Mariska Hargitay’s ‘My Mom Jayne’ Competes For 3 Primetime Emmys

As Mariska Hargitay reflects on the past year in her life – a momentous one for the actress and filmmaker – a word comes to her mind to describe it: “cathartic.”

She completed her 27^th season starring as Capt. Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU and in May made her Broadway debut in the drama Every Brilliant Thing – both exceptional achievements. But the catharsis emerged through an even more personal endeavor: her nonfiction directorial debut My Mom Jayne. The HBO documentary, an intimate exploration of Hargitay’s mother, the late actress Jayne Mansfield, and of a mystery surrounding the identity of Hargitay’s father, has earned three Primetime Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Nonfiction Program.

“The film has been, for me, the gift that just keeps on giving,” she tells Deadline. “It was an archeological dig of me not knowing what I was going to find, hoping that I had the internal architecture to support myself… Going into the unknown and not knowing what the other side was going to look like, it’s been so extraordinary to come out the other side with the results beyond my even dreams or comprehension, not knowing that the film would resonate with so many people the way it has.”

Hargitay was just three years old when her mother was tragically killed in an auto accident outside New Orleans in 1967. Mariska and her two older brothers, Zoltán and Miklos (Mickey Jr.), were in the back seat of the vehicle but survived. Mariska and her older siblings were raised by Mickey Hargitay Sr., the man she grew up believing to be her biological father.

Jayne Mansfield possessed great beauty and talent. She was multilingual and played classical piano and violin, but her exceptional good looks and curvaceous figure limited how the men who ran Hollywood perceived her. Mansfield accommodated herself to the sex symbol persona. In the film, Hargitay recalls growing up without her mom and becoming uncomfortable with how Mansfield had presented on screen.

“I didn’t really appreciate the sort of bombshell image and didn’t like some of the [acting] choices she made,” Hargitay told us at the Cannes Film Festival, where My Mom Jayne premiered. “I felt myself being embarrassed by her and just wanting a normal mom and a regular mom and ‘pick me up from school’ and like that… I just felt like I dissociated myself and said, yeah, I don’t want to be part of that, and I want to do it differently.”

In the course of the film, Hargitay reevaluates her mom, forming a fuller picture of how Mansfield’s career choices were circumscribed by the egregious sexism of the 1950s and ‘60s. She also explores her mother’s complicated love life, and the blended family Jayne raised that included Mickey Hargitay’s daughter by his first wife. The honesty of the portrayal, coupled with the reality that many people experience blended families or complicated family dynamics has allowed viewers to connect with the film.

“You could say, ‘Oh, [this story is] about Jayne Mansfield, a movie star in the ’50s and her TV star daughter’; that’s not what the movie is about. It’s a family film. It’s a story about generational trauma, and it’s a story about identity and recovery and reclamation and forgiveness and so many things,” Hargitay says, expressing pride in “the way the film has been received and the way that people have said, ‘That’s my story,’ and the spark that has led people to investigate their own families to uncover their family secrets or just deal with them or just look at them closer.”

Hargitay captures on screen her reaction to learning as an adult that Mickey Hargitay in fact wasn’t her biological father. Her dad was Nelson Sardelli, a Brazilian singer with whom Jayne Mansfield became romantically involved during a break from her marriage to Hargitay. That revelation triggered conflicting emotions in Mariska, who felt intensely loyal to Mickey Hargitay as her loving father and didn’t want it to seem as if, somehow, she were turning her back on him.

“When we keep secrets, I think that occupies a big part of our psyche — knowingly and unconsciously,” Hargitay observes. “Holding this secret and feeling bad about it and knowing that there was a part of me that just wasn’t clear and allowing myself to be my authentic self — but out of duty thinking this is how it had to be to honor my father. And then when I came to the realization like, no, no, no, that secret isn’t honoring anyone. We have to tell the secret.”

She adds, “I wanted to make a love letter for my father, Mickey. That’s what I wanted to do. But in the process, it turned out to really be a love letter to all three of them [Jayne, Nelson, and Mickey] because the film deals with the complexity of the human condition, the real complexities of what it is to be human and how two things can be true at once.”

In My Mom Jayne, Mariska connects with Nelson Sardelli, and the half-sisters she never knew she had.

“It was very cathartic and mind-blowing to hear Nelson’s side of the story and understanding why he made the decisions that he made and how complex the decisions were for all three of them in so many ways,” she shares. “I was freed up; I felt like this giant exhale.”

The freeing of psychic space has allowed Hargitay to pursue new avenues of creativity. She made her Broadway debut 40 years after her late mother had done the same.

“She was 22 [when she made her debut] and I was 62. That was also a deeply extraordinary feeling for me,” Hargitay affirms. “And when I went to Broadway, one of the things that I took with me was a plaque that she got that said ‘Broadway’s Rising Star 1955.’ And so every night I would hold that before I went [on stage].”

Hargitay will continue an extraordinary year by embarking on the 28^th season of Law & Order: SVU and taking on another major challenge – hosting the Primetime Emmy Awards on NBC on Monday, Sept. 14.

We’ll have more on Mariska’s plans for hosting the show in a separate piece we’ll publish on Tuesday. She won’t be simultaneously hosting and hearing announcements of winners in the documentary categories – those are presented at the Creative Arts Emmys ceremony in Los Angeles on Sept. 5 and 6.