Law & Order SVU star Mariska Hargitay recently reflected on her long friendship with Chris Meloni. While reminiscing, she remembered that one of her fondest SVU memories wasn’t even in the script.

How Mariska Hargitay reacted to this unscripted ‘Law & Order SVU’ scene

In a very recent interview with Vanity Fair, Hargitay touched on her heavily praised work in Law & Order SVU. She also couldn’t help but gush about her work with Meloni. They found a quick connection as the duo Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler that led to one of television’s most iconic partnerships.

“I think Chris and I, Benson and Stabler, at the end of the day, it’s all the same,” she said. “In the relationship, whether it was acting or being partners, there was a level of trust. If I had, like, six dots and this was him and this was me, and then you connect the dots, they connected in so many ways: acting partners, friends, comedians, people that hold each other accountable. We almost had our own language. I mean, here we were for these 12 years, and we spent more time with each other than our spouses. All day we were making this thing together, all day long that we built together, that we created together.”

In the show’s earlier seasons, there was one SVU scene that stood out to Hargitay. It was a sequence where Stabler hugged Benson for the first time.

“If I’m correct, I think that’s the first time we ever hugged on the show,” she said. “And he surprised me with it, and it was so right. And in that scene, I think it’s somewhere where you can really feel everything unspoken, almost more than the spoken word.”

“Chris and I were very careful and very judicious [about] the way we interacted physically [on screen],” she added.