Fan reveals she was wearing Law and Order: SVU shirt when she ran into Mariska Hargitay on plane

‘She was nice, I’m not even joking, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met’

A fan has shared that while she was wearing a Law and Order: SVU shirt on a plane, she ended up running into the show’s star, Mariska Hargitay.

Taylor, @itstaylorcolson, shared a video on TikTok on Monday that featured photos of her and the actor. She also shared a picture of her posing in the T-shirt, which had Hargitay’s character, Olivia Benson, and the detective’s former love interest, Eliot Stabler, who was played by Chris Meloni, on it.

Throughout the TikTok clip, Taylor shared some texts that she had with her peers about the interaction, with one of her friends expressing their hopes that Hargitay would post the picture of the shirt on her Instagram Story. Lo and behold, she then revealed in her TikTok post that Hargitay did share that photo of Taylor on her social media account.

Taylor praised the experience on the plane in the caption of the video, which is set to Meghan Trainor’s newest song, “Mother”. She wrote: “WHEN YOU ARE WEARING YOUR SVU SHIRT & OLIVIA BENSON IS ON YOUR FLIGHT. Mariska is my mother.”

As of 22 March, the video has more than 1.3m views, with TikTok users in the comments praising the viral interaction between the actor and fan.

“How does it feel living everybody’s dream?” one wrote, while another added: “It looks like mariska is meeting you lmao.”

A third added: “Omg to meet Olivia Benson while wearing Olivia Benson…you are living the dream.”

After Hargitay posted the photo of the fan on her Instagram Story, people also went to Twitter to figure out who she was and called her “shirt girl”, before they discovered Taylor’s TikTok video.

Speaking to The Independent, Taylor expressed how shocked she was to learn about her new nickname on social media.  “After I posted my TikTok and it started to get attention, my DMs were flooded with messages about how I was ‘Twitter famous’ as ‘shirt girl,’ she said. “I could not even believe the tweets that I was reading about how excited people were to find out who ‘shirt girl’ was.”

Taylor also shared a follow-up video about the interaction, explaining how she saw Hargitay on a flight from Los Angeles, California to Nashville, Tennessee. As she recalled how she spotted the actor while wearing the shirt, she also emphasised that she’s the “biggest SVU fan” and that she’s watched every episode “20 times”.

She noted that while she normally wouldn’t go up to celebrities, she decided to approach Hargitay and show her her shirt. After describing how Hargitay took a photo of her, Taylor went on to recall how the actor told her that she’d never seen someone in a SVU-themed shirt.

Taylor then acknowledged how kind Hargitay was, adding: “She was nice, I’m not even joking, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. And she’s like, ‘After the flight, we need to take a photo because you deserve it.’”

She then said that once she discovered that she was on Hargitay’s Instagram story, it was “the best thing [she’s] ever seen”.

Along with emphasising how nice Hargitay was, she also said that the director’s children, who she met on the plane, were “really cute”. The 59-year-old is a mother of two sons, August, 16, and Andrew, 11, and one daughter, Amaya, 11, whom she shares with husband Peter Hermann.

In her TikTok video, Taylor concluded her remarks by noting how lucky she was to meet the Law and Order star.

“They say don’t meet your heroes, and I did, and she was amazing,” she concluded. “The stars really aligned for that one, I don’t know what the odds [are].”