In therapy, Hargitay used to fall asleep anytime she wandered too close to painful events—“like a narcoleptic!” She blamed that on her long hours playing Law and Order: SVU’s Captain Olivia Benson, work she juggles with her personal life as a mother of three. Eventually, Hargitay’s therapist suggested that her sleepiness might be a powerful defense mechanism against trauma. In order to dismantle it, she’d finally have to process the shame she felt about her sex symbol mother and let go of the dark secret about her paternity that she’d been guarding for decades. (Don’t worry, we’ll come to that shortly.) And so, during the depths of the pandemic, Hargitay began transforming her personal Pandora’s box into My Mom Jayne—an emotional documentary that premieres May 17 at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and will air Friday, June 27 on HBO and HBO Max.
Hargitay grew up mortified by this image of her lost mother: a blonde bimbo, the butt of everyone’s joke. “It all started with the voice,” she remembers. “When I would hear that fake voice, it used to just flip me out. I’d think, Why is she talking like that? That’s not real.” Her father, Mickey Hargitay—a Hungarian bodybuilding champion turned actor who married Mansfield in 1956 and raised their three children after she died—would insist that this was just her public image. “My dad would always say, ‘She wasn’t like that at all. She was like you. She was funny and irreverent and fearless and real.’’
But for Hargitay, educated in Los Angeles Catholic schools, it was hard to swallow. “I just wanted my mom to be like the other moms! Like, Why are you always in a bathing suit? Why so much breast? I just wanted a maternal mother image,” she says, burying her head in her hands. “I was embarrassed by the choices that she made.” When I mention the famous photo of Sophia Loren glancing sidelong at Mansfield’s exposed bosom, Hargitay’s face crumples. “That was a rough one. To see another woman look at your mom like that was excruciating for me as a little girl.”
“I didn’t want to be that girl, and I was judgmental about it. That’s the honest answer,” she says. “I definitely think that it informed some of my choices. What kind of actor am I going to be? I am going to be a different kind.” It’s probably not an accident that she’s spent 26 years inside the character of Olivia Benson, one of the fiercest, most nurturing female characters on television. “I’ve had so much strife and turmoil with this word mother—and here I was, this iconic mother figure in the culture. Isn’t that ironic?”
Hargitay sees a link between the familial silence-breaking of My Mom Jayne and her work with her Joyful Heart Foundation, a nonprofit for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse. In 2017 she produced I Am Evidence, a documentary about thousands of unprocessed rape kits languishing in America’s police lockers. Last year, she revealed that she had been raped by a friend during her 30s. “That was my own parallel journey with shame and not wanting to carry that anymore,” she says, “wanting for so long to be free of [the secret].”
I Am Evidence (directed by Trish Adlesic, who also coproduced My Mom Jayne, and Geeta Gandbhir) made Hargitay fall in love with filmmaking, and she plans to make more documentaries. “That’s one of the things I’m carving out in my future at SVU, making sure that I can have the balance.” When I ask about the fate of television’s longest-running character, she clutches her heart. “I’m not done with Olivia Benson yet,” she replies. “She’s got more work to do.”
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