Law & Order: SVU’s Mariska Hargitay is still having to correct people’s pronunciation of her name on set after 26 seasons.
The veteran actress admitted people continue to trip up over her name — which is pronounced with a silent H: Ma-rish-ka — despite working on the hit NBC legal drama for decades.
In fact, it’s not just Mariska’s coworkers who struggle to pronounce her name correctly — her loved ones do, too, she shared during a recent podcast appearance on “Good Hang With Amy Poehler.”
“How badly have people screwed up your name?” host Amy Poehler asked the TV legend.
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“Oh, I still live with it,” Mariska, 61, confessed. “Who was it last night? Oh, I had a brunch yesterday for my sister and my cousin was there — I’ve known him from 1994 — and he kept calling me Ma-riss-ka. At one point, I go, ‘Ma—’ and then I said, ‘No, just let it go.’”
Mariska, who has played SVU’s Captain Olivia Benson since 1999, even devised a seemingly foolproof plan to ensure people get her name right at work.
She said, “It happens on set a lot. Now, on the call sheet, it’s M-A-R-I-S-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-K-A. That’s how I put it on the call sheet, just so people go, ‘Oh, got it, she’s big on the Hs.’”
Despite Mariska’s insistence on spelling her name with multiple Hs on the call sheet, some of her coworkers still get it wrong. And in the case of longtime costar Christopher Meloni, they do it on purpose.
“I get called Maritza, Marcika, Markiska, but Chris will call me Maritza on set,” she quipped.
Mariska’s name is inspired by her Hungarian roots, having grown up the daughter of legendary American screen star Jayne Mansfield and Hungarian-American actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.
“It’s a nickname for Maria. It means ‘Little Maria,’” the actress told Poehler. “In Hungarian, the K-A or K-E on the end of a name, it’s a little endearment. So the name is actually Maria, after my grandmother.”
Mariska recently directed an HBO documentary about her iconic mother, titled My Mom Jayne. Jayne was a popular actress and Playboy centerfold. She died in 1967 at age 34.
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In the documentary, Mariska opens up about discovering that her biological father is the Italian comedian and singer Nelson Sardelli, and not Mickey as she grew up believing.
Mickey raised Mariska and her two brothers — Mickey Jr., 66, and Zoltan, 65 — after their mom’s death. It wasn’t until Mariska saw a picture of Nelson in her 20s that she realized the truth about her parentage.
“It was like the floor fell out from underneath me,” Mariska says in the doc. “Like my infrastructure dissolved.”
In the film, Mariska reveals that before her birth, her mother briefly split from Mickey and had a brief affair with Nelson. Jayne broke things off with Nelson and reunited with Mickey before their daughter was born.
The actress reflects that, ultimately, she “grew up where [she] was supposed to,” adding, “I’m Mickey Hargitay’s daughter — that is not a lie.”
