*Be aware that spoilers for the series are discussed*

The Netflix original series Daybreak shows what happens to high schoolers in post-apocalyptic Glendale, California, when it’s populated by gangs of jocks, gamers, cheerleaders, the 4H Club and other tribes, as they fight to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear blast that has turned the surviving adults into hungry zombie-fied versions of themselves known as Ghoulies. As 17-year-old hero Josh Wheeler (Colin Ford) amasses his own tribe, that includes the highly unstable Angelica (Alyvia Alyn Lind), samurai Wesley Fists (Austin Crute) and biology teacher turned witch Ms. Crumble (Krysta Rodriguez), they must learn to navigate this strange new world, if they’re ever going to figure out what comes next.

During this 1-on-1 phone interview with Collider, actress Krysta Rodriguez (who is so delightfully insane as Ms. Crumble, aka The Witch) talked about the fun of getting to play such a crazy and bizarre character in the vein of Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice, her own favorite apocalyptic story, the transformation of Ms. Crumble to The Witch, having doll heads and maggots for co-stars, telling a high school story alongside Matthew Broderick (who plays Glendale High School’s Principal Michael Burr), whether viewers will learn why Ms. Crumble is different from other adults, and the experience of working in a mall.

Collider: I love your character, but she’s also quite possibly the craziest and most bizarre character, ever!

KRYSTA RODRIGUEZ: Yes, definitely!

Did you know, from the beginning, just how outrageous this character would be, or did you learn how much crazier she would get, along the way?

RODRIGUEZ: It was a little bit of that. I went all out for my audition, in the way of just, “Well, what can I lose?,” and they responded really well to that because people had been trying to make it tragic when it was more about being out there. So, it helped me out that I hit what they were looking for. And then, once I had the part and they were writing for the character that I had created, it just got like crazier and crazier, for sure.

When you were originally told about this show, how did they describe what this would be, what the story was, what the character was, and what this world would be?

RODRIGUEZ: It was crazy. They gave me the script, so at least I got to understand it a little better than just the description. The show is an extended metaphor of what high school can feel like, and setting it in the apocalypse was just adding one more thing that high school kids have to go through. And the description for Ms. Crumble/The Witch was just that she’s a teacher who is passionate, but is feeling disillusioned with the good that she can do in the world, and somehow the apocalypse is a fresh start for her. Even though she’s not the same person she was before, she actually has more of a chance of making an impact in the world. And so, that was like really cool, but also like Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice. There’s a lot of heart and a lot of sweetness to the character, but then there’s also the times when she’s just bonkers and balls to the wall, which is so fun.

There have been a lot of apocalyptic stories, and this one has a lot more comedy in it than some. Do you have any personal favorite apocalyptic stories, whether it’s movies, TV or books, and do you tend to lean more toward the comedy aspect of it?

RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, I definitely am more on the comedy side of most things, but Mad Max, to me, is the best. There’s comedic elements to it, but there’s also that electric guitar absurdity, which is what I love. Just going full out on something is great.

When it comes to the horror side of things, are you someone who prefers the type of horror that scares you, or do you prefer the type of horror that makes you laugh?

RODRIGUEZ: I don’t like to be scared, so I definitely prefer something that makes me laugh. For me, if we’re gonna go horror, it’s a [Quentin] Tarantino situation. I want it to have some camp involved, but also some amazing acting and beautiful cinematography. I’m very high brow with my horror.

How does Ms. Crumble see herself, and how do you think others see her?

RODRIGUEZ: She thinks she’s pretty cool, actually. She thinks that she’s got the life she’s always wanted. She’s teacher, she’s a scientist, she has some students that have promise, and she plays in an all-female Latina Morrissey cover band. She’s living her best life, in some ways. And then, to see that the students do not respect her and she can’t really make any changes, and that there’s a bureaucratic nature to the world that she is too pure to know how to fight, that’s why, when she becomes The Witch, she gets that animal instinct that can fight. She can fight, in a way that she couldn’t before. That’s what’s cool about the show. Instead of the apocalypse being the worst thing that’s ever happened, all of these kids that didn’t go out in the first round, there’s something about the apocalypse that brought out their better selves. With some of them, it brought out their worst selves, like in the case of the jocks, but the Cheer-mazons are living their dream life. All of the kids have found their voice and found their calling, in some way.

I love that we get to see both sides of her – the biology teacher and The Witch – and sometimes in the same episode. How did that work? Did you shoot the different versions on separate days?

RODRIGUEZ: I would go back and forth, in a day, sometimes. I did that a couple of times. We would try not to because of the make-up. The Witch is still a part of Ms. Crumble. She’s a fractured brain. So, it was just a challenge, as an actor, to always be thinking about which room in her brain she was living in, at any moment. It was sometimes easier to access, going back and forth to Ms. Crumble, because that already existed in her brain.

Was there a process for finding the look, with the hair, the make-up, and the teeth? Did you go through different variations of it?

RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, definitely. We started one way, and we did a camera test, before we had started shooting. We spent a couple of weeks in pre-production, and after the first test, they were like, “More dirt,” so we just kept piling on more dirt. I had dirt inside of my ears, on the back of my neck, and under my fingernails. There was dirt on me for six months. It was just never coming out. We also had the teeth get grosser and grosser and grosser, and then they eventually just made me fake teeth, so that I could put them on every day, instead of eating all of this paint. We would also add things on. In the first episode, I’m eating pillow filling, so by the next day, there was stuck on pillow filling. And then, I was eating ketchup, thinking it was blood, so then they would put ketchup on me. It was a cumulative dirt growth. As the time went on, she got dirtier and more layered with all of the things that she’d been living with. Then, we got to clean her up, so it wasn’t six months of dirt. From there, we got to rebuild again because she doesn’t want to be clean, she wants to be a monster. At the end of Episode 4, she says, “Let’s just be who we are. Let’s be monsters.” So then, we got to layer the dirt back on, to what she’s comfortable with. It was fun, deciding how much dirt to have.

