Latest news with #Law&Order:SpecialVictimsUnit
7 days ago
- Entertainment
Christopher Meloni, Mariska Hargitay reunite on 'Law & Order: SVU' set
Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay had a sweet reunion on the set of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." In photos Meloni shared to Instagram over the weekend, the duo are all smiles, posing for a selfie and a few snaps with fellow "Law & Order" actor Dann Florek. "Hangin with friends on a Friday nite @therealmariskahargitay @dannflorek," Meloni captioned the post. Meloni played Detective Elliot Stabler on "Law & Order: SVU" for 12 seasons alongside Hargitay, who plays now-Capt. Olivia Benson. The role earned him an Emmy nomination in 2006 for outstanding lead actor in a drama series. His character left "SVU" following the episode "Smoked" in season 12, which focused on a case involving Stabler that "required him to step in to halt a devastating shooting at the precinct," according to NBC Insider. "The episode centered on what would've have been a trial for the sexual assault of Annette Fox, a victim whose case had been delayed for years," NBC Insider states. "A week before she was scheduled to testify, Annette was shot in cold blood in front of her teenage daughter, Jenna Fox." Meloni told the New York Post in 2020 that he parted ways with "Law & Order: SVU" with "zero animosity" and had his sights set on "finding new adventures." He returned to the "Law & Order" franchise in "Law & Order: Organized Crime" in 2021, also making a guest appearance in an episode of "SVU" that same year. Season 27 of "Law & Order: SVU" premieres Thursday, Sept. 25.
USA Today
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Ice-T sparks concern with 'Law & Order: SVU' injury gag
Ice-T may be in need of an ice pack, or at least his TV counterpart Detective Fin does. The Grammy-winning rapper and actor, who stars as Odafin Tutuola on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," teased his return to the long-running crime drama in a playful Instagram post on July 31. Ice-T, who joined the iconic NBC series in 2000, shared a photo of his character sporting a gnarly black eye and cut lip. "Back filming SVU and the first scene I shoot…." Ice-T wrote in the post's caption, using an expletive before quickly reassuring fans, "It's in the script." Viewers won't have to wait long to see what crime-fighting adventures Det. Fin and the rest of the "SVU" gang, which includes show leads Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni, have been up to in the streets of New York City. Season 27 of "SVU" is expected to launch on Sept. 25 alongside the Season 25 premiere of flagship series "Law & Order," according to the official NBC website. New episodes will air on Thursdays and be available to stream on Peacock the following day. During an October 2024 interview with The Guardian, Ice-T, who initially made a name for himself in the rap scene of the late 1980s and early '90s, reflected on his unlikely "Law & Order" stint after appearing in crime dramas such as "New Jack City," "Mean Guns" and "Sonic Impact." "They called me to do four episodes, and it just kept on giving, 25 years later," Ice-T, 67, told the British outlet. "Hip-hop was doing this paradigm shift away from acts like me, Public Enemy and Ice Cube into this weird other world where I wouldn't have survived." He added, "So, maybe it was like a lifeboat pulling up next to me. Like, OK: Time for you to change your main hustle. It's been a good ride, and it keeps me contained — when you're a musician and only a musician, you got a lot of free time, and that free time can get you in trouble." Ice-T and Pink Floyd: Rapper says band gave rare approval for 'Comfortably Numb' sample Ice-T's black eye photo prompts playful concern on social media In the comments section, Ice-T's realistic "SVU" make-up for his character's injury had some of the rapper-actor's famous peers reaching for their own emergency alert. "Man, before I read the caption, I was about to come to the house with Uncle Tony 😂❤️," Premium Pete wrote. "OG! I immediately start thinkin', 'Oh ... We about to crash out,' " Big Court commented. "I ain't about to post what went through my mind. 🤦🏾 Glad it's make-up though. 😂😂😂" 'Law & Order: SVU': These 2 cast members won't be back next season "Had me worried for a second — excellent work by the makeup team," Alycia Miller wrote. "I am glad it's just for SVU! ❤️" "Was getting ready to launch missiles..🫡," King T wrote, while Edwin Robinson II added, "I was about to send the prayer angels down… 😂😂😂"
New York Post
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Law & Order' star Christopher Meloni says he's ‘f—ing trying' to get Stabler to hook up with Benson
