Copyright Parade
Mariska Hargitay has accomplished a lot throughout her professional career, and she recently boldly declared that her documentary, My Mom Jayne, is the “best thing” she’s ever done. “I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. And I think it was my life’s work in many ways,” Hargitay, 61, said of the project, which documents the life of her late mom, Jayne Mansfield, during a post-screening Q&A at the Wythe hotel in New York City on Tuesday, October 21. “I feel like a different human being since I made the film. I do. It’s cleared a lot of space, and I learned so much. It was such an extraordinary process.” While the film is about her own family’s history, Hargitay explained that she has loved hearing feedback from viewers. “I hope that people come away with the universality of the film, and they realize it’s a family story. I’d like to think of it as a gentle invitation to look at our own families,” she said. “And that’s what has been the biggest through line is that people have said, ‘I never thought I could, but now I think I can.'” As for producer Trish Adlesic, she said that the “life is all about relationships,” which is a moral reflected in the film. “And sometimes they get fractured. They get harmed along the way, and we walk away. And we’re like, ‘Ah, I’m not going to deal with it,'” she said. “And I think [this film] is just an opportunity to take some space to think about it, and consider maybe making that call or writing that letter.” While promoting the documentary that she appeared in and directed, which was released on HBO in June, Hargitay admitted she didn’t have many memories of her mother since she died in a car accident when the Law & Order: SVU star was only 3 years old. “I have a couple of memories that — I don’t know if they’re memories or they’re photographs or they’re something that I wish happened or a fragment of a memory,” she said while appearing on the June 25 episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. “It’s been a life of longing for her and trying to reconstruct connection.” She continued, “I say in the movie, losing my mother felt like having a hole in your heart. So it’s been a life of navigating that and trying to figure [it] out.” Parade Daily🎬 SIGN UP for Parade’s Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬 Hargitay also previously opened up about her mother’s death while speaking to Glamour in 2021, revealing that she viewed the lessons she learned from Mansfield’s passing as her “superpower.” “I think I learned about crisis very young, and I learned very young that s–t happens and there’s no guarantees, and we keep going. And then we transform it,” she said at the time. “That’s been kind of my superpower, and the gift of having trauma early in life.”
