Entertainment
Jennifer Morrison Officially Knew ‘Once Upon a Time’ Was a “Slam-Dunk” From the Pilot [Exclusive]
To say that transformation occurred on Once Upon A Time is a major understatement. On screen, the ABC series was known for reinventing itself and putting its iconic characters through numerous wild scenarios and twisted storylines. Off screen, the actors who brought those characters to life were also changing and growing. In an interview with Perri Nemiroff for Collider Ladies Night, Jennifer Morrison talked about what first drew her to Once Upon a Time and how being on the long-running show was its own Disney-adjacent hero’s journey.
Once Upon A Time took us to Storybrooke, Maine, where fairy-tale characters like Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin), Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), the Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla), Belle (Emilie de Ravin), Little Red Riding Hood (Meghan Ory), Rumpelstiltskin (Robert Carlyle), and more lived normal lives, with no happy endings, thanks to a petty curse. It’s up to Emma Swan (Morrison) to be their savior. First, of course, she has to learn how to believe in magic.
“I was really moved by the pilot,” Morrison told Nemiroff. “I was really, really blown away by the pilot. I thought it was such a slam-dunk idea. It was just one of those concepts. The familiarity of all these fairy-tale characters mixed with this concept of them all knowing each other, and somehow having their lives overlap, felt so universally exciting.” She went on to praise showrunners Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who also wrote the pilot, saying they “had done such an incredible job of also infusing it with a tremendous amount of psychology and metaphor. You could feel the richness of what they were approaching it with, so I was very excited about that.”
Morrison Spent Her “Whole Life” Preparing for the ‘Once Upon a Time’ Pilot
Morrison also admired the Once Upon a Time pilot’s director, Mark Mylod, and came from a Disney-loving family. “I may not have realized this in the moment,” she continues, “but I grew up in a family that really loves Disney.” Morrison explained that her parents would find ways to bring magic into her life growing up, budgeting road trips from Chicago to Orlando on schoolteacher salaries. “So, I think that there was also a lot of that Disney mythology that lived in my bones in a way that I got very excited at the idea of being the new person in that mythology,” she told Nemiroff. “‘What does it mean to be the invention that’s dropped into that world?’ I think without realizing it, I’d spent my whole life doing research to be that person, so there was something very familiar about it that kind of called to me, as well.”
Her character Emma Swan might not be a Disney fairy-tale fan, but she was living the ultimate fan experience as an audience surrogate in a fantasy world. In that pilot, we meet Emma in Boston, where she works as a bounty hunter/bail bonds person with no friends, no family, and no faith in humanity. She receives a call to adventure right from a young boy named Henry (Jared Gilmore) claiming to be her son. Henry takes her to his hometown in Maine, which he’s convinced is not only populated by the archetypal fairytale characters that the Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney made popular, but under a spell that’s made them forget who they are.
A New Disney Classic Reminded Morrison of Her Time on ‘Once Upon a Time’
Once Upon A Time ran for seven seasons on ABC, and in today’s television landscape, very few actors get to spend that long on one job. You’re evolving as the character you play, but also as yourself. The actors who played Emma’s parents, Goodwin and Dallas, got married in real life and had two real children in that time. Reflecting on that experience, Morrison finds an apt metaphor that happens to unfold in a newer Disney movie. “There’s so much in literature about going to the Enchanted Forest and it changing you. I mean, I’ve also now watched Frozen 2 18,000 times with my child, and there’s the whole sequence where Olaf is talking about how enchanted forests are meant to change you, and that’s all based on psychology and all this stuff. So, I think Once Upon a Time sort of was my Enchanted Forest.”
The scene she’s referring to happens right as Anna (Kristen Bell), Elsa (Idina Menzel), Olaf (Josh Gad), Sven, and Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) go into the woods again. The snowman asks the group, “Did you know that an enchanted forest is a place of transformation? I have no idea what it means, but I can’t wait to see what it’s gonna do to each of us.” Towards the end of the film, he admits that he still doesn’t know what transformation means, but feels changed. Sadly, Once Upon a Time never got to tell the story of Frozen 2, but it did cover the original Frozen in the show’s fourth season.
“I went in with a lot of excitement and a lot of passion, and I feel like what I didn’t expect coming out of it was some of the challenges and the things that were harder for me,” Morrison explained, “in terms of being away from my family, being away from my home for so long, the sheer hours worked, and expectations and demands of a show like that, at that age, at that point in my life. Because I wasn’t yet married, and I didn’t have my partner yet, and so to do all of that and sort of still be alone, it really challenged me. It really, really challenged me. I think it forced me to wake up to needing to know myself better.” She went on to say that spending 17 years collectively on network television never left her much time to be herself. ” I’m not method. I don’t take the character home or anything like that,” she told Nemiroff, “but if, for 14 to 16 hours a day, you’re sort of more in the skin of someone else than in your own skin, you don’t have a lot of time to know yourself.”
“So, I think the awakening for me in my, like, ‘Enchanted Forest time’ was that I have to know myself as well as I know these characters, if not better. So it forced me to start prioritizing, taking care of myself differently, and knowing myself differently. And it was in that awakening that I realized that I had, at one point, had two burgeoning careers, which was that I was directing theater alongside being an actor, and I was really craving telling the whole story, and I was really missing that part of myself that could create without giving up myself. So, in that realization, I started directing a lot sooner than I think I would have because I was like, ‘I have to do this now.’ And so that’s how the whole show itself sort of became my Enchanted Forest.”
While Morrison did not direct any episodes of Once Upon a Time, she has gone on to direct episodes of Euphoria, Tracker, Yellowjackets, and The Five-Star Weekend, all after her first short film Warning Labels, and feature Sun Dogs both in 2017. You can stream Once Upon a Time on Hulu and Disney+, and watch Morrison’s full episode of Collider Ladies Night below.
Once Upon A Time
- Release Date
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2011 – 2018-00-00
- Showrunner
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Adam Horowitz
- Directors
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Ralph Hemecker, Ron Underwood, Dean White, Romeo Tirone, Billy Gierhart, Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Alrick Riley, David Solomon, Eagle Egilsson, Milan Cheylov, David Barrett, Geofrey Hildrew, Guy Ferland, Mario Van Peebles, Paul A. Edwards, Jon Amiel, Mick Garris, Sharat Raju, Morgan Beggs, Adam Horowitz, Alex Zakrzewski, Andy Goddard, Anthony Hemingway, Antonio Negret
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Andrew Kavadas
Baron Danglars
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Mr. Gold / Rumplestiltskin / Weaver
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