The verdict is in: Christopher Meloni knows what the fans want. The 'Law & Order: Organized Crime' star, 64, revealed that he has been trying to get his character, Detective Elliot Stabler, to hook up with his former partner, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay). Viewers have wanted these two to get together since they first starred side by side on 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit' in 1999. Although Stabler left the squad in 2011, he came back to the Big Apple to battle organized crime in 2021. Advertisement 10 Christopher Meloni, Mariska Hargitay in 'SVU.' ©NBC/Courtesy Everett Collection 10 Christopher Meloni as Detective Stabler and Mariska Hargitay as Captain Benson. ©NBC/Courtesy Everett Collection Of course, in the Dick Wolf universe, the audience has seen quite a few crossover episodes since Meloni's return. Advertisement On Monday, a fan wrote on X, '@Chris_Meloni for f–k sake, kiss her already!' to which the star responded, 'I'm f–king trying.' The pair has stayed loyal friends over the decades, and at one point, Benson and Stabler even came close to coupling up. 10 A still from 'Law & Order: SVU.' ©NBC/Courtesy Everett Collection For Hargitay's part, she's enjoying the will-they-won't-they narrative. Advertisement 'Maybe on the last episode,' the 61-year-old said while on the 'Call Her Daddy' podcast in June. 'I think that's when they should be together… if it's right. We'll see when we get there.' Hargitay believes the Manhattan officers are 'soulmates, in a way.' 10 Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni in a scene of 'Law & Order: SVU.' ©NBC/Courtesy Everett Collection The 'My Mom Jayne' director added, 'But let's see where the story takes us, you know?' Advertisement In Season 24 of 'SVU,' Benson and Stabler almost shared a kiss, but she pulled away. 'We were attempting something,' Meloni said about the moment in April during a TVLine Spotlight conversation. 'I don't think it worked. But I'm not going to tell you why it didn't work, because you all have your opinion.' 10 Mariska Hargitay as Capt. Olivia Benson, Christopher Meloni as Det. Elliot Stabler on 'Law & Order: Organized Crime.' Virginia Sherwood/PEACOCK He added, 'I know what transpired.' 'I don't go, 'That's what's going to go on TV. That's what we're going to air.' We don't have that power. We do the best we can to be honest with the scenes we're given,' Meloni elaborated. He also tries to 'make it honest, not make it bait.' 10 Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni on stage during the 74th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards. Chris Haston/NBC 'If we do bait, at least for me, I always do it with a wink. I think it's good-natured, but maybe you guys are over that, and that's valid,' the actor explained. Advertisement 'But you give us too much credit for the power that we might have,' he stressed, 'will-they-won't-they and all that stuff.' Harigtay had previously dished on what went down. 10 Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni on stage during the 74th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards. Getty Images for Tribeca Festival '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 revealed to Variety in May 2024. 'Obviously [creator] Dick [Wolf] gets final say. It's his show and he didn't want that.' Advertisement During an EW interview last year, 'SVU' star Ice-T asked Hargitay: 'Y'all haven't hooked up yet at all? Close, right? Almost a kiss?' She teased back, 'No, just two times in Season 4!… No. We have not hooked up.' 10 Sherman Williams and Christopher Meloni attend The Headstrong Project Annual Gala 2024. Getty Images for The Headstrong Project Off-air, Hargitay and Meloni are thick as thieves. Advertisement 'We are just connected,' she said on 'Call Her Daddy.' 'We are so close. It's like we've been through the battle together. We know each other so well. We love each other so much. We respect each other so much.' 'We are so comfortable with each other, we deeply trust each other … Whatever he needs, I will always be there for him, and that's mutual,' Hargitay gushed. 'And we have grown together, we've known each other 27 years.' 10 Peter Hermann and Mariska Hargitay pose with their children. Getty Images The actors also have close bonds with one another's kids. Advertisement The 'Happy' actor has been married to production designer Sherman Meloni since 1995, and the pair shares kids Sophia, 24, and Dante, 21. Hargitay is Sophia's godmother. The NBC star tied the knot with Peter Hermann in 2004. They are parents to August, 18, Amaya, 14, and Andrew, 13. The couple adopted their two youngest children in 2011. 10 Sherman Williams, Christopher Meloni, Dante Amadeo Meloni and Sophia Eva Pietra Meloni. Getty Images In 2023, Sophia shared a touching post for her famous godmother's birthday on Instagram. 'Waving my wand to summon all things sparkly, shiny, beautiful and grand for my fairy godmamma today,' she wrote. 'Law & Order: Organized Crime' recently wrapped its fifth season on Peacock, while 'SVU' will be back on NBC for Season 27 on Sept. 25.
