Mariska Hargitay and Chris Meloni’s Sweetest Quotes About Each Other

An unbreakable bond — on and off conceal. Mariska Hargitay and Chris Meloni first met on the dwelling of Law & Portray: Particular Victims Unit in 1999, once they had been forged as Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler, respectively.

“I truly maintain a million recollections from the pilot, especially the rapid chemistry with Chris. We had been filming within the Meatpacking District, and it became once truly sizzling and raining, so we all needed to wear baseball caps,” Hargitay recalled to TV Insider in 2018. “I became once going, ‘How lucky is this California girl to be taking pictures a tv series in Contemporary York with this unbelievable actor and unbelievable crew!’”

For years on the series, fans important their characters to near together romantically, something that by no method came about. As a replace, Elliot and Liv fashioned a reputedly unbreakable working relationship and friendship — till he all in an instant left the unit at the tip of season 12.

Meloni exited the NBC drama in 2011, selecting to focal level on other initiatives. Restful, the actor’s relationship with Hargitay remained and the pair reunited on many occasions, in most cases snapping selfies and sharing them on social media for the longtime fans.

Meloni returned to SVU for the first time in 10 years in an April 2021 episode earlier than kicking off his new series, Law & Portray: Organized Crime. He printed that he ravishing felt it became once time to utter Stabler abet — something that became once confirmed all over his first night time of taking pictures, when he stepped out of his trailer and a woman saw him on the avenue.

“She goes, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God,’ and he or she starts hyperventilating. Tears originate swelling and forming in her eyes,” he told TVLine in March 2021. “I’m cherish, ‘Howdy, how you doing?’ She goes, ‘No, you don’t designate: You’re the goal I became a cop.’ That became once my introduction abet to the meaning and the energy and the disclose that my personality — and our characters — maintain held within the consciousness of many of us. It became once good.”

Hargitay, meanwhile, confirmed in January 2022 that fans should always now not the final observe ones who feel the chemistry between Benson and Stabler.

“Olivia Benson is wreck! I imply, he left me in a lurch for 10 years. She’s paralyzed,” she defined on The Drew Barrymore Train. “The energy’s there. Olivia’s been in cherish with him for many a year and I maintain that we’re slowly discovering our method abet to it, nonetheless I are looking out to give him the amount of time he wants to grieve Kathy Stabler.”

Scroll by the gallery below for more of their finest quotes about their end friendship: