’Law & Order: SVU’s Mariska Hargitay Confirms She Wanted That Elliot/Olivia Kiss to Happen

So close but so far, Dick Wolf insists on drawing out Elliot Stabler & Olivia Benson’s 25-year slow burn a little longer.

It’s one of television’s longest will they-won’t they relationships. We’re talking about Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler. The pair, played by Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni, were a staple duo in the first 12 seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. After Meloni left due to a contract dispute, Hargitay stayed on and is still with the show in its 25th season. Meloni has since returned to the role of Elliot Stabler in a new Law & Order spin-off: Law & Order: Organized Crime that kicked off in 2021.

Since the re-emergence of Stabler and Benson in one another’s lives, fans have been wondering: will they finally get together? During the initial 12 seasons of SVU, Stabler’s character was married to a woman named Kathy, and they had a family together. When Organized Crime premiered, Kathy was killed off. The decades-long tension between Stabler and Benson is not something Hargitay shied away from talking about in a recent interview with Variety. “Our chemistry is undeniable. It’s just the way it is,” she says.

Will They, or Won’t They? ‘Law & Order’s Long Running Slow Burn Is Still Burning

There’s a moment, after Stabler and Benson reunite, in a scene of great emotional vulnerability, where the episode’s teasers made it appear as if they’d kiss in the highly anticipated episode. As we all know now, they didn’t. The move even came as a shock to the actors. “To be honest with you, Chris and I thought it should go one way and the powers that be didn’t, so it got changed at the last minute, that near kiss,” she says. “Obviously, Dick gets [the] final say. It’s his show and he didn’t want that.”

The chemistry between the two, even after not being on-screen together for a decade, picked right up where it left off, thanks in part to Meloni and Hargitay’s offscreen friendship. Hargitay says for right now, things between Benson and Stabler want to remain open-ended, especially as we haven’t seen the two cross paths in Season 25 of SVU. “We want to hold the tension,” Hargitay says, “and do what’s right and truthful for both characters.” With both characters being in New York City, we see their stories overlap. Most recently, that includes a scene at the end of the Organized Crime episode “Missing Persons” where Stabler is watching a press conference at which Benson is present after the return of a missing girl, but they’ve had no screentime together since the respective shows’ previous season.