Jennifer Morrison Officially Knew ‘Once Upon a Time’ Was a “Slam-Dunk” From the Pilot [Exclusive]

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Jeff Petry / © ABC / Courtesy: Everett Collection

Published Aug 16, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

To say that transformation occurred on Once Upon A Time is a major understatement. On screen, the ABC series was known for reinventing itself and putting its iconic characters through numerous wild scenarios and twisted storylines. Off screen, the actors who brought those characters to life were also changing and growing. In an interview with Perri Nemiroff for Collider Ladies Night, Jennifer Morrison talked about what first drew her to Once Upon a Time and how being on the long-running show was its own Disney-adjacent hero's journey.

Once Upon A Time took us to Storybrooke, Maine, where fairy-tale characters like Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin), Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), the Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla), Belle (Emilie de Ravin), Little Red Riding Hood (Meghan Ory), Rumpelstiltskin (Robert Carlyle), and more lived normal lives, with no happy endings, thanks to a petty curse. It's up to Emma Swan (Morrison) to be their savior. First, of course, she has to learn how to believe in magic.

"I was really moved by the pilot," Morrison told Nemiroff. "I was really, really blown away by the pilot. I thought it was such a slam-dunk idea. It was just one of those concepts. The familiarity of all these fairy-tale characters mixed with this concept of them all knowing each other, and somehow having their lives overlap, felt so universally exciting." She went on to praise showrunners Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who also wrote the pilot, saying they "had done such an incredible job of also infusing it with a tremendous amount of psychology and metaphor. You could feel the richness of what they were approaching it with, so I was very excited about that."

Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey's Anatomy · House · Scrubs

Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.

🚨The Pitt

🏥ER

💉Grey's

🔬House

🩺Scrubs

FIND YOUR HOSPITAL →

A critical patient comes through the door. What's your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.

AStay completely present — block everything else out and work through it step by step, right now. BTriage fast and delegate — get the right people on the right problems immediately. CTrust my gut and move — I work best when I stop overthinking and just act. DAsk the question everyone else is ignoring — what's the thing that doesn't fit? ETake a breath, make a joke to cut the tension, and then get to work — panic helps no one.

NEXT QUESTION →

Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you'd give in an interview.

ABecause I wanted to be where it matters most — right at the edge, when someone's life is actually on the line. BBecause I wanted to help people — genuinely, one patient at a time, in a system that makes it hard. CBecause I was drawn to the intensity of it — the stakes, the drama, the feeling of being fully alive. DBecause medicine is the most interesting puzzle there is — and I needed a problem worth solving. EBecause I wanted to make a difference — and also, honestly, I didn't know what else to do with my life.

NEXT QUESTION →

What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.

ACompetence and calm — I need people who don't fall apart when things get bad. BTrust and reliability — I want to know that when I pass something off, it's handled. CConnection — I want colleagues who become family, even if that gets complicated. DIntelligence and the willingness to be challenged — I have no interest in people who just agree with me. EFriendship — people I actually like spending twelve hours a day with, because those hours are going to happen either way.

NEXT QUESTION →

You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who's worked a long shift has had to answer this question.

AI carry it. All of it. I don't look for ways to put it down — that weight is part of doing this work honestly. BI process it and move — you have to, or the next patient suffers for the one you just lost. CI feel it deeply and lean on the people around me — I don't think you're supposed to handle that alone. DI go back over every decision — not to punish myself, but because I need to understand what I missed. EI grieve it genuinely, find some way to laugh about something unrelated, and try to be kind to myself — imperfectly.

NEXT QUESTION →

How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.

AIntense and completely present — no small talk during a shift, but exactly who you want there. BSteady and dependable — not the flashiest in the room but never the one who drops something. CPassionate and occasionally chaotic — brilliant on the hard cases, prone to drama everywhere else. DBrilliant and difficult — right more often than anyone else, and everyone knows it, including me. EWarm and self-deprecating — not the most intimidating presence, but genuinely good at this and easy to like.

NEXT QUESTION →

How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.

AProtocol is the floor, not the ceiling — I follow it until the patient needs something it can't provide. BI respect it — the system is broken in places, but the structure is there for a reason and I work within it. CI follow it until my instincts tell me not to — and my instincts are usually right, even when they cause problems. DRules are for people who haven't thought hard enough about when to break them. EI try to follow it and mostly do — with a few memorable exceptions that still come up in meetings.

NEXT QUESTION →

What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What's yours?

AEverything outside these walls — I've given this job my full attention and the rest of my life has gone around it. BMy idealism, mostly — I came in believing the system could be fixed and I've made a complicated peace with that. CStability — my personal life has been as chaotic as the OR, and that's not entirely a coincidence. DMy relationships — I am not easy to know, and the people who've tried to would probably agree. EMy sense of gravity — I use humour as a coping mechanism, which not everyone appreciates in a hospital.

NEXT QUESTION →

At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.

AThe fact that it's real — that nothing else I could be doing would matter this much, right now, today. BThe patients — individual human beings who needed something and got it because I was there. CThe people I work with — I have walked through impossible things with these people and I'd do it again. DThe next unsolved case — there's always another puzzle, and I'm not done yet. EBecause despite everything — the exhaustion, the loss, the absurdity — I actually love this job.

