Actor Naveen Andrews is joining the cast of Once Upon A Time in Wonderland for its upcoming debut season.
The casting news broke during Saturday’s Comic Con panel devoted to the upcoming ABC series.
Andrews is best known for his work as Sayid on Lost.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Andrews has been cast as Jafar. The character is based on the villain from the animated Disney version of Aladdin. This iteration of the character will be “radically different,” Andrews told the crowd. He will first appear in the first episode.
Andrews made a surprise appearance that the panel for the upcoming series Saturday afternoon. Before his appearance, fans were treated to a sneak preview of the first twenty minutes of the upcoming series.
Producers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz told the crowd that Wonderland’s story would be more open and closed than Once Upon A Time.
Questions that will be answered this season include Alice’s back story with all the characters, why Jafar is in Wonderland and how the genie got into the bottle. “We intend to be all killer, no filler,” Kitsis said.
Wonderland takes place in Victorian England, where the young and beautiful Alice (Sophie Lowe) tells a tale of a strange new land that exists on the other side of a rabbit hole. The cast includes Michael Socha as Knave of Hearts, Peter Gadiot as Cyrus, Emma Rigby as Queen of Hearts and John Lithgow as the voice of the White Rabbit
I’ll give this a chance but if it goes the way Once did in it’s second season I’ll drop it quickly…they were all over the place and the re-imagined fairy tales went from being inventive from the first season to being butchered in the second. The best show with Lost connections out there right now is Bates Motel…kept me on the edge of my seat.