SVU: Kelli Giddish to Appear in Multiple Season 26 Episodes — Get the Scoop on Rollins’ New Job (and How It’ll Affect Carisi)
At least one of Mariska Hargitay’s SVU Season 26 wishes is coming true: Kelli Giddish will be back as Amanda Rollins in Law & Order: SVU‘s upcoming season, showrunner/executive producer David Graziano and executive producer Julie Martin tell TVLine.
“Rollins is definitely coming back to the show,” Martin says. “She’s coming as a guest star, and she’s going to make a bunch of appearances throughout the season” Graziano adds. “We’re really happy about it.”
Giddish left SVU as a series regular in December 2022 but has returned several times since then, most recently in a May 2024 episode in which a recently unemployed Rollins volunteered to help Hargitay’s Capt. Benson with an attack on a bride-to-be. At the end of the episode, Benson gently suggested that her former co-worker needed to figure out what she really wanted to do with her life, because “I don’t want SVU to be your safety net.”
Seems like Rollins took her old boss’ advice to heart: When she pops up in Season 26, the EPs say, Rollins will be working with the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Unit, “which is very different from the Intelligence Unit anywhere else, because the Intelligence Unit in New York has cops stationed in almost every country in the world,” Graziano explains. “And so, Rollins is going to be traveling a lot as part of that job.”
‘Rollisi’ fans need not worry, though: The EPs assure use that Rollins and husband Dominick “Sonny” Carisi (played by Peter Scanavino) are still happily married and raising their three kids, and that Amanda’s absences will give Carisi a chance to hone his solo-parenting skills (with assists from friends like Liv and Fin). For example, “We’ll see Carisi and his daughter get involved in something together that they’ll kind of have to work their way out of,” Graziano teases.
SVU will return for Season 26 on Thursday, Oct. 3, at 9/8c on NBC. While Graziano and Martin declined to share exactly how many episodes Giddish will film, Graziano joked that he’d say there would be a “bouquet of them — and not describe the size of the bouquet yet.”
In an interview in May, Hargitay lamented that she wasn’t able to stop Giddish’s 2022 departure from the long-running procedural. “Kelli is my favorite actor to work with. Kelli is my heart,” the Emmy winner said at the time. “It’s a sore subject. I have a lot of say on the show [as the star and an executive producer since Season 15], but I didn’t have enough there.”
She continued: “I don’t like not being listened to, especially when I’m right… That relationship was one of the most powerful relationships in television because you saw these two badass women, so flawed and so there for each other.”
TVLine’s forthcoming Fall TV Preview will have lots more SVU Season 26 goodies. Until then, hit the comments with your thoughts about Giddish’s return.
