LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME Post-Mortem: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio on Filming That Jaw-Dropping 'Lago D’Averno' Scene - Give Me My Remote : Give Me My Remote

Give Me My Remote > Law & Order: Organized Crime > LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME Post-Mortem: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio on Filming That Jaw-Dropping ‘Lago D’Averno’ Scene

LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME Post-Mortem: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio on Filming That Jaw-Dropping ‘Lago D’Averno’ Scene

May 8, 2025 by  

Organized Crime Isabella finger cut off

LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME — “Lago D’Averno” Episode 505 — Pictured: (l-r) Dorothy Lyman as Sister Mary Leo-Gene, Mary Elizabeth Mastranonio as Isabella Spezzano — (Photo by: Virginia Sherwood/PEACOCK)

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Thursday, May 8 episode of LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME.]

LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME’s Isabella (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) was able to escape from the Camorra criminal organization—again—but it came at an incredibly high cost.

On the Thursday, May 8 episode, “Lago D’Averno,” Isabella’s brother, Rocco (Anthony Skordi), the head of the Camorras, came to her home looking for Roman (Alberto Frezza). (Roman, Isabella’s grandson, was also involved in the family business.)

Isabella refused to give up her grandson’s location, and Rocco ordered that Sister Mary Leo-Gene—AKA Lucia (Dorothy Lyman), Rocco and Isabella’s sister—get the information out of her. The nun cut off Isabella’s pinky finger and then cauterized the area with a lit cigarette.

When it came to portraying the tension-filled torture scene, “sawing off a finger is often over the top, so I always say, ‘Well, they’ll have to just edit this, because I’m just going to use my imagination,’” Mastrantonio tells Give Me My Remote of tapping into the right emotions for the moment in the video below. “And the thing is…[it was filmed] late in the day. It’s been a very long day, and the location was ages away…So you just have to do it. And then ask how many cameras are going to be on you, because you [need] to know how many times are you gonna have to repeat this?”

“Screaming is easier than crying, by the way,” she continues. “So if you’re just gonna haul off and be hysterical, that’s the thing…people win awards for having gotten angry. And I think, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not the hard part.’ You want to go crazy on camera? Any actor can go crazy on camera for hours. You just go. It’s the control and the measuredness that is more craft than reactions.”



Stabler (Christopher Meloni) arrived at the home before the nun could remove any more appendages from Isabella, and he released his CI from the chair she was bound to. Isabella told Stabler that Rocco had gone to the barn, where her grandkids were hiding out.

Stabler placed a shotgun on Isabella’s lap. “If she moves, shoot her,” he told her about the nun. 

As Elliot made his way to the barn, Roman shot Rocco. While Stabler tried to verify that Roman and Gia were safe, gunshots could be heard. Stabler rushed back to the house, where he found what appeared to be Isabella dead, with her face shot off, and the nun MIA.

Stabler called in a favor to his old friend, Chief M.E. Warner (Tamara Tunie), to get official verification. But he got suspicious when she said there was “not much” evidence of torture to Isabella’s body.

Warner said they ran a familial match with her brother from the crime scene, and Stabler asked whether it was from the body or the severed finger.

“What finger?” Warner asked. 

Stabler pulled up the sheet on the body and saw that the dead woman’s hand was intact. “Never mind,” he said.

With Isabella now in the wind, “she was clearly able to keep thinking,” Mastrantonio points out. “She’s the common denominator for all of this anguish: They really want her [for turning on the family]. I mean, they got to the kids. They’ve wounded them; one is gone. So the only way to stop all of this is for her to disappear.” 

“She’s probably kicking herself for ever having asked for a horse farm,” she continues. “That was probably stupid. That was probably really stupid. So if she ever were to appear [again], I would love it to be in the distance that [Stabler] thinks he sees her, and then when he does a double-take, she’s gone. That’s it.”


Organized Crime Isabella finger cut off

LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME — “Lago D’Averno” Episode 505 — Pictured: (l-r) Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Isabella Spezzano, Chris Meloni as Det. Elliot Stabler — (Photo by: Virginia Sherwood/PEACOCK)

But even though she did achieve her freedom, the toll the ordeal took on Isabella—both physically and with the loss of one grandson/the danger to her other grandkids—could be life-changing.

“If the kids survive, she’ll be okay, because that’s what she’s doing it for; everything else is irrelevant right now,” Mastrantonio says. “I think the material world, the shiny, bold things…she kind of did what they all did—she went for the shiny. I never really thought of this…but she went for this kind of bling. And it’s like, that’s not how you live a quality life, actually. [Instead of living big with the horse farm that makes your location known,] one horse, maybe. A dog.”

Though things were extremely difficult on-screen for Isabella during her ORGANIZED CRIME arc, Mastrantonio relished getting to know and work with Meloni throughout the process, citing it as her favorite part of filming the series. “He’s a lovely man, just a lovely guy,” she says. “Works so hard. Not that I’ve worked with a lot of people that haven’t worked hard, by the way, but [there’s] no [other] side to him. He’s just really there for this franchise that he’s deeply committed to. And this particular arm of it, because he’s…executive producing and he writes; he does a lot of rewrites and stuff. When everybody works hard, it’s really easy to work hard.”

LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME, Thursdays, Peacock.

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