Mariska Hargitay

John Russo

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Mariska Hargitay, one of TV’s most beloved stars (she’s played Olivia Benson on NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit for 27 seasons, longer than anyone else has played a single character on an American primetime live-action show) and one of film’s most exciting new directors (her debut documentary My Mom Jayne won Critics Choice and Producers Guild awards), is the guest on the latest episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, which was recorded in front of an audience at the just-wrapped Napa Valley StreamFest.

As you can hear via the audio player above or any major podcast app, and as you can read below in excerpts lightly edited for clarity and brevity, the 62-year-old Emmy and two-time Golden Globe winner reflected on the 1967 car accident that claimed the life of her mother, movie star Jayne Mansfield, and injured her; how, when she was 34, the age at which Mansfield died, she too almost lost her life in a road accident, and how surviving that changed her outlook on life; and why, starting during the COVID-19 pandemic, she decided to make a film about her mom — and also ended up divulging long-held secrets about her father.

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She also revealed juicy information about SVU, including that she has been asked to direct the show’s upcoming 600th episode, and that, back during the making of the show’s 24th season, she and costar Chris Meloni — whose characters audiences have long wanted to hook-up — did indeed film a scene in which their characters kissed, only to have Dick Wolf veto it in favor of the near-kiss that made it to air.

On the accident that claimed the life of her mother, Jayne Mansfield…

“I certainly don’t remember the accident. And as I say in the film, I don’t know that I remember my mother — the two memories that I have, I don’t know if they’re real memories or they’re things that I wished happened or possibly a photograph that I saw. So that’s hard. But as we know, the kind of trauma that I endured certainly stays in the body and gets stuck until we work it out and we deal with it. I had a lot of PTSD as a child and a lot of anxiety from that, and there would be things that would trigger it. I didn’t really have anything to compare it to because I was a kid, but it lived in me … And so, through the therapy I’ve done, and through making [My Mom Jayne], it’s been extraordinary to experience so much healing in the process of storytelling but also to have so much internal space back. And that’s the best way I can describe it is that when that kind of stuff leaves your body, your nervous system settles and you become a different person.”

On people telling her, early in her career, that she needed to change things about herself…

“So many people told me to change things about myself. My first and favorite one was I walked into an audition at a network, and I met with the head of casting, the head of talent, and he said, ‘Oh, I was expecting a blonde.’ And I went, ‘Well, sorry!’ And then he proceeded to ask me what my real name was, which is funny. I said, ‘Do you think that I made this up? If I was going to make up a name, I don’t know that it would be Mariska Hargitay,’ which by the way, no one can say. It should have been ‘Mariska Hardtosay.’ And then it was just a lot of, ‘You should get a nose job. You should do this. Have you ever thought about that? You’re too this, you’re too that.’ You just hear you’re too everything. ‘You’re too short. You’re too tall. You’re too ethnic. You’re too plain. You’re too pretty. You’re not pretty.’ You just hear it all. At the end of the day, you’re like, ‘Whatever.’”

On almost losing her life at 34, the same age at which one of her grandmothers and her mother died…

“I was on a motorcycle, which I never ride on. I was riding on the back. I had been invited to Cirque du Soleil in Vegas, and my godson was coming. [The others in her group who were making the trip from L.A.] were a bunch of cool motorcycle people. I said, ‘I’ll only go if I can drive the child.’ So I drove the child in my car, and then two hours in they said, ‘Mariska, come on. Don’t be t

Mariska Hargitay Says Chris Meloni SVU Kiss Filmed, More in Interview