ABC’s Once Upon a Time has been all about Frozen this fall, creating episodes that pick up soon after the events in Disney’s hit movie. However, moving forward, the show will go back to pulling from the rest of Disney’s lengthy character lineup. This week, Dracula actress Victoria Smurfit signed on for an iconic role.
For whatever reason, ABC has felt the need to keep the casting under fur wraps, but TV Line is hedging its bets, putting its money on Smurfit playing the villainous Cruella De Vil. Apparently, cast members, including Emilie De Ravin, who plays Belle on the hit Sunday night drama, have been seen playing with a dalmatian. It also helps that Cruella De Vil is expected to pop up on the series sometime this season, and Smurfit is roughly in the right age range to take on the role. We could see the role working out for the actress.
ABC is staying pretty mum about the character so far, but we do know that Smurfit will recur on the series, which is good news for the actress, who starred in Dracula on NBC last year before that series got canceled. Recently, she’s also taken guest-starring roles on The Missing and The Mentalist, but clearly a recurring role is a more lucrative deal.
If she is playing De Vil, you’d have to think that she’ll still be one of the meanest of the mean villains on ABC’s fairytale show. However, Once Upon a Time really enjoys taking the audience’s ideas of many of its characters and twisting them into personalities that are definitely more complicated and often not what we would expect. Take Captain Hook, for example, who is decidedly helpful whereas Peter Pan on the show has been kind of a dick. Some characters have been true-ish to form, however, including some of its heroines, like Belle and Snow White.
Once Upon a Time has had a lot of twists and turns over its multi-year run, and we’ll let you know where Smurfit fits into the storyline and whether or not she will don Cruella De Vil’s epic black and white wig. In the meantime, you can catch new episodes of ABC’s Once Upon a Time on Sundays at 8 p.m. ET.
