The Netflix series Black Summer is a terrifying look at life for the survivors of a cataclysmic event that forces ordinary people to fight for their lives as they face off with the infected. When Rose (Jaime King) is torn from her daughter, she vows that they will be reunited, but as civilization collapses due to an outbreak that brings the dead back to life in their most feral form, that becomes a journey far more harrowing than she initially expected, forcing Rose to figure out just how far she’s willing to go.

During this 1-on-1 phone interview with Collider, actress Jaime King (in what is the best performance of her career, so far) talked about the appeal of Black Summer, why she felt so connected to her character, the dream of working for a company like Netflix, why she throws herself so fully into each role that she plays, what she grew to appreciate about Rose, the terrifying real-life experience she had when she was injured on set, the real world parallels that this story has, and how she can’t wait for the opportunity to continue to play this character, if the series returns for Season 2.

Collider:  This is such a great binge show because the tension is so high that you just can’t stop watching to find out what’s going to happen next.

JAIME KING:  Oh, my god, that’s so good. I’m so interested to know what people think of this, not from an egotistical point of view, but because it’s just so different from anything that I’ve ever done and because I love this story so much.

There are also a lot of storytelling devices that are different from what we typically see.

KING: 100%. Thank you so much. That’s why Netflix is amazing. You get to get away with things that you would never get away with. They let you break cinematic rules and television rules, in a way that few people have ever done before. I have a lot of friends that are filmmakers – like Nash and Joel Edgerton and David Michôd – and when they started working with Netflix, they were like, “They’re amazing!” You get hired, a lot of the times, to make things, and then people want to change your voice and the direction, and Netflix is like, “We celebrate your direction. We celebrate who you are. We’ll let you push the bar.” They are so dialed in. That’s why they’re extraordinarily successful and why every artist wants to work with them. They allow you to do things that other places could never conceive of. It’s heaven.

The last TV series that you did was The CW’s Hart of Dixie, which I adored, and I loved you in that, but it was clearly a very, very different character than the one you’re playing in Black Summer.

KING:  Thank you! I love Lemon. She was rich, complex and fascinating, and I was lucky that my showrunner really let me fly with that and make her who she was. But, this is obviously completely different.

If you were going to sign on to do another live-action series, was it important to you to find something so very different from the last one?

KING:  It’s funny because I don’t ever think of it like, “Oh, I wanna play something completely different.” I can’t say never. I definitely think about, “Yeah, I wanna play things completely differently,” but what I go for is women I can play that are rich, complex, interesting, imperfect, messy and beautiful, internally, and yet fucked up, at the same time. I’m not really interested in playing the straightforward characters. I’m interested in showing women that who we are as women is fascinating and multi-dimensional, and that we’ll walk through fires that few could ever imagine, and survive them. This story was so important to me because, when I got the script, I was actually in Paris, and I literally got on a plane and flew back because I was like, “I have to do this.” It literally spoke to my soul. It was one of the best scripts that I have ever read, in my life. It spoke to everything that we’ve gone through in this country. It spoke to my soul, as a mother who has lost her children, and who has gone through many losses of babies, and who has had to do everything that I could to keep my child alive. If I hadn’t been a mother, I don’t know if I could’ve played Rose. I could approximate playing Rose, but I don’t wanna approximate. I’m not here to approximate. I’m here to tell the truth. I’m very specific, in terms of, if I feel like I cannot fully merge myself with the character, then I won’t do it. I’m not playing somebody and I’m not playing at something. I’m here to look at what’s inside of me, and the truth and shadows that are there, which is not easy. Merging that with the character is where the truth lives.

Your performance in this is just so remarkable. This woman has everything ripped away from her, so early on, and she has to find some way to keep going and keep finding the strength to continue. That’s what makes Rose so fascinating to watch and follow on her journey.