Yahoo
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Law & Order' star Christopher Meloni says he's 'f---ing trying' to get Stabler and Benson to hook up
Hargitay has also said she's into the idea, but she doesn't think it should happen just yet. As much as Law & Order audiences want to see Christopher Meloni's Elliot Stabler and Mariska Hargitay's Olivia Benson get together, Meloni might want it more. After a fan on X suggested Monday that, "for f--- sake, kiss her already," he replied, "I'm f---ing trying." There has long been a will-they-won't-they vibe between the two characters in the beloved franchise. They two were partners for more than a decade on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and while Benson has stayed put, Stabler has moved to Law & Order: Organized Crime. However, they still communicate via appearances in one another's departments. They've come very close to becoming a couple, but they haven't actually gone there. Not only Meloni but Hargitay, too, is hoping for that. But she just doesn't want it to happen just yet. "Maybe on the last episode," she said in June on the Call Her Daddy podcast. "I think that's when they should be together... if it's right. We'll see when we get there." The law enforcement officers are "soulmates, in a way," Hargitay said, adding, "But let's see where the story takes us, you know?" Meloni himself has addressed a moment when the two nearly kissed in a season 24 episode of SVU that Stabler appeared on. That time, it was Benson who pulled away."We were attempting something," he said in April during a TVLine Spotlight conversation. "I don't think it worked. But I'm not going to tell you why it didn't work, because you all have your opinion," Meloni said, before adding, "I know what transpired." In May 2024, Hargitay dished that the kiss was initially supposed to happen. "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," Hargitay said in a May 2024 interview with Variety. "Obviously [creator] Dick [Wolf] gets final say. It's his show and he didn't want that." While Meloni's Law & Order: Organized Crime wrapped up its fifth season last month, there will be plenty more Benson — and maybe some Stabler references or even encounters? — when L&O: SVU returns for its 27th season Sept. 25 on NBC. Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly Solve the daily Crossword
Atlantic
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
She Was More Than the Next Marilyn Monroe
When a chestnut-haired starlet named Jayne Mansfield first arrived in Hollywood in 1954, a casting executive for Paramount Studios told her she was wasting what he termed her 'obvious talents'—meaning her body. A single mother in her early 20s, Mansfield was game for anything that would get her foot in the door and allow her to eventually become a serious actor. So she dyed her hair the color of popcorn butter. She tightened her dresses to accentuate her buxom, hourglass physique. She affected a coquettish purr in her first acting roles and televised interviews, drawing each syllable out into an exasperated coo. Mansfield had grand creative ambitions, having been raised by a mother who enrolled her in singing, dancing, and music lessons as a child. But despite her other talents—she was also an accomplished pianist and violinist—her sexually suggestive persona became her meal ticket in a period when studios were itching to replicate the success of Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood's resident bombshell. This experiment in engineering a star earned diminishing returns, and as Mansfield's screen career waned in the 1960s, her image became more albatross than asset. Hollywood saw her as lacking any substance, thinking the costume of the atomic blonde was all she had to offer. By the time she died in 1967, from a car crash, at just 34, she found herself exiled to nightclub appearances. Taken at face value, Mansfield's life might seem like the tragedy of a woman who struggled to break away from her reputation. The recently released HBO documentary My Mom Jayne, directed by her youngest daughter, the actor Mariska Hargitay—who was 3 when her mother died and would become a household name as the hard-boiled Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit —invites viewers to reconsider that framing. Although the film acknowledges the injustice of Mansfield's unfulfilled artistic potential, it also dignifies Mansfield as both actor and mother. The result is an affectionate tribute to a woman often impugned as Monroe's dime-store variant; it also doubles as a portrait of Hollywood's studio system in a state of free fall. Mansfield was a shrewd navigator of the industry's politics—until they changed so drastically that she could not keep pace with them. In 1954, the year of Mansfield's Paramount screen test, Hollywood was in crisis. Theater attendance had plummeted by a full 50 percent from its zenith in 1946, when 90 million people had hit the movies every week. Television, still a technological novelty, provided convenient entertainment without the hassle of a car ride. The House Un-American Activities Committee had been busy sniffing out suspected Communists within Hollywood's ranks, thereby encouraging a conformist monoculture of directors, screenwriters, and performers who behaved themselves. These accumulating pressures led Hollywood to a moment of existential desperation—which had unfortunate consequences for female actors. The 'woman's films' that had once been popular, providing actors such as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis with meaty dramatic material, lost favor to testosterone-heavy films. Throughout the 1950s, the mold of female stardom became more homogenized. The industry still abided by the Hays Code—a series of censorious enforcements that forbade films from depicting forms of 'sex perversion'—which began to feel illogical as filmmakers grew eager to pursue more rebellious material. This created an uneasy ecosystem in which studios promoted female stars, such as Monroe and Doris Day, who seemed 'all about sex, but without