Reply To: Emma + Baelfire = Swanfire

[Slurpeez]

…When we first see him as Neal with Emma, he’s something of a con man and a thief. Yet this is the same character who sacrificed himself for Wendy and later for Emma! How do you reconcile this character who can be a hustler but who also makes these sacrifices? He’s a very complicated guy.

Michael Raymond-James: Well I don’t see him as a conman at all. What he’s looking for, and has always been looking for, is a sense of family. Just before his dad let him go through the portal, Baelfire was saying “I just want my dad back!” He wants a sense of family even if it’s only half of what he started out with, considering his mom was gone—she was dead. He’s always been seeking family, and he’s sort of found that in this strange new place in nineteenth-century London. He gets a taste of what that is once again through Wendy and her family—which is why he makes the sacrifice for her so she won’t have to go through what he did and wind up alone. When he makes it to the United States and to Portland and meets Emma, he’s a bit of a drifter, yes—but I see him as more of a rudderless ship. He’s bent on survival like he was as a young boy. He’s always winding up in strange places where he doesn’t know about the customs or the terrain or anything like that. So he does what he needs to do, being really an alien from a different place, to just survive. [x]

So you see him as really more of a survivor, someone who’s riding the waves of life?

Michael Raymond-James: Yeah, I would agree with that, and he sort of found that sense of family with Emma. And when he had to walk away from her again, it really wasn’t easy. But he was told she was the savior and she was destined to break this curse. And you know, he walks into a town full of people that he knew while he was growing up. These weren’t nameless, faceless strangers to him—these are people that he knew. And in the past with August back in that alley, there was a lot more to it than what we saw! Adam and Eddy and I had long discussions about what I would have said to August during that time, things like, “I’ll go to jail—let me go to jail for Emma!” But ultimately that’s a false economy, because although that would separate the two, she still wouldn’t accomplish her destiny because she didn’t know about magic. So they said, “You need to break her heart so she can later come around and realize that magic does exist. She can defeat the curse.” If I’d gone to prison, she probably would have just waited for Neal to get out. So there was a lot of jumping on the grenade there for the greater good. And then once he finds out he has a son, that’s really a pivotal point in his world—that’s what he’s been looking for. His family! He has a son now and he has an opportunity to be the kind of father he wishes he’d had. And so now this rudderless ship has a lot of purpose and direction, and that’s to be the best father he can possibly be. Everything he does is in the interest of Henry. After all he’s been through with Emma, I think Neal’s instinct is to move slowly and cautiously, which is in the best interest of his son. There are some complicated issues in his world, but he doesn’t want to let them jeopardize his relationship with his son. [x]