Graduating from the world of child stardom is often a rocky road but Jennette McCurdy, 22, has relished the opportunity. After playing the peppy Sam Puckett in Nickelodeon's iCarly and spin-off Sam & Cat, McCurdy has taken her career in an entirely different direction.

In Netflix's first original Canadian production, the survivalist thriller Between from creator Michael McGowan, she plays Wiley, "a minister's fallen daughter" in her final year of high school and pregnant, caught in a nightmare scenario with factions of other youths as a gruesome, deadly-swift disease fells those over 21 years of age in the bucolic town of Pretty Lake.

"Wiley was raised very religious; her father's a minister. She's pregnant, which obviously doesn't go over too well," McCurdy says. "She's cynical, rebellious and really lost in her life at the point where we meet her, so amidst this disease outbreak and everything that's going on in the outside world, she's also facing a lot of turmoil inside, so it was really fun to play her and very emotional.

"There are romance elements, there are sci-fi elements, mystery elements, so it kind of defies genres in that regard and it doesn't hold itself strictly to one specific niche."

McCurdy is keeping quiet on the greater mysteries behind the epidemic and will only say in general terms that the six-parter will keep audiences guessing. One conspiracy theory she concedes to is the old chestnut of a nefarious, government-led one.

"My character's love interest is a boy named Adam. He's very smart; he's a tech geek and he infiltrates the computer system and starts to develop his own conspiracy theories because he thinks that the government is creating this quarantine and has released this disease for a reason," she says.  "We don't really have any justification behind any other theories so we believe Adam for a while. He's the smartest of the characters that we follow so we logically say, 'Adam's right'."

Unlike in other survivalist thrillers – namely The Walking Dead – mobile communication is still possible and social media is used as a narrative tool.

"An interesting part of the show is how much communication through our cellphones is a crutch," says McCurdy. "If you're met with a crisis where you're not necessarily able to communicate so readily with the outside world, what does that force you to look at in front of you? Even just to bring it back to real life, it's so easy to get caught up in what we can see or access through our phones when really the only thing we can really affect is what's happening in front of us. All of that is a different world."

For McCurdy,  the transition into a mature, edgy role was a natural fit. She's a huge fan of the sci-fi and survivalist genres and the emotional turmoil her character goes through had resonance in her own life.

"My whole demeanour shifts based on what I'm working on. When I was working on iCarly or Sam & Cat I was very outspoken and gregarious and loud on set and hugging everybody and there to have fun," she says.

"But when it came to Between, I kept to myself. On set I was very much introverted and in my own space because I really wanted to stay focused on the character and not lose sight of her.

"I felt like my character really reflected a lot of what I was going through at the time, a lot of self-discovery, figuring out, 'Well who am I exactly?' 'What exactly do I stand for?' I had a couple of days off after I finished and as I was packing up, I sobbed, I just let the emotions wash over me. It was just like I was shedding that part of me."