Kareem Abdul Jabbar Joins 'iZombie'

Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has joined the cast of iZombie for the series' fifth and final season.

The news broke on social media last night, after series stars Rose McIver and Malcolm Goodwin both shared photos of themselves with the 7'2" Abul-Jabbar. By morning, Warner Bros. Television had confirmed.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, where Abdul-Jabbar is a columnist, he will play Zed, "one of just two Seattle City Council members who didn't flee the city before the wall went up. Zed is a zombie, and his fellow council member is a human, thus creating a unique form of gridlock at city hall. With the wheels of government ground to a halt, Liv's (McIver) friend Peyton (Aly Michalka) — the deceased mayor's chief of staff — is left effectively in charge of running the city."

Abdul-Jabbar transcended basketball to become a cultural icon, and has been acting since 1971, when he first appeared in an episode of Mannix. A student of Bruce Lee, he appeared in the martial arts master's final film, Game of Death.

Abdul-Jabbar is no stranger to comics and related media, having penned the stories of Mycroft Holmes for some time now at Titan Comics. He also recently weighed in to support fired Guardians of the Galaxy filmmaker James Gunn.

In the fourth season of iZombie, the city of Seattle's zombie mayor was cured and then assassinated by Blaine DeBeers (David Anders), whose father (Robert Knepper) was a major destabilizing force in the city as Brother Love, the zombie preacher who told his flock that humans existed to serve as a food source and nothing more. With Brother Love gone, it seems the City Council will step into the fray -- but whether they will improve the rudderles leadership of New Seattle or make it worse is anybody's guess at this point.

The season launches with Chase Graves having been deposed and Major Lilywhite (Robert Buckley) now in charge of Fillmore Graves and thus responsible for Seattle's zombie population. Meanwhile, he has Blaine on brain duty and Ravi (Rahul Kohli) working on finding a usable cure for the zombie virus -- but will zombies even want a cure now that they have been living with a "zombie pride" philosophy under the guidance of Brother Love for a year?

iZombie will return for its fifth and final season in 2019 on The CW.