Best known as Emma Swan in Once Upon A Time and Dr. Allison Cameron in House, actress and director Jennifer Morrison sits down with Susie Abromeit on the Great Ones podcast. She looks back on her years on Once Upon A Time and shares what it was like working alongside writer-director Sam Levinson.
In this long conversation, Jennifer Morrison looks back on how she built Emma Swan: rather than playing yet another "strong woman", she set out to play a whole one. Because Emma grew up in the foster system, she read dozens of memoirs of former foster children and stitched together a system of invented memories — specific triggers of vulnerability, guardedness and anger — that served as her road map for the character. She also credits Once Upon A Time creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz for taking risks with Emma, most notably the "Dark Swan" arc, which she compares to a black swan's sixty feet of flight: a stretch without a moral safety net that ultimately made the character fuller and more interesting.
The actress is candid about the craft behind fantasy television: making magic feel real is, in her view, closer to Shakespeare than to naturalistic drama, and the mental gymnastics of grounding the impossible became her best training as a director. Having started in theatre and used her sets as a de facto film school, she made the leap during Once Upon A Time — a rain-soaked night in the Vancouver forest, chasing a floating turquoise sneaker while "doubting her magic", convinced her it was time. A short film premiered at Tribeca and a feature sold to Netflix followed.
She reserves her warmest words for Sam Levinson, who entrusted her with episode five of Euphoria: an "unbelievable jazz musician" whom people keep trying to hear as a classical trumpet player, a visceral, endlessly exploring filmmaker whose process is misunderstood simply because he never explains it. Directing that episode, she says, split her life into a before and an after. The conversation closes on The Night Agent, where playing a morally compromised First Lady taught her that no one believes themselves to be the villain — a lesson, she admits, that softened her own edges.