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Aleki77
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Once Upon a Time: The Story Begins
We talk to cast members and producers from the new series about fairy tale characters.
US, October 23, 2011
Snow White. Prince Charming. Jiminy Cricket. Rumpelstiltskin. The Evil Queen. Some incredibly iconic fairy tale characters are at the center of ABC's Once Upon a Time. When I visited the set recently, Ginnifer Goodwin (Big Love), who plays Snow White, noted the oddity of taking on such a role, recalling a scene in the pilot involving one of the famous Seven Dwarves. As Goodwin put it, "Doc was birthing my baby! Like, Doc is my OBGYN. I never thought I'd be able to say that."
From Lost writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, Once Upon a Time centers on what happens when the Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla) puts a curse on all of those living in the fairy tale land, sending them to our world, with no memories of their true identity. Into this town of Storybrooke comes Emma (Jennifer Morrison), who is brought there by the son, Henry (Jared Gilmore), she gave up for adoption. But Henry not only reveals the truth about the residents of Storybrooke to Emma, he tells her she is the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas) – and the one person who can help set things right.
Like Lost, flashbacks figure heavily into Once Upon a Time, as we move between the present in Storybrooke, and the past in the fairy tale world. Morrison, like the rest of the cast, was excited about the opportunity this gave them, noting, "You immediately have a familiarity of some sense of who Snow White is and some sense of who Prince Charming is and some sense of who Little Red Riding Hood is because it's so engrained into our culture to have a point of reference for these characters. So when you have that familiarity already, then we're providing the opportunity to tell backstories and fill things in and fill in the blanks that you never would've guessed or never would've thought of, and see how it all mixes together."
As Dallas put it, "I think that's what's so great about Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, about what they've written, is they've taken all these iconic characters that we all know, but they've made them somehow realer. There's a reality to them. Prince Charming just happens to be a name. He's still a man with the same emotions as any other man. He's a prince, but he's a prince of the people. He gets his hands dirty. He's got a kingdom to run. He has a family to protect. He has an epic, epic love for Snow White. He's like everybody else. He's human."
Look for plenty of additional fairy tale characters to show up, with executive producer Steve Pearlman noting, "In episode four, we introduce the character of Cinderella and we do a modern take on her. And in one of the next episodes coming up, we have an episode that involves Hansel and Gretel. We're really trying to go to a lot of different places and tie the stories back to our main characters."
The main villain of the story is of course the Evil Queen, known as Regina, Storybrooke's mayor, in our world. Said Parrilla, "Emma Swan coming into Storybrook is a huge, huge, huge threat. There's always two stories being told when playing Regina. There's the threat of her knowing she's an evil queen and then there's just the pure simple fact that the biological mother has stepped into her world and the threat of losing her son is just enormous. That's a fear that I think any adopted mother would have. I think that's going to really help the audience relate to Regina in some level. " Parrilla noted, "You'll learn a lot about the Evil Queen and her history and why she's so evil – why she has so much anger and hatred. She really doesn't want anyone to be happy – Snow, Charming, anyone. She will destroy everyone's happiness, and you'll learn why very soon." She grinned, noting that while there is a vulnerability to Regina where Henry is concerned, we shouldn't forget, "she's a royal bitch."
Because of the nature of the story, Morrison is one of the only cast members who doesn't appear in the fairy tale sequences. As to how she felt about that, she laughed, remarking, "Initially it was 'Oh, I'm actually fine with it.' I kind of like being the audience's proxy in that I get to have a genuine reaction to how ridiculous this all seems but then there is, as time goes on and I see these gorgeous images of everyone in the forest in their gowns and I'm like 'Well, maybe I'm a little bit jealous.'"
Raphael Sbarge plays Jiminy Cricket/Archie, revealing the fifth episode tells the story of, "How Jiminy Cricket came to be Jiminy Cricket. And it gives us a different kind of storytelling. There's one about Rumpelstiltskin [played by Robert Carlyle], there's one about Prince Charming. Each character's sort of gotten their turn and then we get to sort of find how that interacts."
Sbarge said he felt Once Upon a Time felt very different on the TV landscape and remarked, "Fresh and innovative and daring is dangerous in television, but these guys are really smart, as we know from Lost... So far I can say, categorically, they continue to sort of surprise me in terms of the writing. It continues to be thrilling with, 'How fun! I never would have thought that!' And it's no small trick. Obviously there's Grimm's fairy tales and other fairy tales, but to keep trying to breathe new life into this, they're a smart bunch folks sitting around a table like this, knocking out these stories."
Discussing how she approached playing Mary Margaret, the small town school teacher Snow White is trapped as, Goodwin explained, "Mary Margaret, the way we created her was she's an amalgamation of all of the characteristics that the Evil Queen would want her to have, so we kind of created her in reverse. It wasn't that 'This is her life experience so this is how she would seem.' It's 'This is how the Evil Queen would want her to seem so this must be what her life experience was.' In some ways I feel like that she's almost a photographic negative of Snow White. Because the Evil Queen hates Snow White so very much, everything that is alive in Snow White is repressed to an unreachable extent in Mary Margaret."
When it came to playing Prince Charming, Dallas (seen this summer as Fandral in Thor) said he was having a blast. "It's amazing. I love all the fairy tale land stuff. It's always great fun. It's a boys dream to be able to do this kind of stuff. Get a sword and ride horses and fight trolls and dragons and all kinds of stuff. Live in a castle and have a kingdom… It's a challenge and a blessing for actors to be able to have these two characters, which are essentially the same person with the same core, but different experiences and different memories, which make them different people. And it's sad, the Storybrook characters… They're always trying to get back to that fairy tale character, but they don't really know that. They don't remember that they were who they are. So they're always trying to find their way back, subconsciously, to who they were. So there's always a search going on within them."
If you're hoping for twists and turns, Pearlman thinks you'll be happy, saying, "Adam and Eddie have found a moment or multiple moments in every episode we've done. Every episode has had some kind of turn in it that either will be a twist on a fairytale or a twist that would be like a soap opera twist that's more character-based. I think both are really fun. Down the road, when we do the Hansel and Gretel story, when we see the gingerbread house, what is the Once Upon a Time version of the gingerbread house going to look like? And I can't tell you because I don't know yet. Those are the kind of things we spend a lot of time talking about."
http://uk.tv.ign.com/articles/121/1210487p1.html
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Once Upon a Time: Interview to Cast & Crew |
