LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT Post-Mortem: Maurice Compte on Duarte and Olivia’s Different Approaches to Taking Down BX9

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Thursday, January 5 episode of LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, “Jumped In.”]

Olivia (Mariska Hargitay) got one step closer to getting to the bottom of her attack by a group of BX9ers on the Thursday, January 5 episode of LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT.

The SVU captain was jumped by a group of gang members in the opening moments of the episode, “Jumped In,” and shot one in the knee in self-defense; when Noah (Ryan Buggle) tried to call out for his mother, the other young men grabbed their shot friend and got away.

Bronx Captain Mike Duarte (Maurice Compte), as well as SVU’s Muncy (Molly Burnett) and Velasco (Octavio Pisano), finally tracked the injured young man down…with his wound infected. The kid pulled through his surgery—albeit with the need for a new knee—and Olivia decided to help him out.

“Olivia’s Olivia—that’s literally spoken how Duarte would being saying it,” Compte tells Give Me My Remote with a laugh. “She’s gonna go and try to save this kid. What else would you expect from her? These are children. But…it’s a lot more tangled than that, and I think that Olivia still doesn’t get how big and how dark this thing is.”

“She’s, again, looking at this one kid,” he continues, drawing a parallel to the last case Duarte and Olivia worked together, when she prioritized getting justice for a survivor. “This thing is bigger than all of us. We need to destroy this entire thing. But she was just after justice and it’s understandable; I think that the audience gets taken in, along with Benson, to see the vastness of this [gang] world, and how it’s in the shadows, how organized it’s become.”

Over the next two parts of the BX9 trilogy, “the gang problem is so vast that they really get into, to some extent, explaining…the complexity that can potentially exist when you’re dealing with these organizations in terms of gangs, the people that comprise these organizations; the humans behind them and the driving forces,” Compte says.

For the actor, he has a personal connection with this kind of storytelling. “I was raised by my grandmother, and I ended up in this realm,” Compte says. “But I wouldn’t want to go back and do it again, because there’s no guarantee that I would end up here. The streets, especially growing up in the ’80s and the ’90s in Miami, were very much the Wild West. A lot of children grew up without parental supervision. So it was children pretty much raising children. When you grew up in that environment, anything goes.”

“When you deal with a person like Olivia Benson, who is out for redemption and saving people, especially children, it becomes gripping,” he continues.”[She is looking at] what the right thing to do is. For Duarte, I think, [he’s] more cut and dried. He’s been dealing with this for so long, that part of his humanity has become callous. But for Olivia, this stuff is fresh and new, and she’s really trying to make a difference.”

Which means as the duo work the case together over the next two episodes, things will get fiery, as they figure out the right approach.

“Listen, Duarte and Olivia are two A-types; they’re two predators, they’re two lions,” Compte notes. “There’s something very attractive in that realm, when you meet somebody who you feel you can connect to it that way. Things unfold in the way they unfold, because even when you meet somebody and you’re completely attracted to them…life seems to intercede many times. So that’s what the dance is about.”

LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC

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