sex,' as the film critic Molly Haskell contended in her groundbreaking 1974 study, From Reverence to Rape. Those conditions gave a young woman like Vera Jayne Palmer, as Mansfield was born in 1933, a narrow path to thrive on screen. After marrying and bearing her first child in her teens, Mansfield—keeping her first husband's surname even after their divorce—took acting classes and migrated to Hollywood. She patched together an income through modeling, teaching dancing, and even selling candy outside a theater until her persistence got her proper attention from an agent. Mansfield would spend the following years acquitting herself well in B movies and supporting parts in big-ticket studio fare (along with a detour to Broadway in 1955, when she was just 22) before the director Frank Tashlin immortalized the Mansfield persona in a pair of comedies, The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. These films, with their candy-hued Technicolor canvases, were monuments to Mansfield's charisma and comic flair. Playing two similar roles—a reluctant singing star in the former, a fluttery movie goddess in the latter—she took the Monroe archetype to its most parodic end point, flouncing about in fabulous stoles and bedazzled dresses while delivering each line as if it were wrapped in quotation marks. In real life, too, Mansfield showcased a refreshing willingness to laugh at herself. She made herself a fixture of Hollywood's gossip pages and fan magazines, and had no compunction about strategically exploiting her own 'pin-up publicity,' as she called it. 'I use it as a means to an end,' Mansfield said to the television host Joyce Davidson. 'I don't know if I should say I liked it. But I felt that it would do me some good, being put into a position where I could project myself to what I really wanted to attain.' What she wanted to attain, My Mom Jayne asserts, was respect. 'She just had that desire to be a serious actress,' her eldest daughter, Jayne Marie Mansfield, says early in the film. 'And she was totally determined to do that.' The Wayward Bus, from 1957, gave her a fair shake. Scaled-down and somber with its black-and-white palette, the drama was a departure from Mansfield's comedies. She would tame her signature squeak in order to play Camille, an exotic dancer haunted by her stained reputation, and whose personal life is fodder for tabloids. Camille's desperation for a life where men will respect her for who she is, rather than her physical endowments, is moving, and Mansfield makes the viewer root for her character to find happiness even when she fears it might evade her. The film, perhaps her finest dramatic hour, suggests an affecting presence whose capabilities were underutilized by short-sighted producers. 'Why didn't she do more of those roles?' Hargitay asks her sister after a scene from The Wayward Bus is shown, to which Jayne Marie responds bluntly: 'Because the parts didn't come in.' As the 1950s came to a close, Mansfield found herself in the same rut as so many other Hollywood blondes. Today, many film scholars tend to group Mansfield with Sheree North and Mamie Van Doren, two other studio products groomed carefully to mimic the Monroe template. Only occasionally were such women able to escape the typecasting of studio brass. Even Monroe herself had dramatic aspirations that a mere few films—namely her swan song, 1961's The Misfits —gave her the chance to realize. In My Mom Jayne 's telling, Monroe's death in 1962 registered as a wake-up call for Mansfield, who began to fear that she would be forever doomed to cheesecake roles—that the 'whole blonde persona was a box,' as Jayne Marie remarks. This initiated a conscious attempt to change her image: 'I've been someone else for a few years,' Mansfield said to the talk-show host Jack Paar that year. 'And I'm ready to be myself.' But press skepticism followed, as did box-office flops. Her brand of studied, bashful flightiness began to seem more passé than winkingly subversive. 'In the fifties, Jayne was a demonstration of what to do and how to do it, when female sexuality was a come-on, a taste, a broken promise,' Martha Saxton observed in her book Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties. 'Take a good look, she said, but don't touch.' In the 1960s, a decade with newfound openness toward sex, her evasions had less mileage. It would be wishful thinking to assume that Mansfield fared much better in 1970s American cinema. The Hays Code ended in '68, but despite the forward strides of the American movie industry, Hollywood could remain an unkind place for women. In a decade when Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, and Al Pacino got the lion's share of audience attention, Barbra Streisand was the only woman to maintain a steady place on the 'Top Ten Money Making Stars' poll, one of the industry's barometers for measuring an actor's drawing power. Only in recent years has it become more common for once-dismissed female actors to enjoy gratifying second acts, which makes My Mom Jayne an ideal film for this moment. See Pamela Anderson's acclaimed and sincere turn in Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl as a working-class performer at a Las Vegas revue, cocooned by her own delusions of grandeur. A critical class that once may have sneered at Anderson's perceived prestige grab instead welcomed her. Had she been born a few generations later, a performer like Mansfield may have had an easier time revising her reputation as a pinup. My Mom Jayne openly—and justly—laments that she seldom had the opportunity to do that. 'The public pays money at the box office to see me a certain way,' Mansfield once told Groucho Marx. 'So I think it's just all part of the role I'm playing as an actress.' She understood the nature of the game she was playing while knowing, deep down, that its rules were fundamentally unfair. My Mom Jayne positions her as less a hapless victim of Hollywood circumstance than a savvy operator who gave the industry exactly what it asked of her, even if she wanted more than it could grant her in return.
