Elsa

"The only way to ever truly be in control of your powers is to embrace them."

- Elsa to Emma

Queen Elsa, also known as the Ice Queen, is a character on ABC's Once Upon a Time. She débuts in the twenty-second episode of the third season. She is portrayed by guest star Georgina Haig, and does not have a Storybrooke counterpart.

Elsa is based on the character of the same name from the Disney film Frozen.

Trivia

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Production Notes

 * The casting call describes her as, "The Queen of Arendelle, this late-20s/early-30s beauty long struggled to control her “chilling” powers and even unleashed upon her town an eternal winter during her coronation. Ultimately, she realized that the key to controlling her powers is love — namely, her bond with sister Anna — and now she is aware of the threat she poses if she were to lose control of her magic again".
 * Elsa's iconic hairstyle includes most of Georgina Haig's real hair fitted with extensions to create the bottom half of the braid. It takes about two hours to assemble.


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Popular Culture

 * Elsa presents her engaged sister, Anna, with their mother's old wedding dress for her upcoming marriage ceremony. Then, she gifts Anna a necklace. In doing so, Elsa honors a Victorian wedding custom. The bride-to-be wears an old, a new, a blue and a borrowed item on her wedding day to bring good luck to the married couple.
 * Among the food that Elsa prepares as a welcome home meal for her sister is "chocolate julekake". Julekake, meaning "yule cake", is a traditional Norwegian Christmas fruit cake, distinguished by the pungent taste of cardamon.


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Props Notes

 * Georgina Haig wore false eyelashes for every day she portrayed Elsa. She kept each set of eyelashes and later created an original piece of artwork featuring them. The piece was autographed by her, and was sold on eBay, with all proceeds benefiting the Melbourne Indigenous Transition School.

Costume Notes

 * The magical gloves given to Ingrid by Rumplestiltskin in "The Snow Queen", is the same pair of gloves worn by Elsa in "There's No Place Like Home", "A Tale of Two Sisters" and "Smash the Mirror".
 * Elsa's dress was redesigned for Season Four. The new dress is a different shade of blue and has a completely different design, even though the scene where she emerges from the barn in "A Tale of Two Sisters" takes place mere seconds after she emerged from the urn in Season Three.
 * The dress is made of imported silk from Europe with Austrian crystals embroidered in it. The blue cape was created by using sheer fabric and a technique called sublimation printing for the snowflakes. The cape also included Swarovski crystals.
 * Elsa's purple cape, used during the episode "Breaking Glass", was for technical reasons because her scenes were filmed on a green background screen, and because she wore a blue dress, which is too similar of a color to the background screen, that would have made her body completely invisible on the special-effects camera.

Appearances
Note: "Archive" denotes archive footage.