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Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is one of the longest-running shows on the air. It’s in its 19th season now and is still going strong. The cast has changed a few times over the years, but it’s become a tight family unit. It also has a knack for taking popular stars and making them serial killers or crazy people. James Van Der Beek was on the show and played a serial killer as well as Oscar-winner Robin Williams who was on the show as a madman. It’s also been a show that had catapulted young actors into the spotlight like Hayden Panettiere who was just a child when she first appeared in SVU.

It’s crazy how good this show is and the fact that fans have been hooked to their seat season after  season on a show that’s almost been on for two decades. They have “ripped from the headline” episodes that we just can’t get enough of and it’s always fun to see episodes that we do recognize from real life. It’s always got fresh content and it’s relevant to what is statistically accurate these days. If you are a fan, you know what we are talking about. But there may be things about the show that you aren’t aware of. Secrets about the cast that may surprise you or shock you. Some cast members have come and gone and you may have been wondering why. Check out these 15 secrets about the cast of Law and Order SVU they want to keep under wraps.

Mariska Hargitay Suffered From A Collapsed Lung On Set

Sometimes, doing your own stunts can be a bad idea especially when it comes to injuring yourself. Mariska Hargitay has been on the show since the very beginning and her acting has won her an Emmy and a Golden Globe over the years. She’s badass both onscreen and off. In 2008, she suffered an injury while onset doing a stunt. She told Redbook all about it.

"I was doing a stunt chasing a bad guy. I'd always insisted on doing the stunts my own way, although I don't feel so strongly about that anymore. I jumped and landed on pads, but on the second take something happened — I just landed wrong. I got up and felt that something inside was not quite right."

At first, she thought the injury was minor until she started having trouble breathing. After she had some tests done, she was told that 50% of one of her lungs had collapsed and was scheduled for surgery two weeks later. She eventually returned to work but had to take time off again because the lung collapsed a second time. "Having a child changes everything. All of a sudden you have so much to lose, so much to live for. Sometimes things in life happen that allow us to understand our priorities very clearly. Ultimately you can see those as gifts."

Richard Belzer Has Been Everywhere

If you think that Richard Belzer looks familiar, it’s because he’s basically been on every crime show out there. He retired from Law & Order: SVU in 2013, probably because he was exhausted. His character on the show stated that he needed a break from all the crime he had been surrounded by, but it’s likely that he felt that way in real life. He was not only juggling SVU over the years, but he played the same character of Detective Robert Munch on multiple shows such as Homicide: Life on the Street, the original Law & Order, The Beat, Law & Order: Trial by Jury, The Wire, Arrested Development, and even The X-Files. New York Post asked Belzer why he was on so many shows and wondered if it was all hype.

“I think it’s more flattering than that. People are so enamored of the character that when they see in a script 'detective,' they think, let’s bring Belzer in.

They did that on The X-Files, on Arrested Development, on Sesame Street. It’s been so much fun.” It does sound pretty cool!

Kelli Giddish Started Off As A Victim

If you've been watching the show from the beginning, then you may have recognized Kelli Giddish before she became Detective Amanda Rollins. You may have assumed they plucked her out of nowhere to be a detective on the show. But Giddish had starred on the show a few years before as a victim under a completely different character. Giddish joined SVU as a detective in season 13, but she had already appeared on the show previously as victim Kara Bawson in season 8. It’s actually pretty cool that they took previous stand-in actors from the past and created permanent roles for them. She had said that when it comes to acting on SVU, you just get used to creepy episodes.

“I mean, you get one creepy script after another.

Once you start doing the show, it's just people being really cruel and mean to each other, which is always awful. But [this episode, "Father Dearest"] is creepy because you don't know who it is until the very end and why would someone do that? And the character I play on SVU, she's got a clinical, morbid curiosity about things like this, just what motivates people to do this stuff. So I have to play against getting really creeped out, which is fun. But ever since starting the show, my dreams have been really screwed up," she laughed.

Ice-T Was Originally Only Written in For Four Episodes

It’s hard to even picture the show without Ice-T’s cynical character, but when he was first brought on the show, they only intended for him to be in four episodes. He was brought in during the second season of the show, but the writers weren't planning on keeping him in. They must have liked him and fans did too, so he was approached to stay. He told News.com.au that "at the end of the four episodes, they were like, 'we would like to keep you on.'" He’s most known as a rapper, obviously, that was where his career started and even had an offensive song about cops. So, at first, he got a lot of flak for being on a cop show when he had such an offensive song. Ice-T, however, saw a lot of potential in the show and he told Page Six,

"You think because I am a rapper I should have turned this down?

That would have been stupid. I am about getting that check." He’s been on the show ever since and is now one of the lead characters on the show. The actor has certainly come a long way in his career and has a lot to show for it.

Raúl Esparza Was Ready To Leave the Show

Many people were shocked when Assistant District Attorney Raúl Esparza left the show after six seasons. Personally, he was one of our favorite characters on the show and he often had powerful performances. No one could understand why all of a sudden, he left the show. The show left it open for him to return and hopes that he will. “It has truly been an honor writing for Raúl,” SVU showrunner Michael Chernuchin said.

“The power, sensitivity, and morality he brought to the character of Rafael Barba never failed to elevate our scripts. Raúl is family and we look forward to seeing his talent shine in new projects. As for Barba, SVU fans may see him again soon.”

Esparza loved the show, but thought it was just his time to go. “I’ve done six seasons, I felt like it was time to go. I had explored a lot of what I thought Barba was about. I just felt it was time to move on. I was also feeling like the role has changed over the years in a way that has been an interesting experience for me. Again, I’m a theatre guy, so it’s like having a script in front of you that keeps changing every time you go to do it. The learning process of how roles grow over a period of time with a series has been kind of fascinating, and I just felt I had reached the end of what I wanted to explore where they were writing.”

Ice-T Has Been in A Few Feuds

Ice-T isn’t the kind of guy that seems to avoid feuds and drama, in fact, he’s often in the midst of them. He plays calm and collected Detective Odafin "Fin" Tutuola on the show, but he’s rarely like that in real life. In 2007, he got into a fight with Soula Boy when he released a track that stated that Soula Boy was "single-handedly kill[ing] hip hop." Ouch! The two went back and forth for a while just insulting each other. He’s also been in a long-time feud with LL Cool J who we absolutely just love. In 2013, that feud finally died away when Ice-T stated, "I'm happy for LL." It’s definitely not good for any show if an actor is out causing a ruckus in the media. He sent out an offensive Tweet to singer Aimee Mann in 2010, after she insulted his acting on Twitter. He responded with, "Hey @aimeemann stop worrying bout my acting and worry about your wack music." That’s not the greatest thing to have a famous actor do and the show was probably on cleanup control on a regular basis. He did end up apologizing to Aimee after she sent out an apology to him. "Once again there's peace in Twitterland."

Chris Meloni Asked For More Money

Chris Meloni wouldn’t be the first actor to get burned by asking for more money. When it comes to renewing a contract, an actor has to be sure that producers value him enough to shell out more money otherwise bad things can happen. Sometimes, it works out like in the case of the Friends pay raises, but in other cases, it doesn’t. Meloni was another actor that fans were shocked to leave the show, but he sort of did it to himself. Meloni was another actor on the show that was there from the beginning and he played Olivia Benson’s partner for 270 episodes. In 2011, when it came time for him to renew his contract, he couldn’t get what he wanted and so he decided to leave the show. Andy Cohen asked Meloni in 2017 if he ever regretted leaving the show and he responded, "Not for a day,” though we find that hard to believe. "It was confused and ended with a whimper and not a bang," he said.

"It was ham-handed and poorly done, and it all could have been averted. But look, things have to play out as they want to play them out.

