Though fans didn’t know if the actor would ever wear badge No.
Elliot Stabler for the newLaw & Order: Organized Crime.
“This will help with the article.
Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay in ‘Law & Order: SVU’.Will Hart/NBC
Let’s jazz it up.”
Those are all very attractive things."
As for a possible permanent return toSVU, the actor wasn’t interested in investigating that prospect.
Christopher Meloni.Andreas Laszlo Konrath for EW
“That, I didn’t want to do,” says Meloni.
“That felt like going back to what was.
That boat had sailed.”
Danielle Moné Truitt as Sergeant Ayanna Bell, and Christopher Meloni as Detective Elliot Stabler in ‘Law & Order: Organized Crime’.Virginia Sherwood/NBC
So where is Stabler headed?
“It’s an episodic show; the episodes will stand on their own.
But the stories will also play out over the course of a whole season.”
But don’t look for those old tempers to flare again.
“That’s not an attractive thing to watch.”
(Her credits also includeEmpireandThe Handmaid’s Tale.)
But the very first thing [Wolf’s team] said to me is that the show is serialized.
His family, his history, is all very much a part of the show.
That’s the show who this man was, who he is."
(It was revealed in the season 13 premiere that Stabler had responded by retiring.)
Off camera, word circulated that salary negotiations went south, prompting Meloni to unexpectedly quit after the finale.
“It was time,” Meloni says today.
“There were some triggers to it.
But when I walked, I was like, ‘Okay, good.’
That was it.”
“Zero,” he says when asked how much he missedSVU.
“I would have no problem admitting to it.
But I was pleasantly surprised it played out as well as it did.
Because, you know, that’s not how life shakes out, right?
But I must say, the intervening decade was everything I could have hoped for.”
Meloni knew he made the right decision the moment he put on badge 6313 again.
“It felt great, a surprising sense of freedom,” he says.
“It was a very interesting feeling because I rarely get it.
A version of this story appears in the April issue ofEntertainment Weekly, on newsstands now and availablehere.
