Mariska Hargitay went to dad Mickey Hargitay after finding out that he wasn’t her biological father — and they had an emotional conversation.
“I went up to my dad’s house and I was hysterically crying and in a state and he was — how about this metaphor, my dad was physically building me a house. So, I drive up to the house that he is building me and confront him,” Mariska, 61, shared during her “Call Her Daddy” podcast appearance on Wednesday, June 25. “He was like, ‘What are you talking about? Are you crazy? That’s so not true.’”
Mickey kept focusing on Mariska’s looks, telling her that she’s “a Hargitay to the end,” despite the truth she had just discovered. (Mickey raised Mariska and her two siblings — Mickey Jr., born 1958, and Zoltán, born 1960 — after her mom, Jayne Mansfield’s June 1967 death.)
“The irony is that I’m more like my dad than anyone in our whole family. I am mini-Mickey, so it was just a very extraordinarily painful moment,” she continued. “I say that this is the moment that I became an adult and it’s so visceral for me because I was in so much pain. I was so overwhelmed.”
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Mariska recalled seeing a similar pain in Mickey, which made her change her approach to the parenting reveal.
“It doesn’t matter what I feel, I love him … and we’re done here, we’re done here,” she said. “I pretended that I believed him, and we never spoke of it again.”
Mariska revealed the truth of her biological father, who is Italian comedian and singer Nelson Sardelli, in an interview with Vanity Fair which was published last month.
During Wednesday’s “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Mariska recalled how she found out about Nelson while at the home of a collector who owned a lot of her mom’s memorabilia. The actress said she felt a “jolt” when Nelson’s name was initially brought to her attention.
“I knew in one second,” she said. “I don’t know [how]. I think my whole life, all the millions of moments … little fragments of a memory of a moment of things I caught that went into my subconscious. Then I said, ‘Who’s Nelson?’”
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Mariska continued, “I saw the blood drain out of his face and he sort of panicked and turned white and he said, ‘Oh, it’s probably not true, it’s probably not true.’ And that’s when I knew.”
Her parentage was confirmed after seeing a picture of Sardelli.
“I just really thought my life was over,” Mariska continued. “The one thing I did have, the one thing that I was rooted in, the one thing that was my constant, was no longer mine. My identity was just smashed.”
