‘iZombie’ Season 2 – Diane Ruggiero-Wright Interview

iZombie Season 2 - Diane Ruggiero-Wright Interview
Malcolm Goodwin, Rahul Kohli, Rose McIver, executive producer Rob Thomas, Robert Buckley, executive producer Diane Ruggiero-Wright and David Anders from iZOMBIE (Photo © 2015 WBEI. All rights reserved.)

iZombie writer/executive producer Diane Ruggiero-Wright had high praise for the show’s star Rose McIver during our interview at Comic Con 2015. Ruggiero-Wright believes McIver can do anything, and she loves to see Rose tackle the various personalities that come with playing a zombie on The CW series and dining on the brains of dead people. “She’s great at accents; she’s really physical. I like seeing her be like dudes, too. It’s fun.”

So, where will we catch up with iZombie when season two kicks off? “It picks up three months later,” explained Ruggiero-Wright. “Blaine is still bad. We’ll have wonderful, fun, juicy David Anders scenes of him having a new way of being Blaine. We’ll pick up with Major three months later and see what’s going on, how he’s handled learning about her being a zombie which I feel he should be okay with it. It’s a weird argument that I’ve made a lot. Like, I kind of get why he’s upset but then I’m also like don’t you give someone a pass? You find out they were turned into a zombie, don’t you just be like, ‘Okay, yes, I committed myself to a mental institution. Yes, people I loved were killed. But, you were were turned into a zombie – let’s forgive and forget.'”


Tone-wise, season two will be a lot like season one although there is a shift toward more mythology in each episode. Part of the fun of working on iZombie has been exploring that mythology and learning that fans are also really curious to discover more about that. “I think over the course of the first season we learned that we wanted more mythology and less case,” said Ruggiero-Wright. “So if we started off in the first couple of episodes like 60% case/40% mythology now it would be 40% case/60% mythology. And another thing that we’re changing up, tonally it’s still the same but we found that the brains work better when they’re bigger. When you have someone who’s a sociopath it’s hard to say, ‘Show no emotion,’ because then you don’t know when she’s on the brain. When she’s on cheerleader brain, you get when it’s Liv and when it’s cheerleader. So, we’ve kind of locked that down. We have some really fun brains in store, and Rose is so delightful with what she’s able to do so it’s pretty exciting.”

Ruggiero-Wright didn’t want to give away any specific spoilers, but she did confirm we’ll see more of Steven Weber. “I can tell you that Max Rager is still a factor and that we will see Steven Weber again. That’s pretty exciting because I love Steven Weber. One of my favorite moments of last season, one of my favorite Steven Weber moments is when he sees the newspaper article in the finale that says that Max Rager is making people murderous and he’s just doing yoga and maintains that yoga pose. He was acting pissed off with like half a lip. It was amazing.”

More iZombie Season 2 Interviews: Rob Thomas / Rose McIver and David Anders

Watch the full interview with Diane Ruggiero-Wright on iZombie season two: