Lana Parrilla’s fairy-tale experience
NEW YORK, N.Y.— Lana Parrilla, whose dual roles on the fantasy drama Once Upon a Time include the fearsome Evil Queen, wasn’t satisfied just knowing her character was evil.
“You can also see she’s a tortured soul,” says Parrilla, “and I made a very conscious choice to reveal the pain underneath.”
While she prepped for her audition, she asked herself: What caused that pain? “So I did a medi- tation, and I saw a lot of her past and tapped into it,” discovering in the process that “a major betrayal and the loss of someone she deeply loves are what caused the darkness to overtake her, and what caused her need to punish everyone in her life. She doesn’t want anyone to be happy, because her happiness was taken from her.” Parrilla shared her epiphany with the show’s co-creators, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, “and they had their own vision which was totally in line with mine. Maybe I tapped into their psyches!” The ABC freshman hit, which airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on ABC and CTV, has a mind-bending premise. In a nutshell: thanks to the Evil Queen’s curse, a number of fairytale characters were transported to the contemporary village of Storybrooke, Maine, where they have forgotten their pasts as well-known storybook characters and, now stranded in the artifice of real life, have been denied every fairy-tale character’s birthright: the prospect of a happy ending. The hard-hearted mayor of Storybrooke is Regina, the other character played by Parrilla. Also starring are Ginnifer Goodwin, Josh Dallas, Robert Carlyle, Jared Gil- more and Jennifer Morrison.
Parrilla, a beautiful brunette with smouldering eyes and a lively, outgoing manner, counts Once as her seventh series, which also included short-termers such as Miami Medical, Swingtown and Boomtown. Longevity isn’t a priority for her. “When the script for Once came my way, I had the thought that maybe it will last only a season,” she says.
“But I was willing to take that risk. Even if it hadn’t gotten picked up as a series, I’m happy to have played this part.”
She should have said “parts.” She has had to master not one role, but two. Even now, switching between the characters can be dizzying. Playing the Evil Queen, Parrilla performs in a cavernous Vancouver studio, with few props, instead dominated by a huge green screen.
“After 16 hours on a green-screen stage your head is literally spinning,” she says with a laugh.