What was it like to also have doll heads as your co-stars? How were they, as scene partners?

RODRIGUEZ: They’re the best. That was so fun. The doll and the maggots were really fun things. Our props department, our art department, our costume and wardrobe department, and everyone was at the top of their game, doing things that I’ve never, ever seen before. They weren’t just doll heads. They had safety pins stuck in their heads and paint all over their faces and goo all over them ‘cause they were inside my stomach. It was so fun. It was just great. It was great to be able to take that really seriously. It was hilarious. And naming all of the maggots was fun. The maggots are a temperamental scene partner. They were real, and we had to have maggot wranglers on set and could only shoot them for a certain amount of time. We had to put them down and roll the camera really quickly, and then pick them back up. It was a lot of work around the maggots. They were divas.

It’s the sound that always gets me, when it comes to maggots.

RODRIGUEZ: The sound, yes! They’re disgusting. I talk about that all the time. Looking at them is fine. It’s the noise and the smell. They’re a little stinky. We had them in a lunchbox, and you would just hear them crawling all over in there. That was fun.

Did you try to take one of the doll heads home from set, as a keepsake?

RODRIGUEZ: I didn’t take any, but I should have. I took something else from the witch’s den, but it wasn’t that exciting.

Were you ever worried, at all, that you wouldn’t be able to pull off some of the craziness, or was it all just too much fun?

RODRIGUEZ: 100%, the whole entire time. I put myself on tape for the audition, myself. I didn’t go into an audition room or anything ‘cause I live in New York, so in my own living room, I put together this tape and sent it off, and then, three days later, they offered me the job. I never met anybody. I never had a callback, of any kind. I didn’t have any notes, or anything. So, my first reaction was, “They don’t know. They’re gonna realize they made a mistake. They don’t know if I can do this, long term.” We didn’t even have any discussions. They just saw it in me and knew that I could do it. Having that confidence that somebody puts in you is really great and helps to be free and go for it. I didn’t know if I could sustain it for 10 episodes and beyond, but I was super supported, the whole time. Everyone was just like, “More. Go further.” No one was ever like, “Whoa, okay, that was too much. Chill out.”

When you’re doing a high school story, having Matthew Broderick involved makes it that much more iconic. What was it like to work with him, and how fun was it to share those moments with him?

RODRIGUEZ: We had a great time. We had to be the adults, sometimes. Most of the time, I’m like a kid, but in all of the pre-apocalypse stuff, I’m the teacher. So, we got to have a lot of scenes together, and we had a lot of fun because we’re both in New York, we’re both theater actors, we have a lot of experience, in that way, and we have mutual friends. Our relationship develops in an interesting way, throughout the series, so we had to be really comfortable with each other, and that was awesome. As far as him being Ferris Bueller, it definitely colored things. The show was already that, before he came on, but it was a fun added element to have him there. He’s done so much since then and people know him from so many other things now, so it didn’t always come up as much.

Much is made of how lucid Ms. Crumble is and why she’s different from everybody else. Will we learn more about why she seems to be more aware, and just how altered she is, before we get to the end of the season?

RODRIGUEZ: Some things are gonna be revealed, for sure, and then some things are gonna be even more convoluted. You will see why she is a bit different than the other adults, but we still don’t really know what she is. We’re gonna explore more of that, as the series goes on, and you see more of it, as this season happens.

Do you feel like there are definitely still a lot of layers there, that you’re personally excited to get to dig into? Is there a personal wishlist of things that you still want to learn about her?

RODRIGUEZ: Oh, yeah, definitely. She has abilities that she didn’t have before, and I would love to see what those are. I, personally, believe that whatever Ms. Crumble is, is the key to starting the new world, post-apocalypse. It’s gonna be like discovering penicillin. It’s a bad thing that you can extract something good from and change the world. I think there’s something that happened to her and that might change course for the new humanity, which I’m excited to explore.

You got to work in the classroom and in a mall. How did that inform things for you?

RODRIGUEZ: I was actually really lucky, in that way. I didn’t have to go outside, for a long time. I could really make my home in these places. The mall, particularly, really informed a lot of The Witch. You see where she lives there and how she’s been collecting things, and you start to understand some of the things that she does in the early part of the season. Even if you think what she’s saying is crazy, she’s been trying to piece together who she is because she doesn’t remember. When she becomes lucid, she’s piecing together this puzzle of, how did I get here, and why? That was really fun. It’s like Memento, where she lives fractured and trying to figure out who she really is. The mall, itself, was like very helpful in that, as she tries to surround herself with things that remind her of who she was before.

When you play a character like this, who is so big and so specific, do you like need a minute when you’re finished playing her, to go back to figuring out how to adjust to being normal?

RODRIGUEZ: A little bit. Not so much, though. I don’t know why, but I could just go in and out of her. When you’re in it, and you put the hair, the dirt, the nails and the clothes on, and her posture is different, it’s easy to be that character. And then, once you take it all off, it’s easier to leave it. It’s harder to play somebody that feels more relatable to you and who’s going through different experiences. And the show was fun, so it felt fun. It was a collaboration of fun. Even though there’s some tragedy in it, the collaboration felt very joyful to do.

Daybreak is available to stream at Netflix.