Mariska Hargitay gives update on relationship with her dad after bombshell documentary

Key Points

• Mariska Hargitay shares an update on her relationship with her biological father, La Vegas entertainer Nelson Sardelli.

• In the 2025 documentary, My Mom, Jayne, she revealed her true parentage — previously a family secret — and that Mickey Hargitay, who raised her as his own, had denied it.

• The actress met Sardelli three decades ago, and they since “have arrived at a really beautiful place,” she tells PEOPLE.

Mariska Hargitay has a lot to celebrate this Father’s Day.

A year ago, the Law & Order: SVU star dropped the bombshell that actor Mickey Hargitay was not her biological dad. In the 2025 documentary, My Mom, Jayne, Mariska revealed she was conceived during a relationship her mother Jayne Mansfield had with Las Vegas entertainer Nelson Sardelli while separated from Hargitay, whom she went on to divorce in 1964.

Now, after three decades of keeping the paternity secret to themselves, the father and daughter “have arrived at a really beautiful place,” Hargitay tells PEOPLE in a new interview.

Several times a year she travels from New York to Las Vegas to visit Sardelli, now 91. “I just saw him a few weeks ago,” revealed the actress. While in town to catch The Eagles at the Sphere, “I surprised him. He was so happy… Every moment is a gift and he’s very funny, and so we have a lot in common and we always laugh.”

Hargitay’s relationship with Sardelli has been particularly easy-going ever since the two officially met when she was 30.

Five years earlier, she had suspected the Brazilian-born singer might be her father after a Mansfield superfan showed Hargitay a photo of “Nelson,” assuming she knew him.

The actress recalled in My Mom, Jayne how her resemblance to Sardelli was so undeniable, she confronted Mickey Hargitay, who raised Mariska and her two brothers after their mother was killed in a 1967 car accident — but he denied it.

When she finally reconnected with Sardelli, he hardly felt like a stranger. And over the past two decades since Mickey Hargitay’s 2006 death, they have only strengthened their bond.

“He got to say so many things to me that he never thought he would get a chance to say,” Hargitay said of Sardelli, who has three other daughters. “It’s an extraordinarily deep relationship and complex, but nothing has been left unsaid and so it feels clear and clean.”

Sardelli is cheering on his daughter as she embarks on her latest achievement, her Broadway debut in Every Brilliant Thing, a one-person play exploring love and loss. “He’s very excited,” Hargitay gushed to PEOPLE. “I think he’s always very excited when I’m doing new things.”

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At 62, the actress is following the footsteps of her late mother, who was a 22-year-old divorcee with two children when she costarred with Walter Matthau in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter. Mansfield not only won a Theatre World Award for her stage performance in the comedy, she was cast in its film adaptation.

“I used to see myself as so different from how she was and that I wanted to do it differently, and that my career was serious and this is how I do it — and that’s how you did it and that’s fine, but that’s not how I’m doing it,” Hargitay said of her mother.

“And now I feel like, ‘You were so amazing. You were so young and determined and fearless.'”

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