REVEAL MY HOSPITAL →

Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…

Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.

The Pitt

You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn't let you look away.

You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You've made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.

You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.

You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.

Grey's Anatomy

You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.

You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It's messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.

House

You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn't fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.

You're not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you'd deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they're smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.

Scrubs

You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.

You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that's not a flaw, it's a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

Morrison Spent Her "Whole Life" Preparing for the 'Once Upon a Time' Pilot

Morrison also admired the Once Upon a Time pilot's director, Mark Mylod, and came from a Disney-loving family. "I may not have realized this in the moment," she continues, "but I grew up in a family that really loves Disney." Morrison explained that her parents would find ways to bring magic into her life growing up, budgeting road trips from Chicago to Orlando on schoolteacher salaries. "So, I think that there was also a lot of that Disney mythology that lived in my bones in a way that I got very excited at the idea of being the new person in that mythology," she told Nemiroff. "'What does it mean to be the invention that's dropped into that world?' I think without realizing it, I'd spent my whole life doing research to be that person, so there was something very familiar about it that kind of called to me, as well."

Her character Emma Swan might not be a Disney fairy-tale fan, but she was living the ultimate fan experience as an audience surrogate in a fantasy world. In that pilot, we meet Emma in Boston, where she works as a bounty hunter/bail bonds person with no friends, no family, and no faith in humanity. She receives a call to adventure right from a young boy named Henry (Jared Gilmore) claiming to be her son. Henry takes her to his hometown in Maine, which he's convinced is not only populated by the archetypal fairytale characters that the Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney made popular, but under a spell that's made them forget who they are.

A New Disney Classic Reminded Morrison of Her Time on 'Once Upon a Time'

Once Upon A Time ran for seven seasons on ABC, and in today's television landscape, very few actors get to spend that long on one job. You're evolving as the character you play, but also as yourself. The actors who played Emma's parents, Goodwin and Dallas, got married in real life and had two real children in that time. Reflecting on that experience, Morrison finds an apt metaphor that happens to unfold in a newer Disney movie. "There's so much in literature about going to the Enchanted Forest and it changing you. I mean, I've also now watched Frozen 2 18,000 times with my child, and there's the whole sequence where Olaf is talking about how enchanted forests are meant to change you, and that's all based on psychology and all this stuff. So, I think Once Upon a Time sort of was my Enchanted Forest."

The scene she's referring to happens right as Anna (Kristen Bell), Elsa (Idina Menzel), Olaf (Josh Gad), Sven, and Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) go into the woods again. The snowman asks the group, "Did you know that an enchanted forest is a place of transformation? I have no idea what it means, but I can't wait to see what it's gonna do to each of us." Towards the end of the film, he admits that he still doesn't know what transformation means, but feels changed. Sadly, Once Upon a Time never got to tell the story of Frozen 2, but it did cover the original Frozen in the show's fourth season.

"I went in with a lot of excitement and a lot of passion, and I feel like what I didn't expect coming out of it was some of the challenges and the things that were harder for me," Morrison explained, "in terms of being away from my family, being away from my home for so long, the sheer hours worked, and expectations and demands of a show like that, at that age, at that point in my life. Because I wasn't yet married, and I didn't have my partner yet, and so to do all of that and sort of still be alone, it really challenged me. It really, really challenged me. I think it forced me to wake up to needing to know myself better." She went on to say that spending 17 years collectively on network television never left her much time to be herself. " I'm not method. I don't take the character home or anything like that," she told Nemiroff, "but if, for 14 to 16 hours a day, you're sort of more in the skin of someone else than in your own skin, you don't have a lot of time to know yourself."

"So, I think the awakening for me in my, like, 'Enchanted Forest time' was that I have to know myself as well as I know these characters, if not better. So it forced me to start prioritizing, taking care of myself differently, and knowing myself differently. And it was in that awakening that I realized that I had, at one point, had two burgeoning careers, which was that I was directing theater alongside being an actor, and I was really craving telling the whole story, and I was really missing that part of myself that could create without giving up myself. So, in that realization, I started directing a lot sooner than I think I would have because I was like, 'I have to do this now.' And so that's how the whole show itself sort of became my Enchanted Forest."

While Morrison did not direct any episodes of Once Upon a Time, she has gone on to direct episodes of Euphoria, Tracker, Yellowjackets, and The Five-Star Weekend, all after her first short film Warning Labels, and feature Sun Dogs both in 2017. You can stream Once Upon a Time on Hulu and Disney+, and watch Morrison's full episode of Collider Ladies Night below.

Once Upon A Time

Release Date 2011 - 2018-00-00

Showrunner Adam Horowitz

Directors Ralph Hemecker, Ron Underwood, Dean White, Romeo Tirone, Billy Gierhart, Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Alrick Riley, David Solomon, Eagle Egilsson, Milan Cheylov, David Barrett, Geofrey Hildrew, Guy Ferland, Mario Van Peebles, Paul A. Edwards, Jon Amiel, Mick Garris, Sharat Raju, Morgan Beggs, Adam Horowitz, Alex Zakrzewski, Andy Goddard, Anthony Hemingway, Antonio Negret