‘What the f— is going on?’

Even after starring on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit for 26 years, nothing could have prepared Ice-T for the upcoming season 27 premiere.

“I show up this season in the first episode. I get my ass beaten and end up in the hospital. So I’m like, what the f— is going on?” the legendary rapper and screen star tells Entertainment Weekly.

The man behind SVU‘s Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola elaborates, “I wasn’t in the second episode. I come back in the third episode, but you really don’t know. The people that are doing that show, it’s an ensemble cast, and they move us around.”

It’s true that Ice hasn’t appeared in absolutely every one of SVU‘s 570+ episodes. He joined Dick Wolf‘s spinoff to the wildly successful anchor series, Law & Order, in 2000 when it was in its second season. Baring Mariska Hargitay, who has been with the series since the very start and has never taken a hiatus, Ice is about as veteran as you can get on SVU, and in contemporary TV more broadly.

He says he still gladly returns each year to solve more crimes and advocate for some of New York City’s most precarious victims. And he’ll keep returning, “as long as I don’t get shot in the head,” he jokes.

“As long as you stay on Dick Wolf’s good side, you’ll probably be employed. We’re excited, and we’re off to a good start,” he notes, adding that even if an actor’s tenure on one Wolf-produced series doesn’t work out, there’s a panoply of others to jump to. “The cool thing about the Wolf universe is you could die on SVU and come back in Chicago Fire, you know?”

One of his former SVU costars, Juliana Aidén Martinez, recently made a similar move. Martinez played Jr. Det. Kate Silva on season 26 of SVU, but won’t be giving the series a sophomore try. Instead, she’ll be trading her NYPD badge for an FBI badge, as she’s joined the cast of the upcoming eighth season of Wolf’s police procedural FBI as a series regular.

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Beyond his duties cleaning up the Big Apple’s biggest messes, Ice-T is also hosting the documentary special Fame and Fentanyl, which premieres on A&E tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT. The harrowing special explores the premature deaths of stars like Michael K. Williams and Coolio, friends of Ice-T’s who both had the potent opioid show up in their postmortem toxicology reports.

“When you start losing people, you know, it matters,” he tells EW of wanting to get involved. “Hopefully this doc will really blast it out to more people to understand that this is not a game at all.”

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit season 27 premieres Thursday, Sept. 25, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on NBC, with new episodes streaming on Peacock the following day.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly