A Little House on the Prairie star recently opened up about life behind the scenes of the beloved classic… and it wasn’t exactly as wholesome as the show suggested.
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On July 9, Alison Arngrim appeared on the Here’s What Happened Podcast w/ Weston Emery, where she opened up about her time on the show. The actress, best known for playing the infamous Nellie Oleson, reflected on the workplace culture that surrounded the cast and crew throughout the series’ production.
Arngrim explained to Emery that the adults on set “came from an era where everybody smoked, and everybody drank, like all the time.” Healthy eating wasn’t exactly a priority either. “There was no health food and no vegetarian options and gluten-free muffins,” she quipped.
Arngrim claimed the prop truck was the place to be on set… and not just for production supplies. “The prop men were in charge of the booze and the cigarettes, as well as the candy, so everyone was hanging out at their truck,” she recalled. Thankfully, the younger cast members were kept well away from the action. Meanwhile, the adults were living their best lives, with Landon and crew “puffing Marlboros all over the place” and production staff powering through “a couple cases” of beer a day.
“We had to send someone out to the store, ‘cause we’re low on beer, and some days it’s a two-case day, sometimes it’s a three-case day — minimum, really two and a half — we’re down to one case and production will come to a grinding halt if we ever run out of beer,” she added. “And I’m like, well, we can’t have that.”
‘Little House on the Prairie’ Star Recalls Crew ‘Living on Beer’
Somehow, despite the river of booze, the work never seemed to suffer.
“No one was drunk on the set,” Arngrim insisted.
“They were burning it off or something. These guys were going on ladders and hanging lights, and I’m going, ‘I know they’re living on beer,’” she recalled.
Arngrim noted that beer was restocked whenever supplies ran low, and the socializing continued long after filming stopped.
“The prop truck had a whole bar. At the end of each day, when they were done, they’d put up like a bar with a board on a couple of saw horses and then start really drinking,” she told Emery.
Arngrim also recalled the production’s Christmas celebrations and wrap parties as “insane.” She marveled at how crew members still had the energy to party after exhausting filming days. She chalked it up to a different era. “Their tolerance was God knows what, because they were out of the ’50s… where you drank, and you smoked. They did not think this was weird.”
Arngrim played everyone’s favourite on-screen brat, Nellie, from 1974 to 1982, sharing the set with a star-studded cast including Landon, Melissa Gilbert, and Karen Grassle. The 64-year-old has since become a fan-favorite on the convention circuit.