Mariska Hargitay Stopped Doing ‘Law & Order’ Stunts After Hitting Her 40s
Law & Order SVU star Mariska Hargitay looked forward to doing her own action stunts in her hit series. But after reaching a certain age, Hargitay felt it was time to leave the riskier action sequences to the professionals.
What changed for Mariska Hargitay after she reached her 40s
Hargitay’s 40s seemed to be quite different than the actor’s previous decades. The SVU star has been very candid about how difficult it was getting acting work in her 20s. It wasn’t until her 30s that she was cast as Olivia Benson, a life-changing role that gave her a lucrative career.
In her 40s, Hargitay was firmly established in her role as Olivia Benson, and one of the highest paid actors on TV. Speaking with her organization the Joyful Heart Foundation, Hargitay asserted there were many upsides to turning 40.
“I love it. You have clarity, you know who you are—decisions are easier,” she said.
But there were also certain downsides. As is common with most who enter their middle-aged years, Hargitay couldn’t be as physical as she used to be. This was an especially challenging adjustment considering how active she’s always been.
“Like I said, your metabolism starts to slow down. Everything starts to sag. In my head, I still think I’m a 20-year-old athlete,” she said. “I have always been so athletic and have always been a runner, and what I don’t like about the 40s is you just can’t do as much—and my brain can’t seem to get it. Like, Chris Meloni is a super-stud and works out every day, but we were talking about how we used to do our own stunts. Always. For 10 years, we said, ‘We have to do our own stunts.’ We’d have to be badasses. I don’t know what we were trying to prove. And now we’re both like, ‘No way! Let the stunt double do it!’ The fact is, we can get hurt, and we do get hurt.”
Mariska Hargitay sustained a serious injury on the set of ‘Law & Order SVU’
It seemed leaving the stunts to other more professional stunt doubles might’ve been the right call. A while back, the actor had a very serious injury while filming an action sequence on set. She revisited the harrowing experience in an interview with Redbook.
“I jumped and landed on pads, but on the second take something happened — I just landed wrong,” she said. “I got up and felt that something inside was not quite right. At first, I thought I had the wind knocked out of me. I was angry with myself. Later, I thought maybe I’d pulled a muscle, but I didn’t focus on the injury and kept expecting it to get better.”
Hargitay thought the injury wasn’t a big deal until it became worse three months later. Experiencing chest pains and shortness of breaths, Hargitay was worried she was experiencing a heart attack. The fact that her grandfather and mother both died at young ages in their 30s only heightened her concerns.
“They took an X-ray and found that my right lung was 50 percent collapsed. I began to panic. I was so scared. I had a procedure hoping to stave off more serious surgery, but it didn’t work, and I ended up in surgery about two weeks later,” she said. “After I got the clearance to go back to work, everything was normal. They told me the injured lung was now stronger than the healthy one and that there was a greater chance of the healthy lung collapsing than the right one going down again. Then, on March 5, it happened again. I was one out of 1,000, statistically.”
Mariska Hargitay was never worried about getting older
Hargitay wasn’t someone who worried about getting older while on the show. The actor is now in her 60s, and still going strong on SVU. Similarly to SVU, Hargitay felt she only got better with age.
“The age thing was never something I was scared of. I didn’t get cast until I was 35, and then the show kept going as I aged. At 45, we’d been on for ten years and I just met my husband. The man of my dreams. I got married at 40. I had August at 42. So it was like defying all the odds,” she said in an interview with People.