I wanted it to end differently and I'd given ample warnings and feelings and thoughts, and I wasn't that's all. It was handled poorly, in my opinion."

Detective Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Has An Interesting Hobby

When Peter Scanavino takes a break from filming, he doesn’t just go take a nap in his dressing room. Instead, he does woodworking projects. In fact, he’s so dedicated to the woodworking projects that he turned his dressing room into a place that he can practise his hobby in between takes. This is definitely a first for us, we have never heard of such a thing. He mentioned this little quirk of his on his Twitter page.

"We all have these breaks on the show in between scenes and some actors like to work out. They like to do yoga and they read books. Now, what I do is, I kind of mess around with lumber and I do old joinery, which is joining boards together. So, this is all stuff that I've learned how to do on the show with my downtime, and it's just how I keep myself busy.

I think it's really relaxing and fun." That’s definitely fascinating. Being on the show was his breakthrough role in Hollywood. "Me, personally, I can't say enough amazing things about [Leight] because he literally called me up and offered me this job when I was sitting on my couch wondering what I was going to do next. Now it's totally changed my life and I'll be forever grateful," Scanavino said in a recent interview with E! News.

Ice-T Married A Model

Ice-T wouldn’t be the first rapper to marry a Playboy model. Coco Austin is a model/media personality and is 20 years younger than him and he said it was love at first sight when he saw her. “Monogamy is a choice,” he said. “Since Coco and I have been together, I’ve never betrayed her. I’ve never even been tempted to.” She is often in the media for showing up to events in skimpy clothing, but Ice-T assures everyone that they are actually just a boring couple. He told Transom,

“Honestly, Coco and I are kind of boring.

Coco had her party days, and everybody knows my reputation of being a player and being around, but once we got together, we got kind of boring. People think, you know, we have three people and all, she’s picking up girls. We’ve never done that.” They now have a little girl together and they have been together for a very long time. Coco added, “I think people see us out and we’re fun, we’re not like ‘cramped couple in the corner,’ whispering about people. We’re pretty much the wild person in the club when we go out together.”

Chris Meloni and Mariska Hargitay Had Instant Chemistry

Anyone who has been watching the show from the beginning would have connected with Meloni and Hargitay right away. They were awesome partners who always had each other’s backs. You could tell they had great chemistry onscreen and off. Many people wondered if they were going to become an onscreen couple though that never happened. That was why it was so disappointing when Meloni left the show because we couldn’t imagine Hargitay partnering up with anyone else. During an interview with Inside the Actors Studio, Meloni told them, “[Mariska] was always ready for anything new, like let's try something. Let's try this. Like, yeah, ready to do it.

There's always an unspoken shorthand to what we were doing. That makes it just so much easier, and off-camera as well. There's a lot to be said for that when you work with someone 16 hours a day, you better get along when the camera is not rolling as well as when it is. And so, that was priceless, I think for both of us."

He also told The Daily Beast in 2014 that they "email all the time." We love that they still keep in contact after the show, they were so great together.

Hayden Panettiere Appeared on The Show Twice

Before Hayden Panettiere became famous, she appeared on Law & Order: SVU as a little girl who was being neglected by her famous mother. The episode was about a little girl who would hurt herself in order to get her parent’s attention. It was one of her first acting roles ever in Hollywood. She ended up coming back on the show as a teenager under a different character name. For the second episode, she played a high-school student who was hooking on the side for money to buy designer clothing. She proved even back then that she was a great actress. She didn’t become truly famous until her role in Heroes and even then, she knew that it would be hard afterward for people to see her as anything but that character.

“After Heroes I knew it was going to be an uphill battle for me to be seen as anything other than the all-American cheerleader,” she said.

Now that Nashville is coming to an end, we’re not sure what Panettiere is going to do with her career since she has no projects in the works. Maybe she can head on back to SVU for the third time.

