How This Actress Embraced a New Role in LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE

Published: June 26, 2026

By Michaela Gordoni

Rebecca Amzallag plays an untraditional character, Lacey, in Netflix’s new LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE series, and she is an “eye opener for Laura.”

“Lacey, although a new character and quite a different character from the other ones, feels completely possible,” Amzallag told Woman’s World. “I loved developing her backstory and just thinking about what her experience might have been.”

Lacey is a complex character. She’s a widow who sells ammo and guns on the black market yet definitely has personal values.

“She’s very loyal, she likes to fight for the underdog, and she’s a lot of fun. She’s also an eye opener for Laura. In the grand scheme of the show, Laura needs to know it’s possible; that it’s a representation of what freedom can be. It doesn’t have to be this kind of stagnant, boring life,” the actress explained.

Amzallag did not watch the older series as a child, but she did read the books.

“So it didn’t feel as scary as it might have if I’d watched the show,” she said of her role. “It’s really wonderful because the story is being retold in a more historically accurate way, a more complex way, a more diverse way, for the folks who watched it to go, ‘Oh, okay, this is interesting, this is new.’ And especially if the folks also read the books, because the books are 100% diverse and tell the truth about the historical circumstances.”

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She says showrunner and EP Rebecca Sonnenshine has done a wonderful job of adapting the script from the books.

“So reading the books and then getting into the scripts, it felt the same. The mood was the same, the themes, the imagery, the descriptions, the way of speaking,” she said. “So Lacey, although a new character and quite a different character from the other ones, feels completely possible.”

Sonneshine says the show is all about family and appeals to families.

“They’re a family you want to be with, you want to know, you want to spend time with,” Sonnenshine told Tudum. “That’s really at the core of what Little House on the Prairie is about: a family that is there for each other, tells stories to each other, tells stories about themselves.”

She wanted to portray that time period truthfully and show that prairie life wasn’t the Wild West people think it was.

“I think a lot of our pop culture portrays the West as men riding around with guns and solving problems with violence and posturing, but that is just not how it was settled. This is not how communities were formed,” Sonnenshine told Deadline. “It was women, they were the backbone of the country, the formation of the country, and so I really wanted to explore that.”

She noted that the books mentioned very little violence. And just like the books, the females, particularly Laura, are the ones who take center stage.

“We really are trying to do a show that does not fall back on tropes of sort of masculinity, and we’re leaning into how women shaped our lives, definitely through Caroline and through White Sun, who are both women who are in interesting marriages of equality,” she said.

Per Deadline, all episodes of the new series will be available on Netflix on July 9.

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