KING:  Thank you so much. I really, deeply appreciate that. I remember when I was doing press for a film with Sam Jackson, and we were at Comic-Con. I asked him about his favorite movies that he’d done and his favorite characters, and about reviews, and he said, “I don’t read reviews because, if I believe all the good things that people are saying, then I’m gonna believe all the bad.” And yet, with this one, I actually really wanna know if people care about my performance, and if it comes across and hits them in their heart because Rose hit me in the heart. When I go in and do what I do, I do it with such preparation, care and discipline, and with this, I cried for months and months and months and months, to the point where people thought I was crazy. With Rose, I really, really want to know how women feel about her, and how people feel about her, and how it comes across because she’s that important to me. I just want to know that I told her story.

With everything that she goes through, over the course of these episodes, what most impressed you about who she became, by the end of this journey?

KING:  I had a really strong realization that took my breath away, one day. I was missing my friend. My best friend, Elizabeth Kemp, passed away. She was my teacher and mentor, and I was caring for her, until her passing, and I was just really missing her. Elizabeth ran the Actors Studio, and after A Star is Born, she became sick and I cared for her until she passed away in my arms. I just needed to talk to her, and I was literally talking to her in my heart, about Rose. And then, all of a sudden it hit me that it’s the ordinariness of people that is so extraordinary. Rose is someone that came from Omaha, Nebraska. She’s the Midwestern woman who has been with her husband since forever, and who loves her child and her husband more than anything. What struck me was that we don’t change and become something extraordinary. Everything that we are to become is already within us, it’s just that we haven’t allowed it to be revealed yet. It’s those moments where we have to dig so deep inside of ourselves that, all of a sudden, the character of who we are and our traits come forward, but they’ve always been there. There just wasn’t a necessity to go to those places yet. So, that was a big realization. People change and they walk through a fire, and then they become this bad-ass, raw, dynamic, brilliant human being, but do believe that’s already within us. It’s just the circumstances that pull it out. That was a really big thing for me to realize, and it gave me comfort.

You’ve previously talked about how seriously injured you got while shooting this, so it seems that you also were a bit of a bad-ass, yourself, especially since you tried to continue to working with the injury.

KING:  Oh, yeah.

At what point in the production did that happen, and how do you get through something like that?

KING:  I got injured, early on in the production, with my ankle. I tore the three major ligaments in my ankle, and I flew back to California and said to my doctor, “I’m going back. You gotta get me through the playoffs, man. Just get me through it. Whatever you gotta do, I don’t care.” The doctor that I went to works with all of the top athletes, and he was like, “Okay, I’ll get you through the playoffs, but if you don’t rehab, every single day after you shoot, and it’s not done properly, you will never walk the same again.” And I was like, “Done, and done.” So, I would shoot 12 to 15 hours a day, and then I’d go home and do physical therapy and rehab it. I would do my exercises, and everything that I could because, to me, when you’re the lead and you’re also a producer on the show – and I know this sounds bananas, but I think a lot of actors are like this – telling the story is of utmost important to me. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care about my physical body or health. You just can’t miss dates. It’s not a normal job. If you miss a day, it’s a problem. So, I just wanted to go back and do my job, and I knew that I could do it. If my doctor said that I could do it safely, I would do that.

When I got injured, we had two days left of filming, and I was shooting the finale. That moment really changed my life because I had rehearsed the scene a few times, and they were running and gunning it, and we were running out of light. The scene was something that was very, very brutal and hard for Rose. It was one of those beautiful moments of what human beings will do for one another. I had a 9mm in one hand, and a military rifle in the other. I had to do this thing, and then double backwards, but the next thing I knew, I was in the air and I saw this sharp flashing light, and then I was out. When I came to, my hands were twisted in the metal of the guns, and I heard people crying and some guy kept saying, “I’m sorry.” They had put an extra behind me, and didn’t tell me, so I had no idea that there was a physical body, directly behind me. That’s not on Netflix ‘cause they weren’t producing this, and it wasn’t on the director, either. But there was some serious negligence that happened.

