Last, but certainly not least, never mix wine with scissors, a lesson she learned the hard way while shooting season three of SVU: “My hairstylist had a glass of wine and I really should have known better,” she says. “Maybe he’d thought I’d be aerodynamic when I was chasing perps. I have no idea.”
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The resulting pixie nearly cost her job. “We went real short—shorter than anticipated,” she says. “I almost got fired.” Looking at the photos now, she can see how the cut could be seen as “easy, cool, and cop-like.” But would she erase this era if she could go back in time? Definitely.
Throughout our interview, Hargitay had a sunny demeanor while talking about beauty—a stark contrast to her relationship with the concept as she grew up. “My parents were both classically beautiful,” she says. “Growing up with this iconic mother—this sort of legendary beauty and somebody so glamorous—it was a lot.”
That iconic mother, of course, was Jayne Mansfield, the Hollywood bombshell who rose to fame in the 1950s. In her documentary, My Mom Jayne, Hargitay revealed that Mansfield’s on-screen persona ultimately “put her in a box” when it came to her career. “I think she had a tactic and a plan to achieve something, and it didn’t quite pan out,” Hargitay says, explaining that this shaped her own approach to fame. “I’ve learned not to be as accommodating. I learned to call the shots a little bit and not let people put me in a box—any kind of box.”