The evil queen delights in her role

THE face of Disney villainy is curled up in a Canadian hotel room in a fluffy robe.

THE face of Disney villainy is curled up in a Canadian hotel room in a fluffy robe.

Lana Parrilla has just woken up, her throat is still hoarse from cheering on Barack Obama's election win ("I screamed so loud I lost my voice") and she reveals she's there for a "romantic little getaway" with boyfriend Fred Di Blasio.
Wait. Fluffy robe? Once Upon A Time's evil queen wears a fluffy robe?
"It's cold," she says, laughing sheepishly, in a voice so devoid of trademark menace you wonder that she ever believably ripped out hearts and enacted dark curses on screen.
But, wait five minutes and you hear it. The Brooklyn daughter of a Puerto Rican baseball star and a Sicilian painter has an impressive arsenal of vocal inflections, courtesy of a decade of voice lessons.
And, as she literally cackles, recounting scaring a young Cinderella witless on Halloween, you can well picture the girl, and everyone within a 50m radius, backed up into a corner, trembling.
"You know I don't LIKE little princesses," she sneers menacingly as she recreates the scene, before turning on the honey.
"But you do make a pretty one."
She laughs heartily.
"People are afraid of me - some adults, some children," Parrilla, 35, says with relish.
"But I think we've seen such a human side to this character; they're more intrigued now. They want to get to know who I am outside of this character, which is kinda cool."
The real Parrilla is a born performer. She's artistic, sporty ("it's in my DNA") and driven.
As a celebrity, she is one of the new breed - connected, accessible and social-media savvy. In her downtime, Parrilla often can be found tweeting her large global band of followers - the Evil Regals.
In past months her tweets have exhorted them to vote, support gay marriage and try the burgers at a Vancouver eatery, and cheered on followers' health kicks. She says her fans have even inspired her to give up smoking.
She also is largely unfiltered. Parrilla famously posted a video of herself to the Evil Regals having just woken up, wearing no make-up, endearingly rumpled. It was wildly popular.
But somehow under all that niceness lurks some fairly convincing evil. Certainly, it did last season on OUAT, when Parrilla's enraged Evil Queen Regina sent her enemies to Storybrooke, Maine, stripped of memories of their previous fairytale lives.
Season two kicked off last week in Australia with the curse broken and everyone remembering again.
Snow (Ginnifer Goodwin) and daughter Emma (Jennifer Morrison) have been sucked into another realm and meet new characters, including Captain Hook and Mulan.
Parrilla plays three Reginas in OUAT - a sweet, younger self; the closed-off, scheming Storybrooke mayor, and the Evil Queen, a mess of fiendish charm and wrath.
The hardest thing has been to make a famously cartoonish villain multi-layered. Parrilla does it by working out what drives Regina.
"She has evil tendencies but I don't think she is evil," Parrilla says. "She is on the cusp of insanity. The way she sees things, her reality is off.
"That becomes a whole other research area for me - what kind of crazy is she, how does it happen? I don't think she's evil; I think she's definitely misunderstood on many levels."
This season, Regina's focus is on redeeming herself to win back her angry adopted son.
"You're going to see a very different Regina," Parrilla says. "She's becoming more reasonable and more human. She's very vulnerable. She has to do a lot of soul searching."
Parrilla thrives on being outside her comfort zone, going to dark places with the role. "To be vulnerable, to be raw, to virtually expose your guts, I like doing that," she says. "It's great that I get to do it as the character but I find that in order to be successful you have to be able to do it in life, too."
But her biggest challenge may be more physical - specifically those stunning Evil Queen costumes, with plunging cleavages, voluminous skirts and cinched corsets.
"It's very difficult to breathe in those things," she says, laughing. "I once ate a quarter of a cheeseburger and it got stuck - stuck in the middle of my chest. I had to remove the corset in order to swallow it. That was it - I went on a liquid diet.
" It's very, very challenging, not only to eat but to go to the bathroom. I need two people to help me go. Which, again, results in not eating, not drinking. I have no nutrition in this body whatsoever!"
She laughs at how preposterous it all sounds - two people and an Evil Queen squeezed in a Vancouver forest portaloo. You have to ask if she's joking. "No," she enunciates firmly, with wry amusement. "I'm not."
Apparently evil does come with a price. But, when you get to play Disney's most iconic villain, it's one Parrilla seems more than happy to pay.
Once Upon a Time, Tuesday and Thursday, 7.30pm, Seven