As a child, you played Laura Ingalls Wilder in the TV adaptation of “Little House on the Prairie.” Now you’re running to represent the Eighth District of Michigan in Congress. If you win, will this be your first nonentertainment-related job? I’ve done volunteer work, but I’ve never been paid for it. So, yes, it will be my first. There was no salary for the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild.

Famously, the SAG presidency was the thing on Ronald Reagan’s résumé that supporters pointed to when he first got into politics. Does it actually prepare you for political office? Like Washington, SAG is a two-party system; there’s a liberal and a conservative party. The names change, but when I was there, my party was called the Restore Respect Party, and my opposition was the Membership First Party. I reached across the aisle to a few people from my opponents’ party who I thought had really terrific ideas.

Are there any other entertainers-turned-politicians that you look at and see as role models? Because I am a woman doing this, I don’t know that there is anyone else out there like me.

Have you heard the expression that “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people”? What a horrible thing to say.