Mariska Hargitay Shares How Olivia Benson’s Journey Mirrors Her Own in Nearly 3 Decades on SVU

With each passing season of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Mariska Hargitay has become more and more synonymous with her character Olivia Benson — and she knows it.

Hargitay has played the role of the fiercely beloved SVU detective-turned-captain for nearly three decades, having originated the role in 1999.

During day one of Hello Sunshine’s Third Annual Shine Away Event Connected by AT&T on Saturday, Oct. 11, Hargitay spoke to the impact playing the iconic character has had on her.

“It’s changed me in so many ways. 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,” Hargitay, 61, said while participating in the “Connecting Passion to Purpose” panel.

“And so 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 continued.

Hargitay, who made her feature film directorial debut over the summer with her documentary My Mom Jayne, was joined on the Hello Sunshine panel by founder Reese Witherspoon, her The Morning Show costar Karen Pittman and moderator Kellyn Smith Kenny.

“I think that I’ve changed in ways that I know, and in so many ways that I don’t know or don’t have words for, and yet it’s intuitive. I can feel the changes. There’s little micro moments where I know I’m different,” Hargitay added. “And you know what? I’m comfortable with this shedding of an old skin, this limiting old skin, and having the audacity to dream and to be more, to step into all of it.”

As for where her unshakable resilience in life comes from, Hargitay credits two things: surviving and survivors.

“I think that, from experience in early childhood trauma, we learn to survive. We have to survive. So I think I navigated my own life story of ‘How am I going to navigate this world beyond my knowing?’ And that’s intuitive. So we figure out ways to do that,” she explained.

“And then I have had the extraordinary privilege of watching survivors for the last 27 years, witnessing survivor’s stories, watching incredible women navigate — we see people doing some of the worst things to each other — and navigating that, I think, it’s an innate part of being a woman … So I think I have learned from the people I’ve watched navigate it and also try to take that in and see how we’re all connected,” she said.

When Hargitay was just 3 years old, she survived the car crash that killed her mother, Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield. Nearly 60 years later, Hargitay brought her mother’s story — and her own — to life on the big screen in My Mom Jayne.

Hargitay premiered the documentary worldwide at the Cannes Film Festival and domestically at the Tribeca Festival in June. As My Mom Jayne continues to screen at various award-bellwether film festivals this fall, the project continues to draw Oscar nomination buzz.

And, while the documentary took about two and a half years to make, Hargitay admitted that she had been readying herself to tell the story for much longer.

“I’ve been preparing to make it my entire life. 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,” she said. “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.”