For Mariska Hargitay, saying goodbye to Captain Donald Cragen on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit was bittersweet.
“We lost Captain Cragen. That was a rough one for [my] character,” Hargitay, a.k.a. Captain Olivia Benson, shared on the Wednesday, October 15, episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show. Host Kelly Clarkson went on to add, “Nobody, really, has done a show like this with such longevity, and then so many relationships in and out, coming back. That’s a hard thing.”
Hargitay noted that the cast’s emotions about the character’s death lent themselves to their performances. “That was what was so beautiful about it, these scenes, they almost act themselves because the circumstances are so powerful. Right?” she explained. “And there’s such genuine love for the captain, for the actor [Dann Florek], and just having the old regulars — having Dean [Winters] come back and having BD Wong come back. And then, doing that scene with Chris [Meloni] … these are so beautiful.”
Hargitay added, “These scenes are so earned that there’s just an ease and an effortlessness to it because we lived it.”
Law & Order: SVU returned for its 27th season on September 25. The premiere episode shocked fans with the reveal that Florek’s former captain died offscreen. “He was the best boss I ever had,” Olivia tells ADA Sonny Carisi (Peter Scanavino) at Cragen’s wake. “Everything I know about being a captain, I learned from him.”
Olivia later opened up about how Cragen inspired her while talking to a rape survivor. “I had this really great boss, who believed in me and who told me I was worthy, and then eventually, I started to believe it,” she said. “He worked a lot longer than he needed to because he was so good at his job and because it gave his life meaning. He and I were a lot alike, and I don’t think that I fully realized it until after he was gone.”
On Tuesday’s episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show, Hargitay also gushed about Michele Fazekas making history as the show’s first-ever female showrunner for Season 27. “I’m so proud of the show and I’m so proud of all the, sort of, incarnations and all the amazing showrunners that we’ve had are spectacular, but I really wanted a female showrunner,” the actress told Clarkson. “And there was this writer who used to write on the show for four or five years back in the early days.”
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Hargitay continued, “[Michele] was so brilliant, and all my favorite episodes were hers. And so, everything linked up perfectly, lined up timing-wise, and now she’s back. And so, the show feels like there’s this incredible renewal to it. The women are running the show. Literally.”
Along with the return of Kelli Giddish‘s Sergeant Amanda Rollins as a series regular, Hargitay said she loves that the show has “a very specific kind of newness and badassery that’s happening right now.”
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC
The Kelly Clarkson Show, Weekdays, Check Your Local Listings