“Law & Order: SVU” star Mariska Hargitay has revealed how a Long Island psychic predicted that she would end up moving from Los Angeles to New York in order to take on a role that would shape her career and turn her into one of the industry’s leading TV actresses.
Hargitay, 61, has become one of Hollywood’s most revered—and best paid—TV stars thanks to her decades-long role as Olivia Benson on “Law & Order: SVU,” netting a reported $11 million a year from the popular crime series.
Yet she has now confessed that she never dreamed her success would come from such a “serious” role—and only began considering the fact after meeting with a psychic who told her that she would not only make a major move away from her early comedic aspirations, but would also relocate from the West Coast to the East to find fame.
Hargitay, who is the daughter of Hollywood legend Jayne Mansfield, opened up about her eerie psychic encounter during an appearance on Alex Cooper‘s “Call Her Daddy” podcast, admitting that the early days of her acting career proved to be far more difficult than many might have thought.
“My 20s were really hard,” she shared. “I did a couple of guest star things, but then, it dried up for me.”
At the time, Hargitay had been pursuing a comedy career, but after those roles became harder to secure, a friend in New York suggested that she visit a psychic to gain some clarity on what her future might hold.
“I used to go to New York twice a year. I was 34, and I come to New York and a friend of mine said, ‘Oh, my gosh, Mariska, you have to go to this psychic on Long Island,'” she recalled. “I didn’t even know where Long Island was!”
Hargitay confessed that she was initially skeptical about the meeting—not least because she was used to being stereotyped by her mother’s fame.
“So I drive out to this guy’s house and he gives me a psychic reading. And because my mom was famous, I was always like, ‘You are probably just going to Google me and then come up with some bulls—,'” she said.
“So I sit down with this guy and we’re talking, we’re talking, we’re talking. He says some things.”
According to Hargitay, the psychic then turned to her and said: “You see that face? You’re going to be famous for that face—that serious face.”
The actress said she quickly pushed back, telling the psychic that she didn’t think that could possibly be true, because she had every intention of becoming a comedian.
Still, he would not be deterred, telling her: “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think. You’re going to be famous for that face.”
The psychic then dropped another bombshell on the budding actress, telling her that she was going to end up moving to New York.
“And I said, ‘Uh, no,'” she confessed. “I live in L.A., this is my town, I have my roommates, I have my house, what am I going to do with my house? Six months later, I got ‘SVU.'”
Hargitay made her debut as Detective Benson in the hit series in 1992—and has played the role ever since, remaining a constant in a cast of regularly changing stars, alongside her longest-running TV sidekick, Ice-T.
The series has become the longest-running shows to film in New York City, turning Hargitay into her own local attraction, something that she says can be a blessing—and a curse.
“I get so much love on the street, I get a lot of love,” she told Cooper, joking that she was once approached by someone who brazenly told her: “I don’t get ‘SVU,'” to which she had no response.
Hargitay’s appearance on the hit podcast came just two days before the premiere of her new documentary, “My Mom Jayne.” The film delves into some of the darkest parts of her family’s history—including the death of her mother in a car crash when the actress was 3, and the discovery that her dad was not her biological father.
In an interview with Vanity Fair in May, the actress revealed her decision to share the truth about her biological father in the HBO documentary about her mother.
After Mansfield’s death, Hargitay, who had been in the car with her mother when the crash occurred, and her siblings, Mickey Jr. and Zoltán, were raised by the man she always knew to be her father: Hungarian bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Hargitay was full of praise for how Mickey raised her—but admitted that she always had a niggling feeling that something was off.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was different from her siblings in some way.
“He was my everything, my idol. He loved me so much, and I knew it,” she said. “I also knew something else—I just didn’t know what I knew.”
It wasn’t until Hargitay was 25 that she learned Mickey was not her biological father.
Speaking on “Call Her Daddy,” Hargitay recalled the moment she learned the identity of the man who had fathered her, a Las Vegas performer called Nelson Sardelli.
She was at the home of a longtime fan of her mother, who was the head of the Jayne Mansfield fan club and had invited Hargitay to go through some of the memorabilia he had collected over the years.
“It was so rough,” she said. “I had been invited to this guy named Sabin Gray‘s house, and he was head of the Jayne Mansfield fan club, and he was this lovely guy and just obsessed with Jayne and loved her so much and was a huge collector of memorabilia and movie posters and anything related to her.”
Gray showed Hargitay some of the memorabilia before asking her if she’d like to see a picture of Sardelli. The question made her heart plummet.
“He’s showing me all these photos, he’s showing me, whatever it is, dresses that she had that he collected, earrings that she wore, things from movies, from the movie set, props or whatever—and then he says to me, ‘Do you want to see a picture of Nelson?'” she said.
“And I just looked at him, and this jolt went through my body, and I said, ‘Who’s Nelson?’ and then I knew in one second.
“I saw the blood drain out of [Gray’s] face, and he sort of panicked and turned white, and then he said, ‘Oh, it’s probably not true, it’s probably not true.’ And that’s when I knew, and I think that he couldn’t believe that I didn’t know. I was 25. How could I not know? And I understand that, and then, he says, ‘It’s not true. I’m sure it’s not true,’ and then he showed me his picture.”
Hargitay said she was heartbroken by the revelation, recalling how she immediately drove to her brother’s house in tears, before going to confront her father at a house that he was building especially for her, only to realize that he had no clue about her parentage.
“My dad was building me, physically building me, a house, so I drive up to the house that he is building me and confront him, and he was like, ‘What? What are you talking about? Are you crazy? That’s so not true,'” she explained.
“He kept saying, ‘You look like my father, you look exactly like my father. You’re a Hargitay to the end,’ and the irony is that I’m more like my dad than anyone in our whole family. I am mini Mickey. And so it was just a very extraordinarily painful moment.”
Ultimately, Hargitay said, she realized that what mattered was the unwavering bond she had with Mickey, who died in 2006. The two of them never really discussed the matter again—and Hargitay said she still doesn’t know whether her father knew the truth or not.
“I don’t know. I’ll never know. I think that he integrated it [like], ‘This is my new reality,'” she said. “He made a choice, and that was his new truth, and whether it’s true or not emotionally, it was his truth.
“I understand it because I have two adopted kids, and they are no different—no different—than my biological son, and so I go, ‘I get it.’ It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.”
