TV Fanatic Exclusive: Emilie De Ravin Reveals Belle’s Outrageous Alter-Ego

Once Upon a Time’s Belle has been through a lot. Back in the fairy tale world she was kidnapped by the Evil Queen. In Storybrooke she was locked away in a mental hospital for 28 years. Just when she and true love Rumplestiltskin finally reunited, magic stole her memory.

Unfortunately her troubles are far from over, as Emilie de Ravin talks below about Belle’s alter ego who appears in this week’s “Lacey” and how the RumBelle phenomenon took her by surprise.

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What can you tell us about Lacey and this upcoming episode?
Well, it’s a lot of fun to play her and she’s a completely different character within the same episode as fairy tale Belle, and can’t remember who I am Belle. It was intense shooting this episode maybe not remembering who I am each day. She’s fun. The reason it’s done is horrible, to basically destroy Mr. Gold’s life. You know, Belle’s the love of his life and now Regina’s given this Lacey memory to Belle. I’m completely different. She enjoys hanging out at the Rabbit Hole, drinking whiskey, playing pool. Listening to very different music than Mr. Gold would. She’s by no means stupid or outrageous in a…she’s kind of outrageous, I guess. She’s fun. She’s carefree. She dresses a little scantily but not for any attention. She’s just comfortable like that. No one messes with her. She’s nice girl but she just couldn’t be any different to Belle.

Will Lacey be sticking around for a while?
You will see some more of her, yes. For sure.

RumBelle as the shippers call Rumplestiltskin and Belle, certainly have quite a following. Did you expect that? What’s it like to work with Robert Carlyle?
Well, it would be kind of weird if I expected it. No clue and it started after the first episode we did together which was even more amazing. Thank you to all the fans for their support. Adam and Edy who created the show and I knew from Lost asked do you want to do this with Robert Carlyle and I was like, with who? He’s an amazing actor. I think we just hit it off with the characters and hit it off with each other as far as just having naturally good chemistry and between dialog and that and just talking about our characters it just seemed to work out. It’s nice, in a sense that I’ve been predominately been working with him so that that relationship can develop as much as possible.

Belle’s been locked away for decades throughout most of the curse and even back in the fairy tale world. Will she ever seek her own revenge against Regina for that?
You’ll have to wait and see on that one. Yeah 28 years, I don’t know what she was doing in there.

Is there anyone on Once Upon a Time that you’d like to work with more than you have thus far?
I think some Evil Queen and Belle is due for some kind of interaction at some point. As you said, there’s definite background there that hasn’t really been addressed too much really. We only saw them having that little walk in “Skin Deep” and it would be nice maybe revisit that in Storybrooke.

Anything you can tease us with about the season finale?
People are still trying to figure out if they want to go home or not. That would be a lot of U-hauls though. There’s the whole danger of what is going to happen to Storybrooke because there’s more tension building as outsiders are coming in now. What’s its existence going to be and what do we do about it. We will see the Jolly Roger enter the picture again. Quite a lot of work out on the docks.