Dean Butler struggled with anxiety after discovering that he would be giving his co-star, 15-year-old Melissa Gilbert, her first kiss – both on-screen and in real life. The actor, who played Almanzo Wilder in “Little House on the Prairie,” has written a new memoir, “Prairie Man,” which details his rise to stardom and the age-gap scene that still raises eyebrows today. “You just couldn’t do it today,” the 68-year-old told Fox News Digital. “There would be way too much blowback. It’s remarkable that we didn’t get more blowback than we did. . . . But I think it was handled so tastefully that people . . . forgot about the age difference.”
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“I think the audience had been watching Melissa for years and loved her incredibly,” Butler shared. “They wanted to see when she, so honestly and innocently, declared her love for this young man. She fell in love from the first time she laid eyes on him. The audience was prepared to go right along with that.”
Butler was 23 when he was cast in the popular TV show, which aired from 1974 to 1983. Gilbert, who starred as Laura Ingalls, was “a young 15.” “She was really a little girl,” Butler recalled. “She was very sophisticated in the ways of the industry. As an actress, she was very skilled. But as a young woman, she was very inexperienced. And I think that it was much harder for her than it was for me. . . . . [And] I’m not aware of any casting that was like that . . . our casting from an age difference of 15 to 23.”
According to Butler, the characters from the original book series were supposed to have a 10-year age difference. He noted that Gilbert had “complete trust” in her TV dad, who carefully supervised the scene. “That was a very powerful relationship Melissa had in her life, the one she had with Michael Landon,” said Butler. “When Michael said, ‘This is the guy for you,’ she was prepared to suspend all of her anxieties and just step into it. And Michael never led anyone wrong in the series. He really had it down. He knew what he was doing. He believed very strongly in his creative instincts. He trusted that it would work.”
“I’m just really grateful that I was the guy that he felt he could trust with this,” Butler added.