So, I got back up and I was like, “Roll cameras. Go, go, go!” When the adrenaline hits like that and you’re acting, it’s just pure adrenaline. I was still in character, and couldn’t feel the pain yet. I felt fucked up, but I would not allow the pain in because the pain of what Rose had just done was the same as the pain of what Jaime had done. It was the same thing. There’s no separation. That’s how I was trained. And I knew that we had to make our day, so from a producing standpoint, I did not want to miss the shot. I was like, “Roll cameras! Go! Call action!” I did it two more times. And then, Justin Chu Cary (who plays Spears), who’s like my brother, looked at me and said, “What did I tell you before? Don’t be a fucking hero.” And he picked me up and carried me down the stairs. The look on people’s faces was like, “Wait, where are they going?” When I first injured my ankle, I did the same thing. I was like, “We’re rolling. Just go!” And then, Justin said, “Hey, stop. Don’t be a hero.” So, he repeated that, the second time, and he had my back because he knew that I always had his.

With any of my cast members, I’ll always have their back, and everybody else on set, from the grips to crafty. I’m there to put food on people’s table. I am there so that everybody gets paid, and they get to go home and take care of their kids. I always say that we only have between action and cut. I tell that to other actors, especially when they’re first starting and they ask why I’m so disciplined, or why I take it so seriously. I’m like, “Listen, I play, but the reason that I take it seriously is because my husband (Kyle Newman) is a filmmaker, and my best friends are filmmakers.” Producers, writers, directors and actors can work for years and years and years, to never get a job. And then, they finally get a job, but it took them six or seven or ten years to get that script bought, and it will then sit in turnaround forever. People don’t realize how hard people work to get a movie or a show greenlit. That’s the blood, sweat, tears and dreams of people’s lives. Then, when you have hundreds of people on your crew, literally relying on you – and they don’t say that, but it’s true – I know that if I go in and kick ass and I’m a success, that’s all that I can do. I do my best to make sure that everybody on the set is taken care of. If that’s a success, then it’s really up to the audience.

But that injury was very interesting because I was basically told that I had to come back to set, or they would just use my body double. It wasn’t my director, but was looking to the people that I had been producing this with and thinking, “What are you talking about?! How could you do that?” And I was told by the doctor that, if I didn’t get back to the hospital, I would lose my hand. I’ve never, ever been in an experience like that before. I kept trying to figure out ways to make it work, and I was like, “I’m gonna make it work,” but the head of the hospital was like, “Let me make this plainly clear, you have nine hours. If you do not make it into a hospital within nine hours, you will lose your hand. That’s it.”

Which is terrifying.

KING:  It was terrifying! My driver was the best. She’s a real bad ass. She’s one of the most famous rodeo women in Canada, and she breaks the horses that nobody can break. She’s like my momma bear. So, they sent a car to come pick me up, and she took me straight to the airport. I felt like I was on another planet because I didn’t get to say goodbye to anybody. I didn’t get to finish what I had started. I didn’t get to hug my director, my cast and my crew, and Netflix didn’t even know about it. They weren’t even made aware of it, until I posted that picture. When I came out of the hospital, there were paparazzi outside, and I wanted to have control of the narrative. It’s one of those things where you realize that you have to chose your body, which is my livelihood, over this thing, in this moment. I’ve never been in that position before. It’s not about blame. It’s just that, when you’re in your final days and you have to get it done, nobody can think straight. Everybody is in their emotion. Frankly, that’s the power of the story. We were all in the depth and power of the emotion of the story, and it was literally life imitating art.

Will that make it much more mentally difficult to return for Season 2, if there is one?

KING:  Oh, no! Are you kidding me?! I cannot wait for Season 2. Ultimately, it was all perfect. I know that (show creator) John Hyams had my back. I knew that Netflix had my back. I knew that my cast had my back. I knew that they would always take care of me. I knew that there was no negligence, on their behalf, at all. When I spoke to my executive from Netflix, he was like, “What happened?!” He had no idea. He was like, “It’s not about the show. I don’t care about what happened with the show. I care about you. We care about you and your body. Are you okay?” That’s how I know Netflix is my home. They cared so deeply about my physical well-being. There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do for them. I’m so grateful for them, and for the opportunity that they chose me to tell this story. The injury is nothing compared to what I was able to do. That’s just a part of the job. It happens. People make mistakes because they’re trying to do a great job. I could’ve made the same mistake and done the same thing.

