The ‘Law & Order: SVU’ star also revealed her friend and former costar Christopher Meloni sometimes jokingly calls her “Marissa”
At this point, Mariska Hargitay will answer to almost anything.
The Law & Order: Special Victims Unit star, 61, made a guest appearance on the Oct. 21 episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, where the pair discussed the different ways people have “screwed up” the pronunciation of Hargitay’s first name. Despite several decades in the public eye, the actress revealed “I still live with” being called the wrong name.
“I had a brunch yesterday for my sister, and my cousin was there — I’ve known him since 1994 — and he kept calling me Mar-is-ka,” she quipped (her name is actually pronounced as Mar-ish-ka). “And at one point, I go, ‘Ma…,’ and then I said, ‘No. Just let it go.’ “
Hargitay said that the mistake even happens on the SVU set, so she came up with a way to try and get ahead of it.
Among the mispronunciations she often hears are “Maritza, Marissa and Markishka.” In fact, Hargitay said that her former costar and close friend Christopher Meloni will sometimes feed into the joke and call her “Marissa” while on set to further people’s confusion.
“But it’s Marishka,” she added, leaning into the mic. “Marishka.”
When Poehler asked what the name meant, Hargitay joked: “Gorgeous, talented one. Ray of sunshine. Queen of… something.”
In all seriousness, she shared that it’s actually a nickname for Maria.
“It means little Maria in Hungarian,” she explained. “The K-A or K-E on the end of a name, it’s like a little endearment. So the name is actually Maria, after my grandmother. Both of them — Hungarian and Italian.”
“See the film people,” she then laughed, referring to her new HBO documentary about the life of her late mother and Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield called My Mom Jayne.
When Hargitay was just 3 years old, she survived the car crash that killed her mother. Earlier this month, at Hello Sunshine’s Third Annual Shine Away Event Connected by AT&T, she spoke about the impact that the project has had on her healing journey.
“I’ve been preparing to make it my entire life,” Hargitay revealed. “I feel like that’s what I’ve been doing, is getting ready to make it. Building the infrastructure inside me so I could tell the story in a clear, concise way while battling all these demons. I went on this journey, which has been cathartic and extraordinary and scary and bumpy and that’s why I talk about shoring myself up and making sure that I had the infrastructure internally to make this film.”
She also opened up about her beloved lead character in SVU as detective-turned-captain Olivia Benson, which she has played for nearly three decades after originating the role in 1999.
“It’s changed me in so many ways,” she noted. “I look at it sort of as the perfect feminist story, in a way, of how I started here and actually sort of grew into this character and into this person right onscreen and off. At the beginning, [I was] starting and wanting something but not owning or understanding my own power or what I was capable of doing.”
“I look now, and I think ‘I’m so grateful to have this experience that parallels the onscreen and off.’ But getting to, as this character, grow into this fierce lioness whose ambition and need for justice, need for her own sustainability, she couldn’t live without trying to right the wrongs? [There are] parallels of my own life. Wanting to grow and change, and again, understand, reclaim and right wrongs,” she concluded.
