Why Melissa Gilbert Turned Down One of the First Audition Opportunities She Got During the COVID-19 Pandemic
During the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the entertainment industry completely shut down. But as time progressed and we learned more about how the virus operates, COVID specialists were brought onto projects to help keep filming safe. Around this time, Little House on the Prairie alum Melissa Gilbert got the opportunity to audition for a television series filming in Canada, but she ultimately decided to turn it down. Here’s why.
Melissa Gilbert didn’t want to be away from husband Timothy Busfield
The producers of the television show wanted to bring Gilbert in for an audition, but if she got the role, she’d have to film in Canada for several months.
“I wouldn’t be allowed to visit home at all because of quarantine rules,” she wrote in her 2022 memoir, Back to the Prairie. “Tim would soon be filming his show For Life in New York City and would not be able to come visit me because of quarantine rules. The prospect of our being separated for months was daunting, to say the least. Particularly during the time of turbulence we were living through.”
Gilbert and Busfield discussed the opportunity at length. In the end, they decided the former Laura Ingalls actor should pass on the opportunity.
The other reason Gilbert turned down the audition
Jokingly, Busfield asked his wife if the real reason she decided to pass on the audition was that she didn’t “trust [him] with the chickens.” Gilbert had purchased a brood of chickens during the pandemic and was caring for them as if they were her children.
“I laughed,” Gilbert wrote of her husband’s question. “But Tim’s concern might have been deserved. Everyone who knew me understood that I enjoyed and needed a certain measure of control. It wasn’t that I always wanted or needed to be in charge. I just felt more comfortable when I was.”
Gilbert suffered from a self-coined condition she called “competentitis,” “meaning I was good and often extremely competent at a whole lot of things, maybe even most things.”
As much as Gilbert would miss her husband, the other reason she skipped out on the audition was that she had a hard time letting go of the reins to the little farm-like oasis they’d created in the Catskills.
Gilbert blames her mother for her competence
One day when Busfield was teasing his wife about her “competentitis,” she responded with, “I blame my mother.”
“But I meant it as a compliment,” wrote Gilbert. “My mother had raised me and my sister, Sara, in a way that gave us agency. We grew up feeling empowered to do anything–and I think our track record speaks for itself. This was not common among girls back in the seventies and eighties. But thanks to my mom, I came out of Little House with my own production company and a plan that led me to not only star in but produce the movies The Miracle Worker and The Diary of Anne Frank, among others.”
Gilbert also gives herself credit for being “ a very capable woman.”
“Believing myself to be capable of many things, if not almost anything, has given me a sense of independence and self-confidence, even at my most insecure, and that belief has kept me afloat through tough times and provided me with a generally positive outlook,” she wrote.
