Mariska Hargitay Says She Made My Mom Jayne in 2.5 Years After Spending Her ‘Entire Life’ Preparing: ‘Batting All These Demons’

More than 50 years after the death of her mother, Mariska Hargitay decided she was ready to share her story.

Hargitay, who has been empowering audiences for 27 seasons as Olivia Benson on NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, is the daughter of Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield, who died in 1967 at age 34 in a car accident.

This past June, Hargitay released My Mom Jayne — a stunning portrait of the mother she never knew — and a reclamation of her own story, too. As the documentary continues to screen at various award-bellwether film festivals this fall, the SVU actress, 61, is reflecting on what went into making the documentary.

“I feel like people say, how long have you been preparing to make this movie? And there’s two answers. I made the movie in two and a half years, and I’ve been preparing to make it my entire life. I feel like that’s what I’ve been doing is getting ready to make it, building the infrastructure inside me so I could tell the story in a clear, concise way while battling all these demons,” Hargitay said during a panel on day one of Hello Sunshine’s Third Annual Shine Away Event Connected by AT&T.

The two-time Emmy winner also shared that the idea for the documentary came to her during the pandemic, when she had time to examine her family’s history a bit closer. She began to confront “some things that I sort of pushed away,” which included boxes filled with photographs of her mother and letters from people who had known her.

“I finally opened this box, and I was so scared of it because it was like Pandora’s box to me. And I opened it up, and I started reading these letters and one of the letters said to me, ‘Dear Mariska, I played violin with your mother in high school, and I used to sit outside her driveway and listen to her play,’ ” Hargitay recalled. “And I was just so bowled over [by] this idea of my mother being this extraordinary musician that [she] inspired her friend to do that.”

Hargitay then began cold-calling people who had written to her about her mom over the years in the hopes they’d be willing to speak to her.

“I got a hold of probably four people and had extraordinary conversations with them … It was like somebody handing me a piece of her, of my mother that I had yearned for for so long, and at the same time [she] was the thing I pushed away,” Hargitay said.

Hargitay also knew that in choosing to make the film, she had to be wholly ready — equipped with the skills to navigate and parse through inevitable discoveries about her mother and herself.

“[This] has been cathartic and extraordinary and scary and bumpy, and that’s why I talk about shoring myself up and making sure that I had the infrastructure internally to make this film,” she said. “I didn’t want to re-injure myself or my family, quite frankly.”

“I went into something that I was so afraid of — I was so afraid of it — and then I went ‘Either I live like this and I carry it for the rest of my life, or, as we all know, the only way out is through.’ And so I thought only way I’m going to ever be free and unburden myself is to find out what happened. And [I] was yearning and longing so much for my mom, to figure out who she was [and] where do I come from? Who am I?”

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My Mom Jayne is streaming now on HBO Max.