It’s hard not to root for Rose McIver. The star of CBS’ “Ghosts” — you probably also remember her five season turn on The CW’s “iZombie” — is in good spirits as I meet up with her at Little Ripper, a coffee shop/wine bar in Los Angeles’ Glassell Park neighborhood. It’s owned by an Australian couple, so I wonder if I’m offending the proud New Zealander by taking her into enemy territory. But it’s quite the contrary.
“The second you come somewhere like the U.S., there’s just so many cultural crossovers between Australia and New Zealand that you just gravitate towards each other,” she tells me. “I’m here at Little Ripper, I’m not carrying a New Zealand flag, but I’m OK! My husband’s Australian, so we had to navigate a peace treaty a long time.” (If Little Ripper sounds familiar, I had a similar sit down there last year with McIver’s pals Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer, the stars and creators behind “Colin From Accounts.)
McIver has carved out a pretty nice corner of the world, and not just in this café. For starters, “Ghosts” has been renewed for two more seasons: “I can’t believe it. The number of my mates who are so talented and who have worked so much that are just scrambling to try to get jobs. It’s a crazy time, and not lost on me how lucky I am.”
On “Ghosts,” based on the U.K. comedy of the same name, McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar pay Samantha and Jay — a young couple who inherit a deteriorating mansion inhabited by a wide assortment of quirky spirits. Through an accident, Sam can see and converse with the ghosts — but this is a laugh-out-loud comedy with just a dash of spookiness.
“iZombie” also balanced that laughs-to-creeps ratio quite well. As I dig into some vegemite toast (that was my stereotypical idea for a breakfast order), McIver explains how she’s really found her happy place in starring on a comedy. “I did a lot of drama growing up,” she says. “But when I think about the reality of working on some heavy, gritty mystery show that shoots 22 episodes, the idea of that is just so daunting to me — versus going to work and laughing every day. It’s a job, it’s long hours and it’s tough. But I do really just laugh with my friends every day. It’s insane to be able to do that for a living.”
This year, McIver stepped behind the camera on “Ghosts” — her first time ever directing a TV episode. “What appeals to me about directing it is just dropping into something that already exists, being a gun for hire, and being able to see the vision that the showrunners are looking for and really service their vision and emulate that,” she says. “I think some episodic TV directors get frustrated at not being able to put their own stamp on things. I’m like, ‘No, I love that. Let me work out what you were wanting to achieve and find out how to do it.’”
McIver splits her time between Montreal, her home base of L.A., her native New Zealand and France, where her artist husband has a gallery. “It’s a lot of spinning plates,” she says.
It’s also not easy with a young daughter, but that’s where the stability of having a hit TV show comes in handy. “It’s why I’m drawn to a set as well. It’s just this enormous, chaotic operation that you have to try to find some order in. Whether I’m acting or directing, being on set where it’s this giant, unruly beast, it seems impossible to try to get everybody on the same page. And somehow you have to.”
There’s something refreshing about McIver finding joy in the hard work of TV production. Or how, in her rare spare time, she has found simple passion in the classic arts of gardening and quilting. She’s even been making sure to take a moment to soak in her kid’s own bright-eyed take on the world.
“My husband came to me the other day, and was like, ‘Have you ever really looked at a red onion? I just spent 45 minutes with our daughter unpeeling a red onion, and it was so beautiful.’”
Here’s to the small joys in life, like grabbing a coffee at an Aussie coffee shop with a New Zealander like Rose McIver. You’ll be rooting for her too.
