Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion by Susan Green, Randee Dawn Page A
Authors: Susan Green, Randee Dawn
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were independently shorn in season nine—“He did that on his own.”—and Richard Belzer “is really into the textured look for hair.”
The bigger challenges sometimes are reserved for visiting actors. Perkins recalls. “Brian once had to do Orthodox payes (the sideburns worn by Hassidic men),” Perkins recalls. “And in another episode, a guest star had to look like a street urchin.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CLOSE SECONDS
I ’ve gone gray while working on this show,” laments Kent Cassella, who’s been with SVU from the beginning.
His Law & Order odyssey started with “my first audition for the Mother Ship in 1997 or 1998. David Platt was directing an episode about a toxic terrorist threat. Then, in July 1999, I got a call from ( SVU ) Extras Casting to be a stand-in for Dann Florek. They saw from my head shot that I was also going bald. I’m a little shorter than he is but that didn’t seem to matter. I wear clogs and maybe that made us closer in height.”
Ever since, Cassella has been a temporary Captain Cragen while the crew adjusts lights for the next scene. “The main thing is they know I’ll be there when they need me,” he says. “The show prefers to have people they can count on who know the business. It’s not rocket science.”
Kent Cassella
Except in season ten’s “Lunacy,” that is, the story of an errant astronaut.
Cassella also gets to go before the camera from time to time. “I played a character named Eddie Love in ‘Runaway’ (season two),” he recalls. “That was the big joke on the set: ‘It’s Eddie Love! Eddie Love’s here!’ The next year, I did three episodes as Eddie Palmieri, a detective, but everybody still called me Eddie Love.”
As Mariska Hargitay’s quasi-doppelganger since season four, Ellie Scully appreciates the steady gig but regrets that “we’re always on our feet for what can end up being a sixteen-hour day.”
Rick Johnson, subbing for Richard Belzer since 1999, is glad the show helps him fill in the income gaps of his career as a singer-songwriter.
Storm Chambers, who has been doubling for Ice-T since the second season, periodically does SVU extra work as, say, a jury foreperson. Otherwise, the job leaves him time to audition for roles elsewhere, “because you don’t want to be a stand-in for life.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
OUT THERE IN TELEVISIONLAND
A n objective television news icon like CNN’s Anderson Cooper travels the globe to report on the most important issues of the day, yet in a September 2008 interview with USA Weekend he revealed that there’s somehow still time for him to catch one of his three favorite TV programs: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit .
A more subjective source, identified only as “hazel” on the specialvictimsunit.org fan site, observes that “watching ( SVU ) is like going on a roller coaster ride at times.”
This roller coaster may be planetary in its reach. The show has been licensed to more than 200 territories worldwide (though not necessarily airing in all of them right now), including such far-flung lands as Sri Lanka, Fiji, Macau, and Botswana. The Kalahari Desert comprises 70 percent of that African nation, where the wildebeest and the antelope roam, so perhaps SVU ’s themes can transcend almost any geographic or cultural divide.
Back home, another American enthusiast—“chloethereturner,” posting on the svufans.net blog—announced she was writing a college paper about “which psychological aspects are used in the construction of the main characters of the series in the search for identification with the public.”
That academic mouthful, perhaps a topic more appropriate for B.D. Wong’s on-camera shrink to tackle, is offset by less cerebral devotees of the show who periodically chat about their desire for an SVU convention. Sans Spock ears or Klingon lingo, what would such a gathering entail? A murder-mystery scenario worthy of dinner theater? A fake mass arrest of
The bigger challenges sometimes are reserved for visiting actors. Perkins recalls. “Brian once had to do Orthodox payes (the sideburns worn by Hassidic men),” Perkins recalls. “And in another episode, a guest star had to look like a street urchin.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CLOSE SECONDS
I ’ve gone gray while working on this show,” laments Kent Cassella, who’s been with SVU from the beginning.
His Law & Order odyssey started with “my first audition for the Mother Ship in 1997 or 1998. David Platt was directing an episode about a toxic terrorist threat. Then, in July 1999, I got a call from ( SVU ) Extras Casting to be a stand-in for Dann Florek. They saw from my head shot that I was also going bald. I’m a little shorter than he is but that didn’t seem to matter. I wear clogs and maybe that made us closer in height.”
Ever since, Cassella has been a temporary Captain Cragen while the crew adjusts lights for the next scene. “The main thing is they know I’ll be there when they need me,” he says. “The show prefers to have people they can count on who know the business. It’s not rocket science.”
Kent Cassella
Except in season ten’s “Lunacy,” that is, the story of an errant astronaut.
Cassella also gets to go before the camera from time to time. “I played a character named Eddie Love in ‘Runaway’ (season two),” he recalls. “That was the big joke on the set: ‘It’s Eddie Love! Eddie Love’s here!’ The next year, I did three episodes as Eddie Palmieri, a detective, but everybody still called me Eddie Love.”
As Mariska Hargitay’s quasi-doppelganger since season four, Ellie Scully appreciates the steady gig but regrets that “we’re always on our feet for what can end up being a sixteen-hour day.”
Rick Johnson, subbing for Richard Belzer since 1999, is glad the show helps him fill in the income gaps of his career as a singer-songwriter.
Storm Chambers, who has been doubling for Ice-T since the second season, periodically does SVU extra work as, say, a jury foreperson. Otherwise, the job leaves him time to audition for roles elsewhere, “because you don’t want to be a stand-in for life.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
OUT THERE IN TELEVISIONLAND
A n objective television news icon like CNN’s Anderson Cooper travels the globe to report on the most important issues of the day, yet in a September 2008 interview with USA Weekend he revealed that there’s somehow still time for him to catch one of his three favorite TV programs: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit .
A more subjective source, identified only as “hazel” on the specialvictimsunit.org fan site, observes that “watching ( SVU ) is like going on a roller coaster ride at times.”
This roller coaster may be planetary in its reach. The show has been licensed to more than 200 territories worldwide (though not necessarily airing in all of them right now), including such far-flung lands as Sri Lanka, Fiji, Macau, and Botswana. The Kalahari Desert comprises 70 percent of that African nation, where the wildebeest and the antelope roam, so perhaps SVU ’s themes can transcend almost any geographic or cultural divide.
Back home, another American enthusiast—“chloethereturner,” posting on the svufans.net blog—announced she was writing a college paper about “which psychological aspects are used in the construction of the main characters of the series in the search for identification with the public.”
That academic mouthful, perhaps a topic more appropriate for B.D. Wong’s on-camera shrink to tackle, is offset by less cerebral devotees of the show who periodically chat about their desire for an SVU convention. Sans Spock ears or Klingon lingo, what would such a gathering entail? A murder-mystery scenario worthy of dinner theater? A fake mass arrest of
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