The character of Maleficent, played by Kristin Bauer van Straten appeared first during Once Upon a Time’s freshman season back in 2011. Last seen or rather heard as a warning voice in the Once spinoff series Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, Maleficent is coming back and she’s not alone! Yesterday Entertainment Weekly posted photos of Kristin as Maleficent along with Cruella de Vil (Dracula’s Victoria Smurfit) and Ursula (Merrin Dungey of Alias) along with an interview with series creators Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis. Apparently, we’re going to be learning a lot more about Maleficent and Regina’s origins as friemies and about Ursella and Cruella as well. The three are known as the queens of Darkness.
From the photos, we see that Maleficent is now wearing the horned hat more commonly associated with the original character. The creators are sticking to the stories and ideas that they first began developing for the character at the beginning of the series instead of incorporating elements from the most recent Disney movie released last summer:
HOROWITZ: As far as the movie Maleficent goes, we were big fans of that movie, but we’re not doing that movie. We’re doing our spin on Maleficent. There may be nods to that movie and the classic Maleficent story—
KITSIS: Definitely nods to the classic. As Adam said, we introduced her in episode 2, so we had already been thinking about her on our own. So like Frozen, we’d stick more towards the movie. This is a case where this half of the season is going to be much more of the Once twist on all of them.
Some of the things that will be touched on starting this Sunday and going into the second half of season 4 will be Regina and Maleficent’s relationship and we’ll also learn more about Aurora and Maleficent too:
KITSIS: We are definitely going to dive into Maleficent story. We will see Aurora. Mulan we love. We love Jamie Chung. We absolutely have hopes to bring Mulan back. Her story is in the laboratory right now. But she’s a great character and we’d love to see her back.
Of her character’s history with Malecifient, Lana Parrilla says that there is a beautiful episode all about it coming up:
“She has less of a history with Cruella and Ursula, and more of a history with Maleficent. There’s an episode where Regina and Maleficent, we go back into fairy tale land and we see how they met and how they became friends. It’s a beautiful episode.
Kristin will make her return to Storybrooke this Sunday in the Once Upon a Time winter finale, Heroes and Villans on ABC.
Sources: EW.com- “Exclusive: ‘Once Upon a Time’ bosses tease the Queens of Darkness”
EW.com- “‘Once Upon a Time': Will Robin Hood choose Regina or Maid Marian?”
Image Credits: Jack Rowland, ABC
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