Before she was putting people behind bars, she once spent a night there herself.
Mariska Hargitay appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast this week, and told a pretty wild tale from her younger, pre-Detective Olivia Benson years to host Alex Cooper. There are twists and turns aplenty in this one, so we’ll take it step by step.
We begin in 1984, when the 20-year-old Hargitay had been cast in a music video for the pop-country artist Ronnie Milsap‘s song “She Loves My Car.” Accompanying her in the video were performers as diverse as Hervé Villechaize, Britt Ekland, and John Doe and Exene Cervenka from the band X. That has no impact on the story, but it’s further evidence of how wonderfully weird Hollywood can be sometimes.
Ronnie Milsap/Youtube
The shoot went late and Hargitay wanted to get home to say “bon voyage” to her folks, who were taking a trip to Africa. As such, she left the set “full face of makeup, hair out to here, no shoes, like in fishnets and a questionable outfit.” The Emmy winner then added, “I’ve always been known to have a bit of a lead foot.”
She continued, “Stop signs, well, you know, I always saw them as optional,” before saying she’s reformed her ways, but she was in a hurry to get back on this specific evening.
A cop pulled her over and that’s when she confessed, with great regret, that she had $3,000 in outstanding parking tickets.
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Hargitay continued, “At UCLA, I was [frequently] late to class, and I didn’t always use my parking pass because the garage where my classes were was so far away. I was like, ‘I’ll just be fine here. I’ll just really quick go to class and come back out,’ and I would get tickets every day. I was in, like, a fantasy denial world. [So] when this [cop] told me to get out of the car and, of course, I don’t have shoes on, he’s, like, making a lot of judgments about me. He puts me in his car, locks me in the back, and throws me in the clink. [And] I can’t call my parents after I’ve just said, ‘Hey, guys, I’m coming home.'”
Virginia Sherwood/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty
She added that she was just $20 short of having enough cash to make bail, so when she was “in the clink” she decided to “make friends with everyone” and ask them what they were in there for. Soon she had a bunch of new pals who “gave me phone numbers when I got out because, at the time, a friend came and picked me up. And I got everyone’s phone number, and they said, ‘Will you call this person? Will you call this person?'”
Michael Parmelee/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty
As such, when she got home, perhaps still in her Ronnie Milsap music video clothes, she was calling people saying, “Just wanna let you know, your friend is in the Santa Monica jailhouse.”
With that, here’s Ronnie Milsap’s “She Loves My Car.”
To hear more rambunctious tales from Mariska Hargitay, check out the rest of her Call Her Daddy podcast interview below.