Once Upon A Fan

Tony Amendola recent conducted an interview with The Morton Report which offered some intriguing insights into his views on the show.

Over the years, classic fairy tales have been twisted, tweaked, turned on their heads and re-imagined for the big and small screens. In season one of ABC’s fantasy TV series Once Upon a Time, The Evil Queen interrupts the wedding of Snow White and Prince “Charming” James and places a curse on everyone, taking away all their love so that only she will ever have a happy ending.

Having also had their memories erased by The Evil Queen, these former residents of the Enchanted Forest end up in fictional Storybrooke, Maine, where time is frozen and they are living their lives as very different people. Only Snow White’s and Prince Charming’s daughter Emma Swan can break the curse, and the town’s mayor, Regina Mills (The Evil Queen), is well aware of that. Among those exiled to Storybrooke is Geppetto, an elderly carpenter who, according to the popular fairy tale, carved himself a son named Pinocchio out of magical wood. Veteran stage, feature film and TV actor Tony Amendola, who plays Geppetto, was delighted to venture into this “fractured” TV fairy tale world.

“I read the pilot script for Once Upon a Time and thought, ‘Wow, this is really wonderful,’” says the actor. “So I went in to audition for the Geppetto role, but there really wasn’t that much material on the actual character. I was given a brief scene as Geppetto, but the rest of the material was, I’m pretty sure, from a film. It was similar, though, to Once Upon a Time in that it involved a father giving advice to his son. So I just presented it in the style of who I thought Geppetto was. They [the show’s producers] seemed very pleased with what I did, and before I knew it I was being welcomed into their world of classic fairy tales.

Read the full interview at The Morton Report