Mariska Hargitay is most synonymous with NBC‘s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where she’s spent the last two and a half decades playing Captain Olivia Benson. Behind the scenes, Hargitay has also served as an advocate for survivors of sexual assault through her Joyful Heart Foundation as well as her documentary, I Am Evidence. Now, Hargitay‘s feature film directorial debut is a documentary about her mother, actress Jayne Mansfield, who tragically died in a car crash when Hargitay was just three years old. The documentary, My Mom Jayne, premieres June 27 on HBO and will also be available to stream on Max. The documentary comes from Hargitay and her I Am Evidence producer Trish Adlesic. Now, we have our first trailer.
In the trailer, Hargitay details her journey reclaiming the story of her mother, after spending so much of her life distancing herself from her mother’s public persona as a bombshell and sex symbol. Because Hargitay was so young when Mansfield died, Hargitay explains that she doesn’t remember much about her mother, not in a real tangible memory type of way. She says she’s “envious” of her older siblings that do. Hargitay is joined in the documentary by her siblings, Jayne Marie Mansfield, Mickey Hargitay, Jr., Zoltan Hargitay, and Tony Cimber, along with her stepmother, Ellen Hargitay; and Mansfield’s press secretary, Raymond “Rusty” Strait. In addition to hearing from those who knew Mansfield, the documentary will feature never-before-seen photos and home movies as Hargitay reconciles her late mother’s public and private personas.
Mariska Hargitay Assembles a New Image of Her Mother in ‘My Mom Jayne’ Documentary
In an interview with Vanity Fair that went live during the debut of Hargitay‘s documentary at the Cannes Film Festival, Hargitay reveals a family secret made known in the documentary. As she reflected on that part of her and the need to make the documentary in the first place, she tells Vanity Fair, “so many people were really hesitant for me to do it.” Ultimately, though, as Hargitay recalls watching a screening of the documentary with her siblings, it was viewed as a catharsis. “Memory fragments you in so many ways, so to see the story organized felt like, “Oh, now we can deal with that.'”
Debuting the documentary at Cannes was also special for Hargitay, as her mother was famously photographed there in 1958. “The fact that I get to take her back and to tell her story there, I just don’t have the words.” In the documentary, interviews with her siblings remind audiences that Mansfield wasn’t just a pretty face or sex symbol, she was smart and the public parts of her were just as Mansfield explains in an archival clip shown in the trailer that “the public pays to see me a certain way.” Now, Hargitay is aims to reclaim her mother’s story and her own in My Mom Jayne.
My Mom Jayne premieres on HBO June 27 and will stream on Max. View the trailer above.
via Collider