Mariska Hargitay knows star power when she sees it.
The “Law & Order: SVU” actor stopped by Amy Poehler’s podcast, “Good Hang,” on Tuesday and recounted two fellow performers she came across who made her go “Holy God.”
Hargitay told Poehler first about meeting actor Abigail Breslin, who was 7 years old when she appeared on “SVU.”
“She was so young on the show. She kept doing this dance between takes … some kind of dance, and I started doing it with her,” Hargitay said. “It was some funny little nursery rhyme schtick. I don’t know what it was, but I would just do it with her, and then they would say ‘Action!’ And I swear to God ― I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.”
Hargitay said that Breslin “would turn” and instantly embody her character.
Mariska Hargitay couldn’t stop gushing over two guest actors.
“One tear, and start lip quivering ― no acting,” she recalled. “I remember going, ‘What the fuck, are you, like, Meryl Streep?’”
After the director yelled cut, Hargitay said, Breslin would just be a regular 7-year-old again and would “go back to her nursery rhyme.”
“I was like, ‘Oh, there’s something. This kid is touched.’ She is so magical,” Hargitay said, before revealing the second actor she met who struck her.
“Another person that I called it ― and I remember saying it to her ― is Meghann Fahy,” Hargitay said of the star who later found fame on “The Bold Type” and “White Lotus.”
“When she did the show, I was like, ‘Let me tell you something. I’m just going to tell you right now, you’re going to be a big movie star. You’re going to be a huge star.’”
Aside from Fahy’s obvious “talent” and “light,” Hargitay said, she “was so sparkly, internally.”
“And there have just been people that have come through where you go, ‘Oh ― oh, wow.’ And it’s almost like an effortless, beautiful light, and it’s so exciting,” she said.
Now, when she sees Breslin, who became an Academy Award nominee at age 10, and Fahy, who won a Screen Actors Guild Award, Hargitary reacts with joy.
“It’s so exciting to see them go on and go, ‘I called it ― I called it!’”
See more of Hargitay’s conversation with Poehler below: