‘Little House’ Star Alison Arngrim Says Victor French Helped Make Nellie ‘More Evil’

According to Alison Arngrim, being bad can also be really fun.

Arngrim opened up about bringing Nellie Oleson to life on Little House on the Prairie on the Aug. 28 episode of the Little House: Fifty for 50 Podcast. Arngrim, 63, hosts the show alongside Little House alum Dean Butler, who played Alamanzo Wilder, and Little House superfan Pamela Bob. The trio revisited the season two episode “The Talking Machine,” in which Melissa Gilbert’s Laura Ingalls and Arngrim’s Nellie vie for the affections of a new boy at school, Jason (Eric Shea); a classic showcasing of Nellie’s scheming against Laura

In the episode, Jason is a scientist, and both Laura and Nellie try to showcase their love of science to impress him. Nellie gets her parents to put the titular “talking machine,” thinking Jason will be impressed by the phonograph, which records and repeats what you say.  

Nellie ends up using the machine to embarrass Laura, and during the podcast, she remembers how the episode’s director, Victor French, found the way to get her to really flex her evil side. French, who died in 1989 at age 54, played Isaiah Edwards on the series but also directed over a dozen episodes. 

In the moment where Nellie decides to record Laura talking about her crush to embarrass her, Arngrim doesn’t have any dialogue. She called French’s direction “freaking brilliant.”

“He was really good about how things should build,” she said, remembering he would often tell her, “No, more, no, more,” to get her “to go all the way.”

“His thing was, it didn’t really matter how you got there or what the hell you were thinking about,” she said. “You could be method. It didn’t matter as long as you just went somewhere with this thing.”

Arngrim noted that when it came to playing the moment where she has her “horrible evil idea,” she thought of the moment in How the Grinch Stole Christmas where the Grinch has his own “wonderful, terrible” evil plan and smiles. 

But when she played the moment, French kept telling her, “No. Worse. No, more evil. No, more terrible.”

And then he had an inspired idea. “I had been reading these horror comics that week on the set with werewolves and zombies and things. They’re very, very gory and fabulous. I was 13,” the actress remembered. “And just as I’m kinda really getting into that good, like, almost the Grinch-type of evil, and then Victor said, ‘Think of your werewolf comic books!’ ” 

“And then you just see this fabulous, beautiful smile just overtake me,” she said. “And he’s like, ‘Yes. That’s it.’ ” She credited him with helping her land the moment. “He absolutely rah rah’d, cheered me through it.” 

Ultimately, Nellie’s villainy is discovered and she’s punished by her father, while Laura gets the guy. Arngrim appeared on Little House in a recurring role in the show’s first three seasons and was promoted to a starring role for seasons five through seven. 

However, the actress told PEOPLE in 2024 that in real life, she and Gilbert were friends. “Here’s Melissa Gilbert and I playing mortal enemies, beating each other senseless all week,” she said. “And then on the weekends, we’d go to each other’s house for a slumber party and we were hanging out.”

She said they were “like sisters” when the cameras weren’t rolling and would even choreograph their fight scenes together.