SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Little House on the Prairie,” now streaming on Netflix.

“Palm Royale” star Crosby Fitzgerald swears she “manifested” her role as Caroline “Ma” Ingalls in Netflix’s new “Little House on the Prairie” adaptation by watching much of the streamer’s “American Primeval” before being cast.

“I just wanted to be in something like that, from that era, and actually the next day I got an email about ‘Little House on the Prairie,'” Fitzgerald says. Variety.

The “Crime 101” actress, who says she has primarily been a babysitter for the past 10 years while continually auditioning, initially didn’t know if she could pull off Ma’s “proper, measured lady” vibe. But after reading creator Rebecca Sonnenshine’s script, Fitzgerald realized “this wasn’t a trope about the 19th century” and put everything she had into accepting the role.

“I think Caroline Ingalls, the figure, is a mom, and a lot of people understand her as this type of person,” Fitzgerald says. “And the approach they took in the script was: This is a marriage of equals.”

Based on the “Little House” novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Netflix’s “Little House on the Prairie” reboot follows Caroline, Charles Ingalls (Luke Bracey) and their two daughters, Laura (Alice Halsey) and Mary (Skywalker Hughes), as they leave their home in “Big Wood” in Wisconsin to make a new life on the Kansas frontier.

“It’s extremely risky; in our story, it’s a risk that Charles is very willing to take,” Fitzgerald says. “I think at the time, it was something that was done with a lot of people, it was done with a lot of family. It would be very strange to go alone, especially with two young daughters. And I think their fear reflects that. Why are we doing this alone? Why don’t we wait for our family? In the end, they have to do it, because of what’s going on at home. The way I see it, there’s a part of them that needed a push to take this really risky step and there’s some very real drama with their extended family that makes them feel like maybe it’s “Time for us to go our own way.”

At the beginning of the first season of Netflix’s “Little House on the Prairie,” the show features a now-pregnant Caroline questioning Charles’s decisions and asserting her right to take the girls back to Wisconsin if he isn’t honest with her about his finances and the realities of life on the prairie.

“Charles married her because I think he respects her opinion, and I think she married him because he respects her opinion,” Fitzgerald says. “Her goal throughout the show is to keep her kids safe, and so she will do it at any cost. If that means telling her husband that he’s being a jerk, that’s what it means. I think it wasn’t hard for her in those moments to say what she felt and say, I’ll do whatever it takes to keep my kids safe. She had a tumultuous life and she didn’t want that to happen to them. I think facing it actually wasn’t hard, because that’s not the dynamic they have.”

At the end of Season 1, the entire Ingalls family, including new baby Grace, has just settled into life in Independence, Kansas, when a catastrophic fire destroys their crops and prompts another move. This time, they head to Plum Creek, which audiences will remember as the main setting of the iconic NBC series “Little House on the Prairie” of the 1970s and 1980s. It’s where the Ingalls build a new home and where Laura’s coming-of-age story truly begins.

At the time of this interview, Fitzgerald was on the set of filming the second season of “Little House” with her on-screen family and some new additions to the cast, including Willa Dunn as the iconic villain Nellie Oleson.

“I think people will love Nellie Oleson the same way they loved her in the past,” Fitzgerald says. “And I think, similarly, this second season, which we’re filming now, is about the main things that we love about the book, ‘On the Banks of Plum Creek,’ which are all there, plus these fun extra story components that I think people aren’t going to like as much.

“But listen, there’s a cow,” Fitzgerald continues. “I get to hang out with a cow, a baby cow, every day. So that’s what I’m focusing on.”