Mariska Hargitay was nearly cast on Friends, she revealed Tuesday.
The Law and Order: SVU actress appeared on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, where she dished about her early pursuits of a career in comedy.
“I did a lot of” of comedy auditions,” she told Poehler. “I did Seinfeld and I did Single Guy, and I tested for Friends, so many times.” Hargitay said she thinks she was up for the role of Monica, which Courteney Cox would go on to play for ten years.
“I always thought I would end up being on a sitcom or doing comedy,” she added, before landing her career defining role as Olivia Benson. Hargitay has played the sex crimes detective for over 25 years on the long-running Dick Wolf show. Benson remains the longest-running character in primetime live-action TV history. But Hargitay said she was dead set on becoming a comedy star when she began her career in the 1980s.
“I was like, I want to do drama but it has to be funny because that’s what I felt like my gifts were,” she said Tuesday, telling Poehler she would tell people, “‘I’m going to be a comedian because I’m funny and I’m pretty.’”
Hargitay was so convinced that comedy was her path at the time that she studied improv with the Groundlings comedy troupe, a common Saturday Night Live feeding pool. She told Poehler that a psychic was the first person to tell her that comedy wasn’t where she’d hit it big career-wise.
” I’m in LA, struggling actor,” wondering “’What am I going to do?’” she began the story. “I came to New York, which I did three times a year to see theater. And then I met with this psychic. Everyone said to me, “Oh my gosh, Mariska, you have to meet with this psychic. He’s amazing… I drove out somewhere on Long Island to this man and I went there and he started saying all this amazing stuff to me.”
“I was listening to him really intently like this. He said to me…‘You see that face you’re doing right now? You see that face?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘You’re going to be famous for that face. You’re moving to New York and you’re gonna be famous for that face.’”
Hargitay said she was still determined to land that Friends-type role, however. “I said, ‘Uh, no.’ I live in L.A. and I’m going to be a comedian,” she recalled.
“Six months later, swear to God… I got SVU.”
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