Mariska Hargitay may be known as one of TV’s hardest-hitting (and longest-running) police officers, but she didn’t always have a nose for drama. Getting her start in the Groundlings improv comedy troupe, the Emmy winner revealed Tuesday that she actually tested “so many times” for another one of TV’s most iconic characters: Monica Geller on “Friends.”
Telling “Good Hang” podcast host Amy Poehler that it was “always” comedy first for her, the actress lamented, “How did I end up as America’s sweetheart sex cop?! I should’ve been you!”
“All I wanted to be was you,” Hargitay said, gushing over the “Saturday Night Live” and “Parks and Recreation” vet. Of course, things didn’t turn out that way. Hargitay is celebrated today as “SVU” hero Olivia Benson, the beloved sexual crimes commanding officer in New York City and the longest-running character in an American primetime drama.
Reflecting on early career comedy roles she had in episodes of “Seinfeld” and “The Single Guy,” Hargitay continued. “I always thought I would end up being on a sitcom or doing a comedy. That’s what I thought,” she said. She was even developing at one point a hybrid comedy-drama series like “Ally McBeal” for DreamWorks. “That’s what I wanted to do, I was like, I wanna do drama, but it has to be funny because that’s what I felt my gifts were.”
“ER,” the medical drama in which she played Cynthia Hooper for 13 episodes in 1997-1998, was a turning point in her acting aspirations. (“SVU” came in 1999.)
“We lived through what ‘ER’ was, it was the pinnacle of all television. I mean, it was the greatest show on the planet, and the acting was so next level,” Hargitay said. “And I look back at it, and I think how that show really shaped me and those actors shaped me, and how invested they were, how amazing they were, how it was acting like I’d never seen. But I knew I didn’t know how to do exactly what they were doing. It was a little out of my league, but I watched them so skillfully and in such a beautiful, nuanced way.
“I think that is when I went, I wanna do that. I wanna do that. Whatever they’re doing that’s so masterful and skilled, and that … was such a turning point of my life.”
Watch Hargitay’s full “Good Hang” podcast interview below:
