Ghosts’ Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar Talk Double Possession, Big Jay Twist and That iZombie Nod (Video)
Warning: The following contains spoilers from Thursday’s Ghosts. Proceed at your own risk!
Ghosts’ Season 4 Christmas special checked off several items on our holiday wish list, including the much-anticipated twist that let Jay see the spirits.
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The hijinks began while Sam and Jay were trying to fix their broken water heater ahead of his parents’ visit. Unfortunately for the couple (but fortunately for us viewers), they forgot to turn off the power and were zapped, resulting in Sam and Jay being possessed by Nancy and Pete, respectively.
Sam was able to eventually “evict” Nancy, but only after the ghost went to town on some guacamole and unexpectedly bonded with Jay’s disapproving mother. Getting Pete out of Jay’s body, however, proved to be more complicated since he has the power to leave the property without being expelled. So Sam staged an exorcism — but Pete’s soul is so pure that it was Jay who got kicked out of his own body! At least the concerning turn of events allowed Jay to finally interact with the ghosts.
Meanwhile, Pete kidnapped Jay’s body to go visit his daughter, who is moving to Australia. As “Jay” told her how proud her father would be of her and hugged her, Pete’s spirit separated from Jay, leaving Sam’s husband in a zombie-like state. Using the faulty lamp and Sonic fries as bait, Sam lured zombie Jay into being zapped so her hubby could come back to life.
Below, stars Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar talk about how they tackled the double possession, how getting to see the ghosts will bring Sam and Jay closer together, and which possessions are on their wish lists for each other.
TVLINE | What a gift of an episode for the both of you. You get so much to do, from the double possession to meeting Jay’s parents to Jay getting to see the ghosts. What was your favorite part?
ROSE MCIVER | It was incredible to get to play, especially Nancy and Pete, they’re just such iconic characters, and to get to throw a dart at who they are and what they bring… Especially for Sam, I found it so liberating, being able to kind of shake off her properness or her sort of sense of making people happy and appealing to other people, and just to be able to be completely free and liberated. Nancy was such a joy.
UTKARSH AMBUDKAR | Well, I’m happy that we get to see Rose be sort of the comedic engine of the first half of this Christmas special. I think she has to do so much technical heavy lifting every episode as Sam to just let everybody else shine. She facilitates a lot of other people’s success. So for her to have a chance to really go for it was super funny. Watching her eat that guacamole was disgusting, and she went to town on it.
MCIVER | You mean gorgeous?
AMBUDKAR | It was harrowing to look at, but it was really funny. It was hilarious. She made me laugh so much.
MCIVER | Do you remember that lunch, I had bought my lunch in advance, and it was a guacamole quesadilla? That is what I had ordered for lunch, and then I finished that scene and I, honestly, looked at the lunch box and wanted to be sick.
AMBUDKAR | Yeah, no, thank you. And I was so glad that Jay’s parents get to join us finally, and now we’ve met all of the sort of immediate relatives of our two humans.
MCIVER | And honestly, that stuff where you’re talking to your dad about Mahesh, naming [the restaurant] after him and this storyline, it was so resonate. We have a lot of people who’ve immigrated to different countries or families that have immigrated to different countries in our immediate cast and crew, and people were really affected by your performance and what you were saying, what you were talking about. It was a great storyline. It was [a] surprisingly moving moment for being on set of a comedy where we’re normally laughing all day, every day.
AMBUDKAR | It’s, literally, what happened with my family. My parents moved from India to try and make a better life for their kid. They did it through education, and then their son, me, decided he wanted to be a rapper and an actor, and it horrified them, much like Jay opening up a restaurant and trying to be a chef in the middle of Podunk, upstate New York. So there are a lot of parallels to my life. The difference is, I think, my parents were infinitely more supportive than Jay’s. But the fact that we get a chance for him to win them over at the end of this special is nice and, hopefully, will be cathartic for a lot of people watching who can relate.
TVLINE | When you see that you have a double possessions storyline coming up in the script, how do you prepare for that? Did you go back and watch old episodes? Do you start paying more attention to your co-stars?
MCIVER | I definitely went back and watched old episodes, and then also, Betsy [Sodaro] was so generous and recorded herself performing all of the lines that I would be performing as Nancy, and she sent them to me. She filmed them at home. [It] would have taken a substantial amount of time. It was very kind of her. And she said she felt like she was auditioning to play herself, which is pretty surreal and very unfair experience to have at this point. She should not be auditioning for anything ever, in my mind. Then on set, she was also able to come and sit behind the monitors quite often and run in and offer little ideas or thoughts or just kind of course-correct me. So she was very, very generous, and I’m such a fan of her as a person and as an actor, and it was really nice to be able to kind of collaborate like this.
TVLINE | Whose voice was harder to get: hers or Thor’s?
MCIVER | Well, I only learned this episode about finding a gateway word to help you find the voice. So for me, it was “Stuart.” So anytime I got lost, I would just think about how she says “Stuart” when she’s talking to him in the basement. [Ambudkar laughs] I said, “Oh, my God, the blooper reel is going to be horrific.” Me just 50,000 times in the middle of scenes going, “Stuart, Stuart, Stuart, Stuart.”
AMBUDKAR | On the flipside, I tried to do the same approach with Richie [Moriarty] and I was like, “Hey, Rose is having Betsy record her lines. Can you do it for me, too?” and Richie was like, “Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.” But he shares a [trailer] wall with Brandon Scott Jones, and he was feeling very self-conscious about doing his lines and having Brandon hear him. So he whispered all of his lines into a tape recorder and then sent that to me, and I was like, “Richie, what the hell am I going to do with this?” So, basically, if you see my impression of Pete as being understated and almost at below room-tone volume, it’s because I copied Richie whispering into his phone.
