Even Ice-T thinks Law & Order: Special Victims Unit characters Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler deserve a love story.
“Y’all haven’t hooked up yet at all?” Ice-T, 65, quipped to costar Mariska Hargitay during an interview for Entertainment Weekly published on Monday, February 5, about Benson and Stabler’s onscreen relationship. “Close, right? Almost a kiss?”
Hargitay, 60, has played Benson for all 25 seasons of SVU while Christopher Meloni appeared as Stabler from 1999 to 2011. Meloni, 62, has since reprised his role for SVU and Law & Order: Organized Crime.
“No, just two times in season 4!” Hargitay joked. “No. We have not hooked up.”
Throughout the show’s 25-year tenure, fans have hoped that Benson and Stabler would become more than just partners on the job. While they’ve yet to cross the line of friendship, the characters have had what Hargitay referred to as “a close call.”
“I think that they early had, kind of, a thing going,” Ice-T — who’s played Odafin Tutuola on SVU since 2000 — said. “That was allowed to grow without.”
Ice-T proved himself to be a Benson and Stabler shipper as he asked Hargitay why her onscreen persona hasn’t crossed that line just yet.
“Did you kiss? Almost?” Ice-T said, stirring the pot, when referring to a season 24 moment between Benson and Stabler where she stopped short before they shared a kiss.
“Yes. Almost,” Hargitay admitted. Ice-T went on to say that he’s “waiting” for the Benson and Stabler romance to come to fruition.
“[On] my social media, people think this show’s real. They’re like, ‘Yo, tell Chris to come back.’ I’m like, ‘I’m not Dick Wolf. I can’t tell Chris just to come… that’s not how it works!'” Ice-T joked. “But yeah, I’m waiting. Fans are waiting. My fans are like, ‘Tell Mariska to go over to OC and give Chris some lovin’.'”
While it’s unclear what’s in store for Benson as SVU season 25 continues, Hargitay teased that her character might just be in her Taylor Swift Lover era at the moment.
“Yeah, go with it,” she told Us Weekly exclusively at the SVU 25th Anniversary Celebration last month. “I was listening to [Lover] last night as I was running on the treadmill. I listened to also 1989 because that’s good to run to.”
Hargitay is a public supporter of Swift, 34, and the two A-listers are also real-life friends.
“My favorite one is, I don’t know what album this is, sorry, ‘Invisible String.’ That’s my song with my children,” she gushed, referring to kids August, 17, Amaya, 12, and Andrew, 11, whom she shares with husband Peter Hermann. “Really gorgeous.”
