Everyone is saying Mariska Hargitay’s name wrong.
The actress admitted that the correct pronunciation of her first name is “Mrish-Koo” during a guest appearance on Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast on Tuesday.
Ms Hargitay, who is the daughter of the late actress Jayne Mansfield, said the nickname was a nickname for Maria, which means “little Maria”.
“In Hungarian, the ‘ka’ or ‘ke’ at the end of a name is a bit of an endearment,” she explained. “So her name is actually ‘Maria’ after her Hungarian and Italian grandmother.”
The “Law & Order: SVU” star said the mispronunciation “still lives on” from friends, colleagues and even some family members.
“Who was it last night? Yesterday I had lunch for my sister, and my cousin was there too,” she said, describing a time when a family member misspoke her name.
“Are you your own cousin?” host Amy Poehler asked, to which the activist replied, “I’ve known him since 1994 and he kept calling me ‘Muffliscou.'”
Hargitay said she almost tried to correct her cousin, but ultimately decided to “leave him alone.”
Dealing with mispronunciations is something she also grapples with on the set of the hit NBC show.
She told Poehler that she changed her name on the call sheet to “Marishka” to avoid having to correct everyone on set every time.
“I get called ‘moo litz woo,’ ‘maa see koo,’ and ‘maa kiss koo,'” she shared, noting that co-stars sometimes call her by one of the wrong variations to tease her a little.
But Hargitay isn’t the only Hollywood star who routinely deals with people mispronouncing her name.
Kirsten Dunst recently talked about giving up on correcting people who mispronounced her name.
“Everyone’s messing up my name,” the actress told Town & Country in August, revealing that the correct pronunciation is “Keersten.”
“I don’t care,” Dunst continued, “I’ll answer to Kristen[or]Kirsten, that’s how I call it.”
“In England, we don’t say my name very often. In the last set, everyone got my name wrong, and there were people from Sweden and Hungary.”
At one point, the “Bring It On” star confessed, “I just gave up.”
