Chris Meloni Could’ve Returned to ‘Law and Order’ Years Earlier Under the Right Circumstances

Law & Order: SVU parted ways with Chris Meloni under some pretty tense circumstances. The actor reprised his role as Elliot Stabler not too long ago for the recent spinoff Law & Order: Organized Crime. But if things worked out a certain way, Meloni might’ve been back on SVU much sooner.

How Chris Meloni was almost brought back to ‘Law and Order’

There was a bit of bad blood between Meloni and Law and Order after he first left the show. The actor was given a big break being cast as detective Elliot Stabler on SVU. He was a pillar of the spinoff until his departure in 2011. In a 2021 interview with Men’s Health, Meloni opened up that he left simply because of a disagreement.

“My thought was: Instead of 22 episodes, bring me back for nine episodes, or bring me back for 18 episodes. They literally came to me on a Thursday night and said, ‘This is the deal. We want the answer by tomorrow. It’s our way or no way,'” Meloni recalled.

But Meloni wasn’t willing to waste time on negotiations.

“’I don’t want to f*** around with you guys,’” he said he told them. “’This is what I want. If you can’t do it, that’s fine. Let’s figure out my exit.’”

Meloni and Law and Order would go their separate ways. The show continued on without Meloni’s contributions for quite some time. But there was one point where it looked like the series was facing imminent cancellation. The showrunner at the time, Warren Leight, confided to The Hollywood Reporter that he was bracing for the series’ premature end. Leight cited that Law and Order’s timeslot was doing more harm than good to the program.

“We’ve always been aware that our numbers are lower than they could be if we were on Tuesday at 10 or Wednesday at 10 or Thursday at 10 and that the competition is very tough in that 9 o’clock slot,” he said. “Sometimes there’s been this unspoken fear that we’re being asked to build our own coffin.”

Fortunately, the series would continue its run. But if the series was going to be canceled, Leight would’ve tried bringing back many actors who’d left the show. Including and especially Meloni.

“We had been talking [about], had this been the last episode, we would have tried him to bring him back,” Leight said.

Chris Meloni regretted how he and ‘Law and Order’ parted ways

According to Leight, who kept in contact with Meloni after his departure, it seemed that Meloni started second-guessing his Law and Order exit. If only because of the fans.

“In hindsight, NBC, Dick, Universal and Chris all know they could have handled that better,” Leight said. “But I think Chris, over time from what I hear, began to realize that the fans were owed a little more.”

Leight asserted that neither Meloni nor Law and Order producers considered the audience’s feelings on the matter. It was something both parties only realized after getting a bit of perspective.

“None of the people in the room thought for a second, ‘How will the fans experience this?’ It was a negotiation handled without much empathy on any of the participant’s parts, and I think they all sort of know that now. And there wasn’t much empathy for the fans either. I think everyone probably learned, but you can’t roll the clock back,” Leight added.

Chris Meloni’s return to ‘Law and Order’ was one of the hardest things he’d ever done

Meloni would eventually return to the Law and Order series in 2021, reprising his role as Elliot Stabler. In an interview with People, Meloni admitted that transitioning back to Law and Order wasn’t the smoothest experience.

“It was nerve-wracking as hell leading up to it. People would ask me, ‘How does it feel?’ and I was like, [it] was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do as an actor because I think so much energy was needed to block out anticipation or expectation, you know,” he said.

But it didn’t take long for the actor to get back into the swing of things.

“You just can’t get locked up into that, that’s a deadly road, and I was honestly shocked that first scene,” he said. “Boom. Even if it wasn’t perfect, it’s just like ‘Oh, oh yeah, you got me, I got you, we got this.’”