IAR: Can you tell us briefly about your next episode, ‘The Return,’ and what we can expect to have revealed to us?
Jane Espenson: Well what won’t be revealed, because ‘The Return’ is Rumplestiltskin’s episode. We’re going to see him dealing a lot in Storybrooke about the stranger, trying to figure out whom the stranger is. He has a theory, we’ll see if he’s right, or maybe we won’t. In Fairytale Land we see him interacting with his teenage son, Baelfire, who we’ve seen before. Baelfire is not so happy with the place his dad is in now that he’s turning into a lizard-skinned villain. He’s trying to figure out how to save his father. We’ll see Rumplestiltskin dealing with both of these stories; and of course this is a character who remembers who he is so we’re going to see both of these emotional moments resonating with him at the same time, which is powerful, and we’re going to see him kind of shaken in Storybrooke.
I was wondering if you could talk a little about your female characters. They aren’t damsels in distress; they’re very strong characters, which is almost anti-fairytale. Can you speak a little about that?
Espenson: I’ve been thinking a lot about this. Our show has such strong female leads, Mary Margaret and Regina, and it’s so great to write on a show with these great, strong female characters. It’s true that fairytale females get rescued a lot; they’re awakened by the prince. If you actually think about and if you count the witches and the evil queens in fairytales and not just the heroes you realize that there are a lot of strong female characters. In fact it is very hard to name a strong male villain from Fairytale Land. There’s Rumplestiltskin, I guess, and then you run out. So I think there are more strong females in fairytale history than what people give it credit for and I think we have taken that one step further. When Snow White is waving the sword around you know things have changed.
I thought your episode, ‘Red-Handed,’ was a great adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood. It reminded me in some ways of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves and Wolf-Alice. Have you read and been influenced by any of Carter’s works or other fairytale variants at all?
Espenson: I have not. I probably should but maybe it’s good that I hadn’t because I was able to write it from a pure place. I was really happy with the reveal of who Red is. We actually got pretty far into the breaking of that episode before we made that final decision to have Red be the Wolf. I’m so glad we went there. What a great story that turned into! I was very, very happy to be assigned to write that one. Talk about an empowered woman!
Fairytales are often metaphors; how important is metaphor in your work?
Espenson: It’s hugely important; it’s what I studied in college. I was linguistics major and my graduate work was all on metaphor. Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to genre shows because I love storytelling with a metaphor built-in. In almost all of the shows I’ve worked on I’ve had that. It’s something that allows you to write very honestly because you’ve got the safety of that little bit of subjective distance that the metaphor gives you.
I’ve heard that some of the characters’ names are coordinated with their fairytale counterpart. Ruby’s is pretty obvious but some aren’t. Can you tell me about some of the other names?
Espenson: August W. Booth has an interesting name. People who are curious may want to do a little bit of research on different parts of that name and see what they can come up with. Gold is a good obvious one because Rumplestiltskin spins straw into gold. There’s a witch in Storybrooke who’s been referred to as Ginger but it’s not the same witch that we saw in the gingerbread cottage, which makes me think that there’s more than one gingerbread cottage. Maybe it’s a scam that a lot of witches run or maybe Emma Caulfield was not the original occupier of that cottage. It raises all sorts of fun questions, but it clearly seems to be a reference to gingerbread. So there are lots of them.
As a writer do you like jumping into a project that’s already in the works or starting a story from scratch?
Espenson: It’s much more fun to be part of a continuing story. I always say that I want to learn about the hour one hundred and one hundred and one in the characters lives, not hours one and two. Having past to build on, having character history to build on, makes it much more fun.
