Snow White, to be exact. And it just so happens to be her favorite of the bunch.
“It is, and ironically, I was Snow White two years ago for Halloween,” she says, calling from a Burger King at Los Angeles International Airport. “I remember saying to my little sister when I explained my (costume) choice: ‘You know, one of my biggest dreams in life is to play a Disney princess. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I always go all-out with my costumes. I’d better go ahead and dress up like a Disney princess now, because if I ever land a princess role, I wouldn’t be able to do that then.”

It’s a good thing she did when she had the chance, because the former star of HBO’s Big Love can now be seen as Snow White on ABC’s Once Upon a Time (Sundays, 8 p.m. ET/PT).
But it almost wasn’t to be. After her “perfect” experience as Margie on seven seasons of the polygamous family drama, Goodwin, 33, says she “wasn’t planning on going back to television at all. … I wanted to take a break from the world of televion and explore a film career.”
She wanted the “luxury of time,” something a television shooting schedule did not afford. But after reading “every film script I could get my hands on,” the actress, who has starred in movies including He’s Just Not That Into You and Mona Lisa Smile, was left more than a little dismayed.
“Let’s be honest: Those offers are going to Amy Adams and Anne Hathaway and Natalie Portman, Michelle Williams and Carey Mulligan,” she says. “I do understand my place in this business. These are the girls getting offers on the scripts that I would want to be part of.”
Not wanting to compromise, Goodwin decided to give some TV pilot scripts a read — something she hadn’t done since “2003, when I got involved in Big Love. I read three scripts in a matter of hours, and I thought, ‘This is where all the great writers had gone.’ When this one came along, there was no question that this was the one that I wanted to be a part of. This one was the one that would bring me back to television so quickly. I was blown away by the script.”

It helps, she explains, that Once Upon a Time has Lost writers on its side.
“Lost was my crack,” Goodwin says. “Not that I’ve ever smoked crack, but I imagine the experience is like watching Lost. I read the script and I cried at the end every time. … Ultimately it became a matter of playing something so risky and challenging and fulfilling my dream of playing a Disney princess. I knew it would be more fun than I would ever have. I’m for all the actor’s struggle, the self-indulgent, painful journey, but I would rather have fun. I want to dress up like Snow-freaking-White, and at the same time get to play a character who’s also very complex.”
This isn’t your typical fairy tale. Set in a Narnia-like land, Snow White, her prince and a bevy of fairy-tale characters are banished to a modern-day world by an evil queen — but not before Snow White sends her newborn daughter off to safety. “We do use a Lost-ish format,” Goodwin explains. “We tell the story out of order, and we present the audience with many a puzzle piece.”
In her modern-day life, Snow White has become Mary Margaret, an elementary school teacher in the town of Storybrooke. It’s where all of the characters live and work normal jobs, unaware of their past lives. Her long-lost daughter, now a grown woman, is played by Jennifer Morrison, someone she calls a close friend in real life: “I think it’s pretty unusal for actresses to get along so well.”
The pair also share a striking resemblance. “When we were both coming up in the business, we would get confused all the time. We have done interviews for each other and signed each other’s photographs. It got too frustrating to try to explain to people that we were different actresses.”

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