As Mariska Hargitay reflects on the past year in her life – a momentous one for the actress and filmmaker – a word comes to her mind to describe it: “cathartic.”

She completed her 27^th season starring as Capt. Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU and in May made her Broadway debut in the drama Every Brilliant Thing – both exceptional achievements. But the catharsis emerged through an even more personal endeavor: her nonfiction directorial debut My Mom Jayne. The HBO documentary, an intimate exploration of Hargitay’s mother, the late actress Jayne Mansfield, and of a mystery surrounding the identity of Hargitay’s father, has earned three Primetime Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Nonfiction Program.

“The film has been, for me, the gift that just keeps on giving,” she tells Deadline. “It was an archeological dig of me not knowing what I was going to find, hoping that I had the internal architecture to support myself… Going into the unknown and not knowing what the other side was going to look like, it’s been so extraordinary to come out the other side with the results beyond my even dreams or comprehension, not knowing that the film would resonate with so many people the way it has.”

Hargitay was just three years old when her mother was tragically killed in an auto accident outside New Orleans in 1967. Mariska and her two older brothers, Zoltán and Miklos (Mickey Jr.), were in the back seat of the vehicle but survived. Mariska and her older siblings were raised by Mickey Hargitay Sr., the man she grew up believing to be her biological father.

Jayne Mansfield possessed great beauty and talent. She was multilingual and played classical piano and violin, but her exceptional good looks and curvaceous figure limited how the men who ran Hollywood perceived her. Mansfield accommodated herself to the sex symbol persona. In the film, Hargitay recalls growing up without her mom and becoming uncomfortable with how Mansfield had presented on screen.

“I didn’t really appreciate the sort of bombshell image and didn’t like some of the [acting] choices she made,” Hargitay told us at the Cannes Film Festival, where My Mom Jayne premiered. “I felt myself being embarrassed by her and just wanting a normal mom and a regular mom and ‘pick me up from school’ and like that… I just felt like I dissociated myself and said, yeah, I don’t want to be part of that, and I want to do it differently.”

In the course of the film, Hargitay reevaluates her mom, forming a fuller picture of how Mansfield’s career choices were circumscribed by the egregious sexism of the 1950s and ‘60s. She also explores her mother’s complicated love life, and the blended family Jayne raised that included Mickey Hargitay’s daughter by his first wife. The honesty of the portrayal, coupled with the reality that many people experience blended families or complicated family dynamics has allowed viewers to connect with the film.

“You could say, ‘Oh, [this story is] about Jayne Mansfield, a movie star in the ’50s and her TV star daughter’; that’s not what the movie is about. It’s a family film. It’s a story about generational trauma, and it’s a story about identity and recovery and reclamation and forgiveness and so many things,” Hargitay says, expressing pride in “the way the film has been received and the way that people have said, ‘That’s my story,’ and the spark that has led people to investigate their own families to uncover their family secrets or just deal with them or just look at them closer.”

Hargitay captures on screen her reaction to learning as an adult that Mickey Hargitay in fact wasn’t her biological father. Her dad was Nelson Sardelli, a Brazilian singer with whom Jayne Mansfield became romantically involved during a break from her marriage to Hargitay. That revelation triggered conflicting emotions in Mariska, who felt intensely loyal to Mickey Hargitay as her loving father and didn’t want it to seem as if, somehow, she were turning her back on him.

“When we keep secrets, I think that occupies a big part of our psyche — knowingly and unconsciously,” Hargitay observes. “Holding this secret and feeling bad about it and knowing that there was a part of me that just wasn’t clear and allowing myself to be my authentic self — but out of duty thinking this is how it had to be to honor my father. And then when I came to the realization like, no, no, no, that secret isn’t honoring anyone. We have to tell the secret.”

She adds, “I wanted to make a love letter for my father, Mickey. That’s what I wanted to do. But in the process, it turned out to really be a love letter to all three of them [Jayne, Nelson, and Mickey] because the film deals with the complexity of the human condition, the real complexities of what it is to be human and how two things can be true at once.”

In My Mom Jayne, Mariska connects with Nelson Sardelli, and the half-sisters she never knew she had.

“It was very cathartic and mind-blowing to hear Nelson’s side of the story and understanding why he made the decisions that he made and how complex the decisions were for all three of them in so many ways,” she shares. “I was freed up; I felt like this giant exhale.”

The freeing of psychic space has allowed Hargitay to pursue new avenues of creativity. She made her Broadway debut 40 years after her late mother had done the same.

