Mariska Hargitay has helped people share their stories for years on TV and through her foundation, and now, she wants to share hers.
The trailer for “My Mom Jayne,” the “Law & Order: SVU” star’s documentary about her late mother, Jayne Mansfield, aired exclusively June 3 on “TODAY.”
The HBO film, which premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, is also the first project under Hargitay’s newly launched production company, Mighty Entertainment.
Hargitay narrates the trailer, which opens with black-and-white footage of Mansfield before jumping to video of Hargitay opening boxes and sorting through memorabilia about her mom.
“I’ve spent my whole life distancing myself from my mother, Jayne Mansfield, the sex symbol,” she says, as racy images of Mansfield pop up on screen.
Old news clips and photos document the Hollywood bombshell’s rise to fame.
“I use my pinup-type publicity to get my foot in the door,” Mansfield says in one of the videos.
As an image of Olivia Benson — Hargitay’s famous “SVU” character — appears, the Emmy winner explains that her mother’s path to stardom made her want to carve a much different career for herself in the entertainment industry.
“But I want to understand her now,” Hargitay says.
She then reflects on losing her parents, saying she has no memories of her mom, who died in a car accident in 1967 when Hargitay was 3 years old. Hargitay and two of her brothers, Zoltan and Mickey Jr., were in the car at the time of the accident. Their father, Hungarian bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, raised them and died in 2006.
Hargitay says she’s never talked to her siblings, including the oldest — Jayne Marie, whom Mansfield had with her high school boyfriend turned husband at 17 — about their experiences with their mom.
The trailer shows Hargitay, who also serves as director of the film, respectively settling her brothers and sister in for interviews.
“Anything you ask, you know I’m there for you,” Mickey Jr. says.
“You have all these memories, and I’m envious of that,” Hargitay expresses in another scene to Jayne Marie, who was 16 when Mansfield died.
“In the beginning, I had her to myself,” Jayne Marie says over archival video footage of her with her mom. “She’d take me everywhere.”
Mansfield, who spoke to the press often and especially loved her fans, took her kids almost everywhere she went on the road.
“When you’re a kid, you don’t know anything else,” Mickey Jr. says. “This is life.”
Zoltan says in the trailer that their mother’s playful on-camera persona, which included a put-on, breathy voice, was “actually a character.”
“The public pays to see me a certain way,” Mansfield says in an old clip.
“I looked the other way because I knew she was really smart,” Mickey Jr. says of his mom, who was fluent in multiple languages and played violin and piano.
“At home, she was just Jayne,” Jayne Marie says.
“I’ve heard things that are really ugly,” Hargitay says.
“I don’t know that I want to know those ugly things,” says Tony Cimber, Hargitay’s half brother, whom Mansfield had with ex-husband and director Matt Cimber.
Hargitay revealed publicly for the first time in a May 2025 interview with Vanity Fair that her biological father isn’t Mickey Hargitay, but Italian singer Nelson Sardelli. The topic also appears to be touched upon near the end of the trailer.
“I pulled out this picture, couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was like the floor fell out from underneath me,” Hargitay says.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” Hargitay asks brother Zoltan.
She told Vanity Fair she once confronted their father about Sardelli but said he denied the claim, and she never mentioned Sardelli to him again.
That’s just one layer to the documentary’s narrative, which has a singular, larger focus for Hargitay.
“Reclaiming our family story — that is what this is about for me,” Hargitay says over clips of her siblings coming together in a garage full of their mother’s memories, “because she’s a part of me.”
“I want to know her as Jayne — my mom, Jayne,” she says, as the video fades to black showing footage of Mansfield smiling and playing the piano.
“My Mom Jayne” will have its North American premiere June 13 at the Tribeca Festival. It will air June 27 on HBO at 8 p.m. ET and stream on Max.
