"Orange Is the New Black" star is trading in her devious cellmates for flesh-eating zombies. Elizabeth Rodriguez, better known as the manipulative and jealous Aleida Diaz on the hit Netflix Original series, will co-star in "Fear The Walking Dead."
The companion series of "The Walking Dead" is set in Los Angeles, just as the zombie apocalypse begins to take over.
Rodriguez admitted the new job entails adjusting to the sight of blood, according to New York Daily News. "When there's gore, I go into these sort of silly places," she said. "That's the way I cope."
The actress will play a nursing student and divorced mother of one, Liza Ortiz. The role was reportedly written as a Caucasian woman. She admitted that she had to sell the character to showrunner Dave Erickson and director Adam Davidson, since she is Puerto Rican.
"It's so amazing to not try to have people fit into something," she said. "It became about her and her relationships than whether or not she's supposed to be Latina."
Although "The Walking Dead" counterpart may be filmed in Los Angeles, Rodriguez feels her hometown of New York has already prepared her for the major California-based catastrophe.
"I feel like I'm part of some zombie apocalypse just transferring from one subway to another in 90-degree heat!" she said. "If you can survive that, you can survive anything."
Meanwhile, Cliff Curtis opened up to Entertainment Weekly about the storyline of the new gory series, exclaiming it is more than just a zombie show.
"We don't even use that word. We don't ever use the Z-word," he said.
Curtis, who plays a teacher named Travis, said "Fear" is more complex than walking corpses but does provide a fun air of mystery.
"It read like a real family show/drama about people's ordinary lives," he said. "Also what's great about our show is in our world we don't even know about that other show. We don't know about what's coming or what this whole phenomenon is."
"The audience knows so much more than we do and it's kind of like we're just sort of carrying on, trying to carry on with our normal lives -- like go pick up the kids from school," he continued. "Oh, the school's not really a school anymore."
The actor also advised for the characters the immediate sense of impending doom could be any real natural disaster.
"It could be anything. It could be influenza. It could be chicken pox," he added. "It just happens to be this mysterious disease that we don't have any knowledge of, but how quickly our civilization and all the things that we take for granted can collapse."
"Fear The Walking Dead" is set to premiere Aug. 23 on AMC.
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