Comic-Con 2011: “Once Upon a Time” in San Diego

Lana Parrilla, Robert Carlyle

This October, ABC will premiere an ambitious and imaginative new series based on fairy tales, something not often seen on network television outside of miniseries and TV movies.  Once Upon a Time stars Jennifer Morrison (House) as a woman who is found by the young son she gave up for adoption (Jared Gilmore, Mad Men) 10 years ago.  We come to learn that he believes she is the daughter of Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin, Big Love) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas, Thor), and that the town of Storybrooke, Maine, is populated by fairy tale characters.

It’s an ambitious project, certainly, but one the cast and producers hope will resonate with viewers.  Given the nature of the show, it’s not surprising that the actors would have had some reservations about joining the cast. “When you read the scripts, you think, god this is gonna be really cheesy, just the sound of the dialogue and everything,” said Lana Parrilla (Miami Medical), who portrays both the Evil Queen and Mayor Regina.  “[But] I think what the writers have done successfully, what the actors have done is…they’ve humanized these fairy tale characters.”  Morrison agreed, saying what drew them to the show was “the writing, the writing, the writing.” The actors all loved the idea of exploring “these iconic characters that we all know and show a different side to them that we don’t know.  And look at them as real people with real problems and real issues to deal with,” said Dallas.

Each member of the cast was determined to bring a strong sense of relatability and humanity to his or her character.  Parrilla dug deep, talking with the writers and rereading fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, and, of course, Rumpelstiltskin, determined to find out what made the Evil Queen become evil.  “There’s some real, human emotions being expressed; there’s betrayal, there’s vanity.  Hatred.  But it all stems from some kind of pain,  because you can’t be evil just for the sake of being evil.”

“Any performance is about honesty,” Robert Carlyle (Stargate Universe) added. “You buy every second of it because it’s coming from the heart.  So you play these characters, no matter how ugly, from the heart.  You touch people with it.”  Goodwin hopes to make her Snow White “terribly flawed.”  She believes that their objective is “to make the audience believe that these are the real people, the real relatable people, upon whom the Disney [and other movies] are based on.  And our princesses are definitely not perfect.”

Morrison was eager to depart from the princess as damsel in distress cliche so often seen in fairy tales.  “[The creators] realized it’s really important to portray these women with integrity, and with intelligence, and with strength and power and not in a way… that’s contrived, but in a way that’s really relatable to right now, in this moment,” she said passionately.  “You don’t want to put a bunch of women on the screen that are damsels in distress because that’s sending a terrible message to little girls right now.  We’re in a time when women are balancing careers and families and children and all sorts of things and they’re doing it beautifully. We’re just coming into a time where the world is limitless for young girls and what they’re capable of, and we forget sometimes how close we are to it being different.  It really wasn’t that long ago that women couldn’t get certain jobs or weren’t respected in certain arenas and so it is sort of the reinvention of the way you think of a fairy tale princess.” “And Prince Charming doesn’t like that kind of woman,” Dallas drawled.  “He likes strong, strong women.”

Jennifer Morrison, Ginnifer Goodwin, Josh Dallas

Carlyle, who plays Rumpelstiltskin and Mr. Gold, was particularly interested in exploring the two different worlds.  One takes place in the Enchanted Forest and is full of princesses, fairies, and magical creatures, where characters like Geppetto and Snow White mingle.  As a result of a curse by the Evil Queen, these characters are thrown into our world, where Rumpelstiltskin becomes the mysterious Mr. Gold, who owns the town, and the Queen herself becomes the Mayor, who is also the foster mother of the 10-year-old boy.  Snow White is his teacher, Mary Margaret Blanchard, and Prince Charming is a comatose John Doe.

Creators/Executive Producers Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, who honed their storytelling skills on series like Felicity and Lost, have had a vision for this show for the past eight years and are excited to finally be bringing Once Upon a Time to our television sets.  They are very optimistic that they will succeed, even in the generally quiet, but family-friendly, Sunday evening timeslot.  They feel that both the network and the studio have been extremely supportive of them so far.  And while they do have an idea of where they’d like the show to go, they remain focused on the first 12 episodes in case they do not get picked up for more.  Viewers will be pleased to know that they promise they will hold nothing back in these episodes (“all killer, no filler”) and hope to surprise us along the way.

Given the success of the Shrek franchise and recent movies like Enchanted and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, there’s clearly a market for fairy tales these days, but will it translate well on the small screen?  Only time will tell.  All signs point to a happy ending, though.  There was a lot of buzz about it at San Diego Comic-Con this year and a standing room only audience responded positively to an advanced screening of the premiere episode.  “I’m surprised we’re getting away with this, honestly.  It works overall.  It completely works.  You read the script and I just thought, ‘wow, this is a brilliant script, but how are we were going to film this?’” Parrilla wondered. “They made it work.  It’s magic.”

Once Upon a Time premieres Sunday, October 23 at 8/7c on ABC.

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Images courtesy of ABC, Ayang and Poptimal.com