Donna Lynne Champlin guest stars in Law & Order: SVU Season 26 Episode 14 as Megan, a tourist who’s attacked on her trip to New York. But she’s maybe not quite what you’d expect. In the first place, the character “is just up in everybody’s grill the whole episode.” And that’s something the actress told us she “really dug” about this part because, while episodes often step away from the victims to spend some time focusing on the investigation or even courtroom procedures, her character “will not be back-burnered in any way, shape or form.”
But that’s not the only reason Champlin was excited to play this character. “Another thing that was important to me,” she told us, was that “Megan, who is basically just…a normal-looking middle-aged woman, had three dimensions. Three full dimensions.” That’s not always a guarantee. “I find sometimes, you know, middle-aged women from the middle of the country…they aren’t as well-represented as they could be on screen.” Those types of characters can have “one dimension, maybe two,” and they wind up being “usually ancillary characters.”
Donna Lynne Champlin on filming Law & Order: SVU Season 26 Episode 14
When Champlin previewed her episode for us during our interview, she told us “the overarching theme is…what do you do when your victim doesn’t act like a ‘normal’ victim? And…does that help the defense?” Or, “what if the victim is in such a state that they keep doing things that hurt their own case?” That makes it “an Olympic sport, actor-wise, this episode. And it was just so thrilling to do that because…I’m not asked to do that — or I haven’t been asked to do that.”
Playing someone like Megan was “exciting to just [be able to] go, ‘oh, wow, you know, she turns on a dime.’ She’s like at zero; then, she’s at 100. And she’s, like, doing all this stuff that…everyone keeps going: ‘What is she doing? Why is she doing that? What’s going on? Why did you do that?’ …and she’s just like, ‘why wouldn’t I do that?'” Basically, Megan’s just “a clearly intelligent, normal, under normal circumstances totally functioning woman, when put in a situation that is beyond what she can handle emotionally, mentally, physically… just starts doing all this bats—t stuff — which, to her, makes total sense.”
When we asked Champlin if anything else stood out about working on Law & Order: SVU, she brought up series star and “national treasure” Mariska Hargitay. “I mean, any moment with Mariska is Xanadu,” she told us, calling Hargitay “just an incredible leading lady, amazing actress, and such a beautiful person.” She also shared that she felt “so lucky that a lot of my stuff was with her.” But that’s not all. “I would take a bullet for Mariska, I think, as would anybody on that show. You could just see anybody on that show would take a bullet for her, which is like after 26 years, that’s quite a testament to her character as a person.”
On the flip side (but kinda not), “the most difficult thing [about the experience] was also the most fun thing about this part.” Getting Megan right meant staying away from the expected. But that “was incredibly freeing. Because any choice you make, as long as it’s not the normal choice, is going to work. So that — as an actor, that’s like a playground. I mean, that is just the dream is to go, ‘OK, well, what’s the normal choice here? OK, so. Anything but that.”
Champlin described “the freedom of not doing the wrong take [because] it kind of didn’t exist” as “the best part about the role.” During the process, “we would just do the same take over and over and over with a different choice so that, in post, the EPs and the editors had multiple options for them to craft.” While you never really know which takes are going to wind up in the final cut, “as long as the choice that we made was not the normal or stereotypical choice, we were good.”
Sounds interesting, right?
Don’t miss Donna Lynne Champlin in Law & Order: SVU Season 26 Episode 14. We’ll have more from our interview after the episode airs this Thursday, February 27, at 9/8c on NBC.
