Why Mariska Hargitay Is Ready to Make Bold Career Move with Broadway Debut: 'I Feel Focused and Fearless' (Exclusive)

The actress will start her six-week run in the one-person show 'Every Brilliant Thing' on May 26

NEED TO KNOW

• Mariska Hargitay says making her Broadway debut in Every Brilliant Thing a year after her documentary, My Mom Janye, is “a natural progression”
• She calls making the documentary “cathartic” and says, “I think it changed my nervous system”
• Now, she’s ready for a new “challenge” with her one-person play: “Bring it on, baby, let’s do this”

There are easier ways to wrap up a photo shoot than climbing atop a narrow steel beam wrapped around an old water tower on a Manhattan rooftop in a Victoria Beckham sheath dress and 4 1/2-inch stiletto heels. But as Mariska Hargitay quips, “Mama is not afraid.”

Fearless, funny and scaling new heights—that’s classic Mariska. Now, after 27 years as Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU, she's making her Broadway debut on May 26 for a six-week run in Every Brilliant Thing.  It’s a solo show about grief, suicide and finding the “brilliant things” in life that give us hope.

“It definitely feels like you’re going out without a net, but that’s also the thrill of it,” says Hargitay in her PEOPLE cover story interview. “Even though I’m still challenged at SVU, I know the drill. I’m a boss lady. I can say, ‘Cut. Sorry guys, let’s go again. Can we take it from the top?’” No such chance on Broadway. “But that’s the challenge,” she says. “Bring it on, baby, let’s do this.”

Hargitay will be stepping into the role previously played by Daniel Radcliffe, now up for a Tony Award. “I was in from minute one,” says Hargitay after getting the offer and reading the script, about the narrator’s search for joy and meaning by listing things and moments to live for after a parent’s suicide attempt.

“I said this is a dream come true," she adds. "I identified with the character in so many ways. It’s a play about healing, the stories that I love to tell.” 

With rehearsals six days a week, she says, “I had no idea what I was in for. Everyone kept saying, ‘Wow, you’ve got to get your strength up.’ I was like, ‘Sweetheart, I’ve been on a show for 27 years. I got this.’"

But even she admits, "It was so exhausting in a new way."

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The play’s director Jeremy Herrin says, "There’s something absolutely delicious about the contrast of her role as a tough cop on TV and this very vulnerable place of the play. It’s a high wire act of theatrical daring and, typical of Mariska, so challenging.”

Her stage debut comes on the heels of her 2025 documentary, My Mom, Jayne, about the life and loss of her mother, Hollywood siren Jayne Mansfield, who died in a 1967 car accident when Hargitay was 3 years old.  

“After all the longing that I had or all the sadness or regret, I feel like my mom is with me now,” says Hargitay, who also dug deep into her own trauma. “I was trapped in a car, and I had a lot of PTSD and a nervous system that was pretty wound up and scared, waiting for the other shoe to drop."

Sharing the entirety of her family's story brought more peace. “The only way to heal is to be in a community and in the present and not live in the past, and making my film was cathartic,” she shares. “It gave me a lot of internal space back. I think it changed my nervous system and I did feel so relieved and so free, and so it felt like a natural progression.”

"I don't think the timing is an accident," she says of making her Broadway debut a year later. "It's sort of extraordinary that my mom started on Broadway when she was 22 and that I've never done a play. I mean, I started in high school doing plays and then here I am like right after my movie comes out and I'm doing a play on Broadway and so that's something to take in and behold."

Hargitay’s husband, actor Peter Hermann, 58, and their three three kids—August, 19, Amaya, 15, and Andrew, 14—are cheering her on. “Watching the person I love do something she loves is more beautiful than I can describe,” says Hermann. “Mariska is so deeply fulfilled by this play and this experience, and I’m every bit as fulfilled seeing her pour her extraordinary heart and soul into it.” 

After her run ends on July 5, she’ll return to the Law & Order SVU set a few weeks later to begin filming her 28th season as Olivia Benson.

"It looks like Mariska will have about a half hour of summer vacation between her final performance of Every Brilliant Thing and her first day back at SVU, so I think it'll be a nap, some snacks and off she goes," says Hermann of their later summer plans. "But wherever we do end up during her break, it’s going to involve a lot of doing as little as possible." 

Of the series Hargitay says, “The joke is, just when I think I should be winding down, I’m like, ‘No, I’m good for a couple more years!’”

Her commitment is just as strong to her foundation, Joyful Heart, which received news in May that its “End the Backlog” campaign (created to eliminate the backlog of untested rape kits and prevent a backlog from occurring again) successfully achieved legislation reform in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. “People said it was impossible, but we’ve been relentless ,” says Hargitay, a survivor herself. “There’s a lot more work to do.”

Bold and brilliant as ever, she reflects, “That’s the thing about getting older. We have such an appreciation of how much time we have left on this planet. There’s so much more clarity, so I feel focused and clear and free—and a little more fearless.”

Tickets for Every Brilliant Thing are on sale now.

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