The Season 5 finale of Once Upon a Time ended with a shocking twist: Regina (Lana Parrilla) managed to get her dark side out of her, only for it to manifest itself into the Evil Queen (also Lana Parrilla).
“Regina never should have let me out to play,” said the Evil Queen in the episode. “I came to set the record straight. There was a battle raging inside of Regina and she may have won the fight, but this is a war. And it’s just begun. The queen is back."
"I think it's still being discovered by all of us. Really, what it is, it's not split personality, but it's like two separate Reginas," she said in a new Entertainment Weekly interview (featured below). "The Evil Queen and the hero Regina. So it's gonna be really fun to play both sides in a different way than I have in the previous five seasons 'cause I've always played two sides. She's always been both, but she's never been split."
Season 5 also saw the death of Regina’s romantic interest, Robin Hood (Sean Maguire). “She’s also getting to a place where she’s starting to believe in karma, and a lot of this I think is karmic for her,” said Parrilla to TVLine. “She’s done so many terrible things in her life — she’s slaughtered villages and hurt so many people — that these two loves [including Daniel] have been taken away from her.”
Parrilla hinted that her character will be coping in the sixth season. “I think mourning will continue, over time,” said Parrilla. “Regina is a very private person, she doesn’t really share a lot of what’s going on inside. Internally, she’s conflicted by so many things that she doesn’t even talk about. So I’m curious to see how she deals with this loss at this stage, at this time in her life. There’s been so much evolution, she’s come so far, she’s been in the shoes of the hero for the last couple of years, so I’m curious to see how she’s going to handle this big loss.”
Parrilla added to TVLine that her character is losing some of her hope. “I feel like Regina is in a hopeless place right now, and we’re going to see how she deals with those emotions in the season finale and also in Season 6,” said Parrilla.
Once Upon a Time Season 6 returns to ABC this fall.
