SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Little House on the Prairie,” now streaming on Netflix.“Palm Royale” star Crosby Fitzgerald swears she “manifested” her role as Caroline “Ma” Ingalls on Netflix’s new “Little House on the Prairie” adaptation by watching a lot of the streamer’s “American Primeval” before being cast.
“I just wanted to be in something like that, from that time period, and truly the next day I got an email about ‘Little House on the Prairie,'” Fitzgerald tells Variety.
The “Crime 101” actress, who says she has been primarily nannying for the past 10 years while continuously going on auditions, didn’t know if she could pull off the “measured proper lady” vibe of Ma at first. But after reading the script from creator Rebecca Sonnenshine, Fitzgerald realized “this wasn’t some tropey story about the 1800s,” and put everything she had into going out for the role.
“I think that Caroline Ingalls, the figure, she’s Ma, and a lot of people understand her as this one type of person,” Fitzgerald says. “And the approach they took in the script was very much, this is a marriage of equals.”
Based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” novels, Netflix’s “Little House on the Prairie” reboot follows Caroline, Charles Ingalls (Luke Bracey) and their two daughters, Laura (Alice Halsey) and Mary (Skywalker Hughes), as they set out from their home in the “Big Wood” in Wisconsin to make a new life in the Kansas frontier.
