Ice-T celebrates return of Law & Order: SVU costar Kelli Giddish: ‘A really close person to me’
Giddish’s Sgt. Amanda Rollins was a pivotal member of the Special Victims Unit for years, and is finally back on the team after an intermittent hiatus.
Ice famously loves Coco — but he also loves Kelli.
Tracy Lauren Marrow, the rapper and TV star best known by his stage name, Ice-T, is celebrating the return of his longtime Law & Order: Special Victims Unit partner in crime-fighting Kelli Giddish. “It’s great,” he tells Entertainment Weekly, reacting to the news that the actress behind Sgt. Amanda Rollins will be back as a series regular in season 27.
“I love everybody that ever worked on the show; I never had a bad day with any of the costars or guest stars,” Ice-T says, but he gushes that “Kelli is a sweetheart.”
“The way they shuffle the deck on SVU, nobody really knows what’s going on,” he continues. But series lead and executive producer Mariska Hargitay “missed her — Kelli. I think the fans missed her. The fans had a lot to do with bringing her back.”
Giddish joined the long-running police procedural in 2011, for season 13, and was a series regular until the middle of season 24. She popped back up during seasons 25 and 26 and will return full-time when the new season premieres next month.
Ice-T, who plays the tough but tender Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola, says he wasn’t too worried about Giddish’s hiatus because he was able to place it within the context of actors coming and going throughout shows in the TV universe constructed by mega-producer Dick Wolf.
“I know when [Christopher Meloni] left, that was his choice. He went off to do movies and stuff, and he ended up coming back and doing Organized Crime,” Ice-T explains. “The cool thing about the Wolf universe is, you could die on SVU and come back on Chicago Fire, you know? So as long as you stay on Dick Wolf’s good side, you’ll probably be employed.”
Giddish appears to have stayed on everyone’s good side, appearing in multiple episodes of the past two SVU seasons even after she’d bid farewell as a series regular. “Playing Rollins has been one of the greatest joys and privileges of my life,” she wrote in 2022. “There is simply no other character on TV like Rollins.”
Ice-T concurs with Giddish’s self-assessment, adding, “I love Kelli. Kelli became a really close person to me. So when they said they were bringing her back, I was overwhelmed, happy.”
He previously said he was “blindsided” by Giddish’s exit, which is also regarded by fans as one of the more shocking departures in Law & Order franchise history.
“No one really expected her to leave the show. We got blindsided by that,” Ice-T said in June. “But the fans said they wanted to see Kelli back, so she’s coming back.”
Speaking to EW last year, Giddish shared her own reasons for returning, calling SVU “home for such a long time” and enthusing about “being invited back to go and play with all the people that I love. And the writers had a really good idea about making Rollins a sergeant at the NYPD Intelligence Bureau, which I thought was a really interesting way in.”
Law & Order: SVU returns for season 27 on Sept. 25 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on NBC.
