After nearly 26 years on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” Mariska Hargitay knows a thing or two about commitment and perseverance — qualities she says she learned from her late father, Mickey Hargitay.
“I was sort of raised with the motto of, ‘We don’t quit in this family,’” Hargitay, 60, said of her dad’s life philosophy in a Sunday Sitdown with TODAY’s Willie Geist.
“‘And if that’s what you want to do, then you do it, and you work harder, and you click your heels together three times and say, “That’s the best I can do,” but we don’t quit,’” Hargitay also recalled her dad saying. “‘It takes that much more.’”
Mickey Hargitay was a bodybuilder and actor who starred in several movies with Mariska Hargitay’s mother, Hollywood legend Jayne Mansfield, including 1957’s “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” and 1964’s “Primitive Love.”
The “SVU” star said her dad’s words of wisdom inspired her from a young age, including when she was a swimmer in high school.
“He would say to me, ‘It takes this much more to win in the swim meet,’ which was, you know, super challenging for me,” she said, making a gesture with her fingers.
She said she had a friend on the swim team named Lisa who was “so fast and so strong” and always bested her.
“No matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t beat her. I couldn’t even come close to her time,” Hargitay recalled. “But my dad kept the inspiration and the work ethic in there by giving me something to strive for. And I do believe that my sports in high school, and even in middle school, have helped me so much with the longevity and not giving up.”
She called the ability to get up again and again, even when feeling discouraged, “a muscle that we have to learn.”
These early lessons from her dad translated to her acting career, Hargitay said.
“High school sports and my father’s training taught me how to get back on the horse and have the stamina to do ‘SVU,’” she said. “’Cause there were hard years.”
“There were times when I (thought), ‘I don’t know if I have it. I don’t know if I can continue this,’” Hargitay added. “But then, we would do an episode, and I fell so madly, deeply in love with my co-stars. And I was working with such great actors.”
She said she learned during her time on “SVU” to “just keep digging” if a scene wasn’t working.
“That’s why I’m still there, because we have an extraordinarily invested and committed team at ‘SVU,’ and that’s probably the thing that I’m most proud of, and that I hear the most from guest stars. They say, ‘I cannot believe that you’re still invested, this invested.’”
Things came full circle for Hargitay when her dad appeared in the 100th episode of “SVU” in 2003, playing a grandfather who gives a statement to her character, Olivia Benson.
This marked Mickey Hargitay’s final television appearance before his death in 2006.
Mariska Hargitay opened up about the loss of her father in a 2018 People interview. She reflected on her dad’s strength as he raised her and her siblings after Mansfield died in a car accident in 1967, when Mariska was 3.
“It was huge to lose this person who was my everything, my strength, my power, the person who believed in me,” she said. “But I got to say goodbye, and I remember it was very calm, and he just looked at me and he said, ‘Mariska … always.’
“I was the most like him, and the gift that I got, in addition to being able to say goodbye, was knowing that he was in me,” she added. “I already carried his fire, the lessons that he taught me, his compassion, his love, his kindness. Now I do feel that he’s with me. Even though he’s not here physically, I carry him.”
