‘iZombie’ Creates An Unexpected Future For Robert Buckley’s Major Lilywhite

Warning: This article may contain spoilers for iZombie.

When iZombie started out, the first few episodes were written in a way that seemed to leave Major Lilywhite, played by Robert Buckley, doomed to fade off into obscurity. By now, fans of iZombie probably predicted that Major would be off playing hoops with Chuck Cunningham from Happy Days and cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch, but in a strange twist, Robert Buckley was given his chance to shine in a steadily growing iZombie subplot.

“I was beside myself! I was so happy,” the iZombie actor exclaimed. “There’s a lot of exciting adventure for Major… I loved the way it turned out.”

As iZombie‘s biggest villain Blaine DeBeers (David Anders) uses the population of the city’s homeless to stock his growing brain catering service, it seems to have been left up to Major to uncover a seemingly ever-growing conspiracy. Lilywhite’s passion for this mystery has landed him in jail, in a sanitarium, and has left him looking like the tenderized meats in Blaine’s storeroom cooler, but still Robert Buckley’s iZombie character continues his investigation.

“All of us were like, ‘Holy smokes! Those came out so good!'” Robert recalls. “Everyone’s in danger, and it just gets crazier and crazier.”

In the latest episode of iZombie, Liv Moore (Rose McIver) seemingly came clean with her ex-fiancee, telling him everything she knew about the zombie apocalypse, but in the end, it was revealed that it had all been a hallucination. In that iZombie fantasy, Major took the news with relative ease, but Buckley says that’s not how he thinks his character would have really taken that kind of news.

“That’s a pretty ridiculous, crazy confession. I don’t know how anyone would take that. Major was insanely understanding. But he has shown himself to be a very loyal, loving guy. Who knows? If it was me in real life, I might be a bit more stunned. It would take me a little bit longer to get to the, ‘It’s OK.'”

The big question for iZombie fans seems to the issue of whether or not Liv and Major will ever reunite and that seemed to become a possibility in the imaginative scenario Liv had created for telling him the truth. In reality, iZombie fans know Liv is still mourning the loss of Lowell and has acquired a taste for revenge where that’s concerned, but there still seems to be a part of her that’s open to a relationship with Major. Robert doesn’t think there’s much chance of that in iZombie‘s future though.

“I don’t think that she’s anywhere near ready to get back into a romantic relationship, because nothing’s changed between Liv and Major. She still would be putting him at risk. The whole Lowell thing hasn’t changed that dynamic between Liv and Major.”

In this week’s iZombie episode, it was revealed that Lilywhite was going to find his way into Blaine’s Meat Cute restaurant, and it will certainly be interesting to see how he manages that. Buckley says he really enjoyed working with Anders in those scenes and that the scenerio created an exciting addition to that iZombie subplot.

“First of all, it was a lot of fun to do, because David [Anders] and I really hadn’t had a chance to play much of the season. On the acting side, it was a blast. David is sofun to work with, and he plays the villain so well. And then the scene, it gets tense pretty quick. You don’t really know what Major’s going to do. How desperate or angry is he? And also, we don’t know how Blaine’s going to handle it. Is he going to be ultraviolent? Or is he going to try to get rid of this guy?”

While it is nice to see Robert Buckley play a bigger part in the iZombie story, it seems unlikely that his character can go on much longer without learning the truth. It really seems to be a question of how he finds out. Will Liv come clean, or will iZombie‘s Major Lilywhite find out on his own?

iZombie airs Tuesday night on the CW network.

[Featured image: Robert Buckley courtesy of Amy Sussman/Getty Images]