Rose McIver interview: ‘Ghosts’
“We were all at a better flow,” reveals Rose McIver about working on Season 2 of “Ghosts” in our recent webchat. She continues, “There are 10 people in the regular ensemble. We had more to jump off. We knew each other better. The jokes sat more naturally between people. We had had a year to familiarize ourselves. It felt like we got more texture or depth.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
The CBS sitcom is set in a manor haunted by people who have died there over the course of history. McIver plays Sam who, after a near death experience in Season 1, can see and hear the ghosts. Season 2 follows Sam and her husband Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) as they run a B&B on the property. They have to navigate the new business while contending with the ghoul’s schemes. McIver explains, “Sam’s getting better at recognising she cannot please everybody all of the time. Throughout the course of the second season, she is getting a little more strength of her own identity in the equation.”
Because other living humans can’t see the ghosts, Sam has to ignore the their theatrics while dealing with customers. McIver admits, “It’s one of the harder parts of playing Sam, trying to wrestle with serving two scenes all the time; what’s really happening and what’s happening in ghost-land. I have to really think and get guidance from directors and co-stars. What’s distracting from either of the scenes in a too major way?”
In this season’s double Christmas episode, “The Christmas Spirit,” Sam gets possessed by Thorfin (Devan Long), a Viking ghost who was abandoned by his shipmates on an expedition to North America more than one thousand years earlier. McIver had to spend most of the second half hour playing the truculent and dramatic Thor. The actress says, “It was fun to do that and be kind of the silly. Sam is often the straight man in these environments. I got to experience some of the heightened things for my character.”
To prepare for being possessed, McIver went out for some dinners with Long and worked her lines with him. She joked, “He kept saying, ‘you are sounding like a pirate again, go less pirate.’ Never have truer words been said, I was going way too pirate. It is still pretty pirate in the final, but I think Devon needs to come to terms with the fact he has a little hint of pirate in his Viking.”
