GREAT MOMENTS IN VICTIMHOOD: Mariska Hargitay suffered ‘secondary trauma’ from ‘Law & Order: SVU’ storylines.
Mariska Hargitay, 60, who has starred as Olivia Benson in the “Law & Order” franchise since 1999 — making her the longest-running character in the longest-running prime-time drama — said that she’s been “deeply” impacted by the show.
“When I started the show, I wasn’t aware of how deeply it would go into me,” Hargitay said in a recent interview with “SVU” fan Selena Gomez published Monday in Interview magazine.
Hargitay, who has been married to “Blue Bloods” actor Peter Hermann since 2004, added, “My husband Peter is always like, anytime I go anywhere, my first question is, ‘What’s the crime rate here?’ So it’s on the brain.”
She continued, “There’s been times when I didn’t know how to protect myself, and I think I was definitely a victim of secondary trauma from being inundated with these stories and knowing that they were true. Those were the parts that I didn’t know how to metabolize, just because of the sheer volume of it.”
Hargitay is paid a reported $500,000 per episode of her Law & Order franchise.