The cast of “Little House on the Prairie” is opening up about the brutal reality of filming the hit TV series.
Cast members were guests on Patrick Labyorteaux’s podcast to discuss their experiences on the show. He asked Alison Arngrim, who starred as Nellie Oleson, what the first day was like for her.
“Complete chaos and confusion,” Arngrim admitted.
‘LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE’ STAR SAYS CHILD ACTORS GET ‘DROPPED’ AFTER HOLLYWOOD FAME FADES
She explained that she hadn’t known she was supposed to show up with her character’s signature ringlet curls, “So it was lots of panic and phone calls back and forth, and then massive curling of my hair. So yeah, bananas. And then, first day on location, of course, I pass out.”
“So, I was off to just a rousing start right there,” she added.
The conversation also included fellow cast members Dean Butler, Pamela Roylance and Jennifer Donati, as well as Tracy and Victor French, the children of late cast member Victor French.
Labyorteaux also starred in “Little House on the Prairie” as Andy Garvey.
During a later conversation about how hot it was in Simi Valley, where the show was filmed, Arngrim joked that the cast and crew were able to tell when summer hit because the “first day of summer is when Alison hits the ground, because I was out like that. It was that hot.”
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Speaking again of her first day on set, she explained that she was “so disciplined,” she approached the director and said, “Excuse me, I think I’m going to faint” before she “completely lost consciousness and dropped.”
“It’s like basically how to not pass out was the challenge,” she continued. “It was insane, though – the great thing is that other people began to pass out, so people realized it wasn’t me, the first one being Sean Penn.”
Penn, who was a child at the time, “didn’t wake up and come back to work. That was it, he was done for the day.”
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Arngrim said, “That’s when they decided maybe it was not just me, that it was actually that hot.”
Later in the podcast, the subject of their least favorite episodes came up, and Arngrim shared that she disliked any episodes where sporting events were involved, because that meant sitting in bleachers “where it was 100 million degrees” for hours at a time while crew members filmed reaction shots.
She recalled one of these shoots when Charlotte Stewart, who played school teacher Eva Beadle Simms, “was just sitting there, and she had in fact lost consciousness and fainted and blacked out, but just didn’t fall over, and they didn’t know she was out.”
About the sweltering set, Butler admitted, “You just had to do whatever strategy you could. I always felt sorry for the women on the set … [the men] were basically dressed in a shirt and pants and dog-eared boots” while the female cast members wore dresses, petticoats, stockings and sometimes wigs.
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Roylance shared that Michael Landon, who acted as executive producer, writer and director on “Little House” in addition to his starring role, let her film one scene with her blouse unbuttoned and her sleeves rolled up because “it was just miserable hot” that day on the set.
“It kind of just wasn’t done,” she admitted about the way she wore the blouse, “but it’s in the shot, you can see it in the episode, and I was so grateful for that.”
She also said that Stan Ivar, who played her husband, gave her “a little fan that I wrapped around my leg and blew up my skirt.”
Donati, who, along with her twin sister, was an infant when she played Baby Rose Wilder, joked, “I don’t want to brag, but I think I was the most pampered cast member there. They didn’t let me get hot.”
“Little House on the Prairie” was a Western family drama loosely based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s semi-autobiographical books. It follows the Ingalls family as they build a life in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, during the late 19th century.
Landon starred as the Ingalls family patriarch, Charles, Karen Grassle played his wife, Caroline, and Gilbert portrayed their daughter, Laura. The series premiered on NBC in 1974 and ran for nine seasons, through 1983, followed by three television movies.