Peter Scanavino Was Originally A Survivor

These days we know Peter Scanavino as Detective Dominick “Sonny” Carisi and he’s certainly proven to be a great asset to SVU. But for all the loyal fans out there, you probably recognized Peter Scanavino from a much earlier episode. He originally played a janitor at a school who was later discovered to be the victim of child abuse in season 14. We didn’t expect to see him again until he turned up as the new detective on the squad and he had a moustache. Now that he’s a regular on the show he couldn’t be more grateful. "Now it's a different world for me. It's amazing," Scanavino added. “I got a call to be a perp on the show in season 14 and that was great, just to get a job offer out of nowhere. I was like, ‘Okay, done SVU, now I've done them all. So that's it, it was great while it lasted, guess I can't do that for a while.'

A year goes by and I get another call and he was like, ‘Do you want to come back on SVU?' And I was like, ‘Do you remember that I was on this show last year?' and he said, ‘Yeah, it's fine. Do you want to do three episodes?'

I said sure and that was fantastic, and then it turned into more and then this.”

SVU Exposed A Real Scandal Before It Happened

The reality show Bachelor in Paradise made headlines in 2017 after a female contestant accused another contestant of assaulting her while she was under the influence. What was most surprising about it was that it was filmed which shocked audiences and made people question whether the producers were looking out for the contestants. What was eerie about the whole thing was the fact that Law & Order: SVU had an episode called "Assaulting Reality" that aired in season 17 before the incident even happened in real life. The show was about a reality show who claimed they did not know about the incident occurring even though one aired live. The question was then put on the production staff as to whether they were keeping contestants safe. It’s both creepy and scary that something like that could actually happen in real life. Mariska Hargitay said she loves the connections she makes because of the show.

“I get so many people coming up to me on the street just wanting to connect,

or I get letters from women saying, ‘I wish you were my SVU detective, I wish you were my mother, I wish you were my father, I wish you were my friend.’”

Mariska Hargitay Didn't Feel Right After An Episode

We can imagine that some of these episodes can be quite emotional for the cast members because they deal with issues that happen in real life every day. After filming an episode called "Something Happened," Hargitay stated, "I was wrecked.” The episode consisted of Olivia Benson interviewing a girl who claimed that her father had abused her, but it turned out it was her sister that suffered the abuse and the girl had just repressed it as if it had happened to her. It was an emotional episode because Benson had to also deal with repressed feelings about her own father who abused her mother. "We were wrecked. Actually, I was wrecked for about three more days. It was hard for me to switch gears into the next episode," Hargitay admitted to E! News.

"I wasn't quite present — definitely not the first day, you know what I mean? My body, my mind, and my soul didn't have time to recuperate from it.

It was rough. I've trained myself now. My job is to do the deep dive, tell these stories and do the next one. It's the nature of the beast of certainly this kind of television, this kind of storytelling," she said, and then conceded, "This one was a deeper dive."

Taylor Swift Named Her Cat After Olivia Benson

If you didn’t already know, Taylor Swift is a big fan of Law & Order: SVU and especially of Mariska Hargitay. In 2014, Swift got a new kitten and told Instagram fans that she had named her after her favorite character on the show. She would often see Hargitay at events like the Met Gala and take the opportunity to tell her how much she loved the show. Swift saw Hargitay once again at a concert where she was attending with her husband. Hargitay hadn’t figured out a ride home yet and Swift was more than happy to offer them a ride home. Hargitay even ended up in Swift’s Bad Blood music video. Could this get even more bizarre? Hargitay also stated that Swift’s song, Shake It Off touched her deeply. "The song 'Shake It Off' touched me deeply, profoundly," revealed Hargitay. "I thought, 'What a beautiful message to send to people,'" she continued.

"I've certainly had thin skin at times, and things hurt my feelings and you sit there and go, 'Why do you let that hurt your feelings? And you know what? Shake it off and move on.' What a beautiful lesson.

There are certain things in life we need to put our attention on and there's other things we don't."

References: today.com, eonline.com, ew.com, dailymail.co.uk, sheknows.com

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