Turns out the real grit in Ransom Canyon isn’t the cowboy drama — it’s the cast literally freezing their boots off in Albuquerque.
Lizzy Greene, best known to your kids (or your younger self) as the Nickelodeon alum from Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn, is now starring in Netflix’s sweeping Texan saga Ransom Canyon. A love-triangle-laced Western drama with just enough dusty legacy drama and soap-adjacent romance to keep you thirst-scrolling. But Greene, born and raised north of Dallas, didn’t exactly walk into this with a cowboy hat and a Southern drawl.
“When I first got the audition, I was like, ‘Westerns? I don’t know if that’s my genre,’” she laughs, admitting that growing up in a very non-horseback corner of Texas gave her more suburban ennui than ranch-hand skills. “But then it came in and I was like… this is kind of perfect.”
Perfect enough that she signed up for cowboy camp. Yes, that’s a real thing. “They didn’t pull any punches,” she says. “We were covered in cow poop. Freezing on horses. It was our boot camp.” Greene, of course, wasn’t even guaranteed to be riding in most scenes, as her character Lauren leans more cheerleader than cattle wrangler. But she showed up anyway. “I was like, ‘Can I still go?’”
It wasn’t all dirt and discipline. Greene also tapped into her athletic side, training with local gymnasts for the show’s more acrobatic bits — until one impressively goofy fall fractured her knee. “I took the most Looney Tunes fall,” she admits. “I looked like a windmill.” Art imitating life: her character ends up sidelined with an injury too — just not the same limb.
And then there’s the music, which Greene geeks out on like a true ex-theater kid who cried to The Cure in a rainy Vancouver phase. “I saw The Cure at the Hollywood Bowl. Life-changing,” she says. So when Ransom Canyon snuck in José González’s haunting cover of “Teardrop” by Massive Attack, she lost it. “I was like, ‘You did NOT!’ It’s one of the greatest songs of all time.”
She also casually mentions Charlie Crockett showing up on set — not in a scene with her, unfortunately. “I think I was in the ER,” she jokes. “With a broken knee.”
But even with Garrett Wareing in the love triangle picture, Greene is already off to her next punk-emo hybrid moment with him in Sweating the Small Stuff, where she looks like she “listens to punk music and that makes me so happy.” Mad Max with eyeliner,. “We got to be producers on it too. I hope I get to work with Garrett forever.”
And which Lizzy is the real Lizzy — the cheerleader in cowboy boots or the girl deep into The Smiths? “It’s very temperamental,” she grins. “But I kept the cowboy boots. I wear them every day now.”
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
