Elliot Stabler’s initial departure in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit hit hard for everyone, but his longtime partner in (fighting) crime, Oliva Benson (Mariska Hargitay) was particularly gutted by the whole ordeal.
The Benson-Stabler scene that still makes Mariska Hargitay cry
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Hargitay talked about a pivotal moment while filming SVU that still sticks with her to this day. It was the Season 12 finale in 2011, where Stabler (Chris Meloni) is involved in a shootout, and Benson is then informed by Captain Cragen that he won’t be returning to the squad, to which Benson has a devastated reaction.
“I just remember that. I remember that. It was so hard because that happened,” she the the outlet, through tears, of how she and her character handled the news. “It was sad. Just brings me back. It was a hard adjustment, because there was so much unknown.”
You can find the emotional moment at the 6:20 mark of the video below.
Ice T, who plays Fin Tutuola, validated Hargitay’s feelings about the painful situation. “We just didn’t know how the deck was going to get shuffled at that point. Mariska is now out there, she has no partner, who’s going to be her partner?” he said.
Meloni has since gone to reprise his character of Stabler in Law & Order: Organized Crime, which premiered in 2021. Hargitay also discussed how the change in dynamic affected her acting process.
“It gave us an opportunity for the show to turn into something else, and we got to reinvent ourselves. We’d done something for 12 years beautifully. And then all this newness came, and we got Kelli Giddish, which was such a gift, and we got Danny Pino. And then off we were, the show was different. So for me, it was like I got to stay in the same place and I was on a new show.”
Ice T, who is also Hargitay’s good friend IRL, boasted about how she has made the show so strong and long-lasting. ”Mariska, for lack of a better word, manned up and took over the damn place. And now all of a sudden, now we got a captain,” he said proudly.
Hargitay added: “It was exciting to create something new, and to be open [so] that something could morph into something else. And I’m just so glad that it did. I look back and think, everything that we were scared of worked out and then some.”
