Mariska Hargitay Trades Her Badge for Confetti

Illustration by João Fazenda Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Mariska Hargitay, the longtime star of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” recently stepped onto the stage of the Hudson Theatre, where she would soon make her Broadway début. “It’s just so magical,” she said, under an array of hanging light bulbs. Her intense “S.V.U.” character, Olivia Benson, investigates sexual-assault crimes; Hargitay, who is more lighthearted than Benson, had a snazzy new haircut and wore jeans, a boxy pink blouse, and lilac stiletto heels. This week begins her run in “Every Brilliant Thing,” the interactive one-actor London import. She is replacing Daniel Radcliffe; the stage was strewn with confetti and handwritten notes from his show the night before. “You know what’s so funny?” Hargitay said. “I saw the show twice, but I haven’t been here since then. I’ve been rehearsing in a normal room. So it just hit me. Yesterday they told me I have to look up.” She looked up: three tiers of Beaux-Arts splendor, opera boxes, Tiffany tile work, and nine hundred and seventy gold velvet seats. “I mean, look at this,” she said. “This is nuts.”

Hargitay, sixty-two and the highest-paid, longest-tenured actor on prime-time television, has played Benson since 1999. (Her fan base includes wearers of “HOT FOR HARGITAY” T-shirts and the Knicks hero Jalen Brunson, who hugs her, courtside, after home games.) She has produced and directed; she loves Broadway and has seen “Hamilton” twenty-seven times. Yet the new role is daunting: she hasn’t done theatre since high school. Her Playbill bio refers to her “side hustle for the last twenty-seven years” and thanks a nun who encouraged her to act in eleventh grade. “I certainly didn’t have a lot of stage credits,” she said.

“Every Brilliant Thing,” by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, centers on a narrator recalling growing up, a suicidal mother, and efforts to remind the mother about the innumerable “brilliant things”—ice cream, water fights, roller coasters—that make life worth living. (The handwritten notes suggested other brilliant things; one, near Hargitay’s feet, said “EVOLVING NICKNAMES.”) She said she’d felt immediately drawn to the play, and had a “beautiful exchange of energy” with Radcliffe after being dazzled by his performance. “What a light of a human,” she said. She’d told him, “I just want you to know that I’m the real Harry Potter.” She’d pulled her bangs aside and said, “See this?” Like Harry, her forehead is marked with a lightning-bolt scar. “He was, like—” She imitated Radcliffe’s stunned reaction. “We had this very deep connection—some kind of weird passing of the baton.”