After 27 Years as Olivia Benson, Mariska Hargitay Is Showing Us Something New
Mariska Hargitay hosted the Emmys Sunday night.
That sentence alone probably wouldn't have sent me running for my laptop.
This did.
She was the first woman to host the ceremony in 15 years.
And that got me thinking about her.
Not Olivia Benson.
Mariska.
That's harder to do than it sounds.
For 27 years, Hargitay has played Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. That's long enough for a television character to stop feeling like a role and start feeling strangely like a person we know.
We've watched Benson change jobs, relationships and hairstyles. We've watched her become a mother and a leader. We've watched her get older.
And while all of that was happening, so did Mariska Hargitay.
Maybe that's what makes this particular moment in her life so interesting.
She isn't walking away from Olivia Benson. She isn't staging some dramatic reinvention designed to prove she's more than the character that made her famous.
She's simply showing us that there was always more there.
The daughter
Some of the most revealing work Hargitay has done lately isn't fiction at all.
In My Mom Jayne, she turned the camera toward the mother she lost when she was only three years old, actress and 1950s sex symbol Jayne Mansfield.
There's something particularly poignant about Hargitay choosing to tell that story now.
She isn't a young daughter trying to understand the mother she barely knew. She's a woman in her sixties. A mother herself. A woman who has lived longer than her own mother ever had the chance to.
Time changes the questions we ask about our parents.
Maybe it changes the answers we're willing to hear, too.
The documentary went on to earn Hargitay Emmy recognition, but the awards almost feel secondary to what making it required.
After spending decades inhabiting a character who helps other people tell their stories, Hargitay decided to tell her own.
The woman beyond Benson
There are other things happening too.
Broadway. Directing. Producing. Advocacy. Now hosting television's biggest awards show.
Taken separately, they're career accomplishments.
Taken together, they look more like expansion.
Because Hargitay's relationship with Olivia Benson has always been unusual.
Actors who become inseparable from one enormously successful character often spend years trying to escape it. They change their appearance. Choose radically different roles. Remind interviewers that they are not that person.
Hargitay never really had to do that.
Instead, something interesting happened.
The world around Olivia Benson got bigger.
Hargitay's years on SVU exposed her to the real stories behind the fictional ones, and she eventually turned that awareness into advocacy for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse through the Joyful Heart Foundation.
The actress was affected by the character.
The woman was affected by what the actress learned.
And somewhere along the way, the boundaries became considerably more interesting than simply asking where Olivia Benson ends and Mariska Hargitay begins.
Because Mariska kept living.
She became a wife. A mother. An advocate. A director. A woman with losses behind her, a family around her and increasingly, it seems, stories of her own that she wants to tell.
Still surprising us
Maybe that's what struck me about seeing her at the Emmys.
At 62, Mariska Hargitay doesn't appear particularly interested in reinventing herself.
She doesn't seem terribly concerned with proving she's more than Olivia Benson, either.
She simply is.
And twenty-seven years after Olivia Benson first walked onto our television screens, Hargitay doesn't appear to be winding anything down.
If anything, she seems increasingly interested in what else there is to say.
Sunday night, she stood on the Emmy stage and gave us another glimpse.
I would venture to say that mama would be proud.
As for me? Mad respect for this girl.
I'm interested in seeing what she shows us next. 🎤
Photo Credit: Photo: Daniel Ogren / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
