It’s not very often that auditioning actors find themselves opposite their potential on-screen co-star.
But such a surprise welcomed Little House on the Prairie star Charlotte Stewart when she first auditioned for the role of Little House‘s maternal school teacher, Eva Beadle-Simms, on the hit drama series.
Interestingly, during her recent appearance on The Patrick LabyorSheaux podcast, Stewart mentioned that she wasn’t fully prepared to try out for the part of Little House’s firm yet loving frontier teacher.
Of course, this ended up causing even more of a surprise when she opened the door to find herself opposite Michael Landon, the iconic lead of Little House, who was fresh off his career-making performance in Bonanza.
“I got an interview for Paramount Studios for something called Little House. I didn’t pay much attention to it,” Stewart recalled. “So, I arrived at Paramount, and there’s all these women in old-West dresses, bonnets, and long skirts, and I’m in my tie-dye T-shirt and jeans. And they said, ‘Are you ready to read?’ I went, ‘Okay!’ So, they opened the door, I walk in, and it’s like 12 men in folding chairs and Michael Landon.”
Seeing Landon there, Stewart said that she was “shocked speechless, because that’s the first time anybody said it was a Michael Landon thing.”
Fortunately, she wound up “recover[ing] very quickly,” allowing her to fully inhabit the role of Eva the moment the audition began.
Noticing a producer sitting behind a large desk, Stewart approached the executive and said, “‘May I sit at your desk?’ [He said] ‘Oh, well okay.’ He got up and moved, and I walked all the way down to the end of the room.”
As the men in the room continued speaking with one another, Stewart slapped her hands on the desk and began to sternly reprimand them. “I went, ‘Quiet!’ I told Michael Landon to shut up in my interview,” she explained. “So I got the part.”
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