger rather than a med student and her supporting cast included a battery of oddball supernatural characters including vampires and a were-terrier.
So…where are the similarities?
Kohli plays Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti on iZombie, a character created for the TV series and arguably the show’s primary source of comic relief. He works with Liv at the morgue and is the first to discover that she’s undead. Which, by the way, he loves.
“Previously for most of the work I did back at home, it’s very introvert and minimalist and gritty,” Kohil said. “When I was given this, I think one of the notes is that he kind of had this Scotty behavior on the Enterprise. He’s highly-caffienated and he has no off switch and no filter. So I was looking at these monologues that I have and he’s rattling them off as fast as possible and he’s a very, very colorful character. He was a joy to play, honestly, and it’s fun to play somebody who can say anything and get away with it.”
The show might seem an odd choice to play on Tuesday nights following the light, frothy superhero fun of The Flash, but Kohli assured fans that they won’t be driven to despair in the next hour.
“If you describe the show as a zombie who just eats brains to keep her humanity, it sounds very dark,” Kohli said. “But through Rob [Thomas] and Diane [Ruggiero] and the rest of the writers, they’re able to still give that vibrancy and that colorful look and to eliminate some of the darker elements of it.”
iZombie debuts on March 17 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
