LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT’s Octavio Pisano on the ‘Gift’ of Being Directed By Mariska Hargitay

[This interview was conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike.]

After two seasons of playing Detective Joe Velasco on LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, Octavio Pisano acknowledges he’s still learning new facets of his character.

“Well, it changed a little bit just because the writers changed; the journey’s changed,” Pisano tells Give Me My Remote. “He’s not as clear as I thought he was when I first started. When I first started, I thought he had very clear intentions and lines; the box he inhabited was very well-defined. Now, I think it’s more like a circle—and I think it kind of is a little wobbly. A lot of things that are coming out from his past that are making me feel like he had a mask [when we first met him], even to himself.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Looking back at season 24, specifically, the actor is quick to cite “King of the Moon”—where Velasco was interrogated by his colleagues about his role in a double homicide—as his personal favorite hour.

“It was a gift to be directed by Mariska [Hargitay], who is not only a mentor to me, but my scene partner and a friend,” he says. “It’s a different thing when an actor is in a scene with you, as opposed to a director seeing it from the outside. But then that actor taking the director’s chair and knowing how you operate, knowing how you work inside, intimately, on a scene, and then having her watch over you, and giving you [the okay to] basically take the lid off, take the ceiling off, and be free—it was amazing. It was a masterclass.”

And its impact on the actor extended beyond that episode. Watching Hargitay, who has directed eight episodes of the NBC drama, step behind the camera “definitely opened my mind up,” Pisano shares. “I’ve always been curious [about] directing. And watching her, watching her process, and watching her shadow directors, always asking questions to the camera crew, to everyone—she’s kind of inspired me, and gave me permission to say, ‘Okay, I can do this, too. I can step into that role as well.’”

LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, Season Premiere, Thursday, January 18, 9/8c, NBC

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