TVLINE | Utkarsh, you have to play a lot of Pete’s emotional beats in this episode. How was that for you? Was there a sense of responsibility that you felt, taking on another character’s big emotional arc?
AMBUDKAR | I don’t think of it like that, really. I just was thinking about what it would be like to just be a dad, talk to your daughter, just tell her how proud I was of her. I don’t really know how to explain it. I just was sort of playing the love.
MCIVER | You, also, were able to physically embody a connection with his daughter, which is pretty special. I mean, he was able to hug and hold his daughter in his arms like that, and as a father, I’m sure, I can’t think of something you’d long for more if you were unable to hold your daughter in your arms.
AMBUDKAR | The episode, also, was so technically involved. That shot when I hug our daughter and then it pulls out, and it’s Richie playing Pete, and you get to actually see Pete holding his daughter for the first time, shots like that took an hour, hour and a half, two hours just to get right. So you’re sort of, technically, trying to stay in the right place. I hope Richie’s happy with it when he sees it. I don’t really mind because the dude got, like, 10 days off of work because I had to play his role. So however he feels about it is like, “You’re good, dawg. You’re good. I did my work and your work. Just be happy.” [Laughs]
TVLINE | When [showrunners Joe Port and Joe Wiseman] first started teasing that Jay was going to see the ghosts this season, I definitely would not have predicted this particular scenario. Utkarsh, when did you first learn about how it was going to happen? And what did you think of it?
AMBUDKAR | I think they told me pretty early on. I knew about a month or so before we shot it. It’s really funny. I’m game for anything. The Joes know the universe of Ghosts better than anyone, and so, they set it up for me, and what they gave me a chance to do was speak to the relationship that Jay has with his parents. They asked me who I would love to play my parents, and the first people I thought of were Bernard [White] and Sakina [Jaffrey]. Sakina has played my mother, I think, four or five times on TV and in movies.
MCIVER | Sakina is one of the coolest people I’ve ever worked with. I’m such a fan of hers. I mean, Bernie’s incredible, too, but just because Champa and Sam had so many scenes together, I was able to enjoy more of her. But wow.
AMBUDKAR | And for a generation of South Asian actors who have had to really kind of go up against a lot of preconceived notions and stereotyping, Bernard was at the forefront of paving the way for the younger generation to have more opportunities. So I look up to him very much, and I was really keen on being able to work with him. And the Joes gave me a lot of input there, and I felt part of that, creatively and culturally. As far as getting to see the ghosts, you’ve got to understand, I’m just an actor who finally gets to look his collaborators in the eye. Like, I get to finally talk to my co-workers. So I, to some degree, don’t care how I get to do it. Like, you figure it out. I’m just so overjoyed that I can look Asher [Grodman] in the face. Rebecca [Wisocky] put her hand on my shoulder in one scene, and I freaked out because I thought she wasn’t supposed to. I was like, “What are you doing?!”
TVLINE | Do you wish it had lasted longer?
AMBUDKAR | I mean, selfishly, as an actor, yeah, of course, I want more time. I wish that Jay and Pete got to meet each other, but, obviously, because of the storyline, we didn’t get to. But yeah, I, for sure, would have taken another one or two episodes of being a ghost or being in that world, but I think for our story and for the overall message and energy of our show, this was the perfect amount.
TVLINE | Does this change Jay’s relationship with the ghosts moving forward? Does he have a new way of thinking about them now that he’s actually met them?
AMBUDKAR | You know, I think for a guy who loves his wife unconditionally but up until this point has, basically, been operating on blind faith, I think he finally gets to see what Sam has to go through on a daily basis, and I think it’s less about his interaction with the ghosts and way more about his connection to his wife, which I think is sort of Jay’s heartbeat. That’s what makes him who he is, is how he can support Sam in the objective insanity that is her life. But I think, hopefully, it makes them stronger and brings their bond closer.
MCIVER | Yeah, she has to live it, but he has to live without it. She has all of this company, and she has these people around her all day. We regularly talk about how fun it would be to see a full episode which is actually from Jay’s perspective, and how isolating that is… [Anything that] helps them understand each other’s perspectives more seems like it would be very beneficial for their relationship.
TVLINE | Rose, did you feel like you were in iZombie for a minute there when Jay turned into a zombie?
MCIVER | Yeah. I have the line in [the episode]: “I hate zombies.” Did they keep that?
TVLINE | Yeah, they did.
MCIVER | Oh, good. Yeah, it was a nice little nod. It was very fun. It did feel like getting transported back to Vancouver in 2018.
TVLINE | Is there anybody from iZombie that you would love to see guest-star on the show?
MCIVER | I mean, Rahul [Kohli] and Malcolm [Goodwin] and Aly [Michalka] would be like a dream. But we always talk about trying to get Rahul in. Utkarsh knows him as well and is a fan as well. So that would be really, really wonderful. Any of those three. I think that, tonally, obviously there’s some good overlap in terms of iZombie and Ghosts, so I feel like they would translate very well into this universe.
TVLINE | If you could pick one character for the other to be possessed by, which one would it be?
MCIVER | I would love for Jay to be possessed by Flower because I know how much he adores Sheila [Carrasco], and we all admire her work so much and the character she’s built, and how contradictory her character is is so fun. She can be such different versions of herself, and it tracks. So I think that would be really cool to see Jay being possessed by Flower.
AMBUDKAR | I think Trevor. Sam is so disgusted by most of Trevor’s outlook on life that I think for her to be possessed by him would be very funny. I think watching Rose pull the “T-Money” would be very funny.
Ghosts fans, what did you think of this season’s Christmas installment? Grade it below, then hit the comments!
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