Longtime Law & Order: Special Victims Unit viewers might have Bensler on the brain — but Mariska Hargitay’s husband, Peter Hermann, isn’t bothered.
Hargitay and her longtime co-star, Christopher Meloni, first met during the audition process for Law & Order: SVU 25 years ago. They both starred on the Dick Wolf procedural for 12 seasons, and even though Meloni left Law & Order: SVU in 2011, he is now starring in Law & Order: Organized Crime, giving new hope that their characters, Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler, might finally get together.
How Peter Hermann feels about Bensler shippers
Hargitay and Meloni’s onscreen chemistry has made their characters’ special bond a fan favorite over the years, so much so that the duo have been nicknamed Bensler. Since Hargitay has such a strong connection with her fellow actor and friend, how does her real life husband feel about the Law & Order stars’ close connection?
“We make it work,” Hermann joked during an interview with E! News back in 2021. “Sometimes Chris and I have some things to negotiate but we’ve gotten really good at communicating with each other. There’s a lot of give and take. Kind of in the end all three of us are really happy.”
Hargitay and Hermann will celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary this August, and Meloni has been there since the beginning. The two met on the set of SVU, when Hermann played defense attorney Trevor Langan.
How did Mariska Hargitay meet her husband, Peter Hermann?
“This is the Peter story, from my perspective,” Meloni told People in 2021. “He’s on the show as a guest actor, and I’m looking at her, looking at him, and I’m seeing how she’s acting, right? I know her, and I’m like, ‘Oh boy. Here we go.’ And she’s just, ‘Tee-hee, tee-hee, I don’t even care about him or anything like that.’”
“I just thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s like I’m back in high school, or even grade school,’” he recalled. “Sure enough, they start dating.”
Meloni also recalled how Hargitay and Hermann almost split, but even during their relationship’s rocky period, he knew the two of them would eventually get married: “The whole time, the [thought] bubble in my head was just: ‘You’ll be married within five months.’ That’s all I was thinking. I knew. I knew,” Meloni said.
And he was right. After two years of dating, Hargitay and Hermann got married on August 28, 2004, in Santa Barbara, California — and they are still sharing cute kisses in front of the Empire State Building all these years later.
“We got married, and we knew that it was going to be good, and I think we both knew, sort of, what we found. We sort of knew that we found the right one,” Hargitay told People in 2019. “I never thought it could be this good, and I never knew that I’d be reminded on the journey, that I’d marry the right one. That I waited and married the right one and it’s better than I thought it was.”
With this current setup it seems everyone is happy. Hargitay and Hermann have their own offscreen real-life romantic relationship, but SVU fans will always have Bensler.
