ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND: Sophie Lowe, Emma Rigby, and Peter Gadiot Preview the New ABC Series

Just like ONCE UPON A TIME has recontextualized what we know of many popular fairytale characters, ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND will show viewers an entirely new side to the “Alice in Wonderland” tale.

“Well she’s grown up now and she’s strong,” Sophie Lowe (Alice) teased to reporters on the show’s Vancouver set last week. “She’s learned how to fight, and she knows how to look after herself. I think when you grow up, you kind of see your family and your parents in a different light, and I feel like she’s going through that. When you’re little you only see your parents and you think of your parents as God, and then when you grow up you realize that they’re just like you and they have fears as well, and so she just kinds of starts to believe herself and stop trying to convince everyone and just kind of follow her heart. So she’s a woman now, and she can kick ass.”

Those ass-kicking skills will likely be massively needed when Alice returns to Wonderland and realizes that she has quite a few people who are invested in what she does next. Among them? The Red Queen, whom Alice holds responsible for the “death” of her true love, Cyrus, whom Alice fell for during one of her stints in Wonderland. But the Red Queen’s portrayer, Emma Rigby, cautioned that her character might not be all bad.

“The Red Queen, like the traditional character in the Lewis Carroll novel ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ he envisaged [her] as a very controlled, fully of fury, governess,” Rigby pointed out. “She’s meticulous to the nth degree, she’s so precise all the time that she’s within…she knows what she is doing and she’s aware of that. So with me with this character I wanted to use that from the original into this series. But I wanted to make her not like any other villain…it’s got to be someone that you kind of love, that you laugh along with. She’s not, you know, taking herself so seriously…she’s living a fantasy of hers, so it’s almost like she’s playing in a movie, herself of being evil and what she might achieve.”

Whether the Red Queen gets away with her precisely evil planning, that’s to be seen. But it seems we should have at least some sort of resolution to some of the pilot’s initial conundrums.

“I think, what I’ve been learning is that the first season in WONDERLAND is very much split into two distinct halves,” Peter Gadiot (Cyrus) said. “So I think there’s two different journeys. I think in one sense there is…basically the first half is very much the journey of reuniting with Alice. It’s quite, in that sense, quite simple objective of overcoming physical obstacles that hinder us. It’s quite a pure kind of goal, which is nice. Then in the second half things are definitely going to change and we’ll have to see. I don’t actually know, but it’s two distinct journeys there which [the characters are] going to go on.”

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ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND debuts tonight at 8 PM on ABC.

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ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND: Meet Jafar in the Newest Promo!
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