I’m definitely glad that you didn’t lose your hand, and that you made it through to the other side.

KING:  I’m always so afraid to even say anything ‘cause I don’t want people to be upset. And then, I was like, “Isn’t that such a woman thing to do?,” thinking that people might be upset with me for just telling the truth about what happened. But the people that I really care about – Netflix, John Hyams, and my cast and crew – know exactly what’s up. They love me, no matter what, and I love them, no matter what.

As much as I love horror comedy and I’m a huge fan of Shaun of the Dead, I also love it when apocalyptic stories and zombie stories are terrifying and scary. This story has so many parallels to what we go through, in the world, that it just feels so real.

KING:  I’m so glad you said that ‘cause that’s why it was written. John originally wanted to write a love letter to his wife and to women, and to what they do for their children and their strengths. And then, when kids were getting ripped away from their parents at the border, he was like, “That’s it.” This is a story about our country, and about what happens when the fabric is starts to rip apart, and what people have to do, in their ordinariness. And I say ordinariness in the best way because I love the ordinariness of life. When we fall in love, yes, you remember roses or gifts that people send you, but it’s the ordinariness that we love and that breaks our hearts. When you have a break-up and you can’t think straight, it’s because you’re used to brushing your teeth with that person, or you’re used to the way they annoy you by chewing their food. It’s the way that they would look at you in the car, or the songs that they would play that you thought were silly. It’s the ordinariness or the quirks that we fall in love with, and it’s those things that we remember and miss the most.

When people that are not equipped for something like this to happen, and if our country were to continue to go down the road that it’s going on, what would that look like? And the genius of John Hyams and his capacity to tell stories, zombies was never mentioned in the script, ever. It’s a sickness, like MRSA or Ebola. Our special effects and make-up departments spent three months studying Ebola and MRSA, and doing make-up tests, so that everything you see, when people are getting sick, is exactly what happens, with the veins, as it passes the lymphatic system, and the bleeding out of the nose, ears and mouth. No one is immune, whether there’s love in your heart, or hate in your heart. It’s not like somebody did something wrong, and then this thing happened. There are no superpowers. We don’t know what’s going on. We’ve never seen anything like this. The government is shut down. When Rose goes to that checkpoint, even the soldiers don’t know what’s going on. There’s no internet or power. There’s nothing. It’s like when you hear about a hurricane and you go, “Oh, my god, that’s horrific,” and you can empathize with it, but you don’t think that it’s gonna hit you. But then, all of a sudden, you’re told to evacuate. That’s the three-week period, before the show starts. What I love is that there’s no backstory because we didn’t want to explain it to people. Obviously, I need to know and be very specific about the backstory because without specificity, I can’t play a complex character that’s interesting. Everything that she sees and that’s happening to her, is happening in the moment. You see her go through that, in the moment, because they don’t know what’s going on.

And that’s what makes it so terrifying.

KING:  When I was working on the character, everything that I wear is actually my husband’s. When they flew in for the costume fitting, I had all my husband’s clothes out because I wanted the audience to feel my husband, throughout the whole series. No matter what, Rose’s husband was always with her. I don’t know if that’s just being trained in the method, or whatever, but I had all of his clothes. And then, I took the D & D (Dungeons & Dragons) dice from all of our friends that come over to play, and I put them in my pocket. When you have these very personalized things on you, it makes the story more personal. When I take things out of my pocket or backpack, those are all of my personal things.

Another reason why I love Netflix so much is that they made sure that my kids could be with me and be on set, ‘cause my kids go everywhere with me. They took care of me and my family. They care about things like that. I want my kids to grow up on set and understand what it is that we do. Most importantly, I just want to raise my children. I don’t want them to be raised by other people. That’s not how I was raised. The one things that I wanted to do, every night, was just kiss my children goodnight. That would like me, as Jaime, know that everything was gonna be okay. When you’re playing a role like this, you need an anchor to keep you onto the planet. When they were separated from me, all of a sudden, I couldn’t differentiate between me and Rose.

Black Summer is available to stream at Netflix.