ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND at TCA: Live-Blog

ONCE UPON A TIME is getting its first spinoff in the form of the upcoming series ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND. The show’s cast and producers will be participating in a Television Critics Association session momentarily, so follow along for our live-blog!

11:36 AM: OUATIW EP Adam Horowitz jokes they’ll just air the 20-minute presentation back-to-back to make up the full pilot. In all seriousness, the 20 minutes are just the first half of the season. The first 13 episodes of the series will be contained as an arc, and if they get more episodes, they’ll tell more stories then.

11:38 AM: “We do hope to have Barbara Hershey back in flashbacks,” EP Edward Kitsis says. Emma Rigby’s character The Red Queen is different than Hershey’s Queen of Hearts. And the EPs reiterate that the show will stand on its own apart from ONCE UPON A TIME.

11:39 AM: Sophie Lowe praises that the Alice she gets to play is so tough. She gets to kick ass, and take care of herself. Lowe shares that Alice was the only book her mom was able to read as a child, so she’s thrilled she’s now able to play this role.

11:42 AM: “I want to do stuff that’s different, completely different,” Naveen Andrews says of taking the role in WONDERLAND. He says they want to present viewers with something they haven’t seen before.

11:43 AM: Kitsis says there are some parallels to the original Alice tale (White Rabbit, Cheshire Cat), but they are bringing their own twist to it, because in this tale, Alice is in love with a genie.

11:45 AM: “You see they kind of complete each other in a way,” Kitsis says of Alice and the genie’s romance. He says it makes sense that a child who would follow a rabbit down a hole would naturally fall for a genie who could take her to any world.

11:46 AM: The idea of introducing the Aladdin world into the Alice universe was appealing, because Kitsis says in some ways, it’s like they’re kids who are playing with STAR TREK and STAR WARS and GI JOE figures and mashing up the universes. When Kitsis poses fake beatdown prospects in the hypothetical toy match up, Horowitz joking chides, “Darth Vader could not kill Spock.”

11:48 AM: Alice’s issues with her father are even darker than people might think. They’ll be exploring that in the show’s first season.

11:50 AM: Are we going to see Sebastian Stan? “We literally run his fanclub,” Kitsis jokes. However, due to the schedule of his filming, it’s likely they won’t see him. “We’re never going to have a Mad Hatter that isn’t played by Sebastian,” Kitsis says.

11:52 AM: “There are twists and turns to his backstory,” Horowitz says of the White Rabbit character. The EPs say there will be other opportunities for good voice actors to come drop by.

11:53 AM: Kitsis says that while the Alice stories can be a bit darker, all of the worlds (just like all of the worlds in ONCE) have a different feel. For Wonderland, it is like “a psychedelic romance.”

11:55 AM: “She was very impressed we had Dr. Pepper at craft service, and I was like, ‘I like this,'” Kitsis says of Lowe.

11:56 AM: “I think what’s most important is this love that he finds,” Peter Gadiot says of his character’s finding love despite being a genie.

“A genie feels he’s a prisoner of the bottle and those handcuffs are literal,” Kitsis says.