“She was 22 [when she made her debut] and I was 62. That was also a deeply extraordinary feeling for me,” Hargitay affirms. “And when I went to Broadway, one of the things that I took with me was a plaque that she got that said ‘Broadway’s Rising Star 1955.’ And so every night I would hold that before I went [on stage].”

Hargitay will continue an extraordinary year by embarking on the 28^th season of Law & Order: SVU and taking on another major challenge – hosting the Primetime Emmy Awards on NBC on Monday, Sept. 14.

We’ll have more on Mariska’s plans for hosting the show in a separate piece we’ll publish on Tuesday. She won’t be simultaneously hosting and hearing announcements of winners in the documentary categories – those are presented at the Creative Arts Emmys ceremony in Los Angeles on Sept. 5 and 6.

“Pep playing himself is a bit like having Robert De Niro play a football coach.”

Those are the musings of Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald, who has just spent two years charting the exploits of Pep Guardiola and Manchester City for A Beautiful Obsession and yet had barely heard of Guardiola before he was brought on board by Prime Video, Plan B, Workerbee and City Studios.

“He wears his heart on his sleeve,” said Macdonald. “He’s just so compelling to watch.”

Macdonald, whose subjects have included Whitney Houston and Bob Marley, and who won an Oscar for One Day in September, believes his lack of interest in soccer was advantageous when following one of the greatest managers of all time. The docuseries charts Guardiola’s tumultuous final two seasons after winning an English record four Premier League titles in a row and follows in a long line of Amazon sports docs about soccer teams, although this one isn’t part of the streamer’s successful All or Nothing strand.

Asking stupid questions

“There’s something quite good about asking stupid questions,” Macdonald told Deadline. “I told him I didn’t know much about football and the weird thing was that really engaged him. He was like, ‘Oh my god I’m so fed up with talking about football.’ So we talked about books, films and all sorts of other things.”

Macdonald’s disinterest in the UK’s national sport echoes that of Fisher Stevens, who directed Netflix’s smash hit Beckham documentary several years back and has also said in the past he didn’t know much about soccer when he took up the gig.

It allowed Macdonald to get under Guardiola’s skin, the Scottish director explained. “I asked why he was so interested and why the players cared so much,” added Macdonald, who spent hours observing with the legendary Spanish coach, met him five times and interviewed him three times. “We tried to make a series that was emotional and human, and saw these players go through really dramatic events. I hope the series will be enjoyed by people who aren’t football fans, but are just interested in the human drama.”

That drama came during the first few months of the period being covered in the doc as Guardiola, fresh off the back of his GOAT-like title quadruple, suddenly found results turning for the worst.

Gavin Johnson, Group Media Director at City Football Group, who oversees City Studios, said filming this period was “quite uncomfortable for people internally,” but the team was commited to keeping the cameras rolling.

“There is an acceptance at the top of the business that you have to tell deeper stories around the club and to do that you have to open yourself up,” said Johnson. “We’d had this amazing run and then we couldn’t stop losing for a short number of games and it was really really hard. Sometimes it was uncomfortable to watch but that is what makes good drama.”

Macdonald said this created “authenticity and honesty,” which contrasts with the “first wave” of popular streaming sports docs from a few years back that “were quite constructed and quite limited” in scope. “Fans see that every Saturday,” he added. “They want something more – a kind of observational, vérité documentary that is quite rare in other worlds.”

City Studios’ deep access comes from its unique position as an in-house Manchester City studio, chronicling the team all-year round.

“The team we’ve built at City haven’t shied away from any area but have done a wonderful job to build trust, catch all of the content and work within the parameters we have to work within,” said Johnson. “These are top sports individuals [we are following] who have to try and win games for Man City. But also they’re human beings and that is the essence of what Kevin Macdonald has scratched below the surface of.”

City Studios has a development deal with Sony Pictures Television for soccer content and Sony international boss Wayne Garvie has previously said he wants to find soccer’s Succession. Updating on the pact, Johnson said there are “three or four projects we are really excited about,” which lean on Garvie’s “expertise, contacts passion and knowledge,” but the world of scripted programming can be “frustratingly slow” compared with docs, he added.

“The philosophical underpinning of the series”

So what next for Guardiola?

Having won numerous titles at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City, the 55-year-old is heading for a rare career break after turning down a job to manage the Italian national team. Macdonald said Guardiola is remarkably philosophical about the future.

“He’s coming to terms with the idea that you cannot be the best forever, but you need to understand and communicate to those around you that you have to enjoy life whether you are winning or losing,” added Macdonald. “In a way that is the philosophical underpinning of the series. This feels very authentic coming from Pep. I kept telling him he was a natural Buddhist.”

The docuseries launches August 19. It is directed by Macdonald alongside City Studios’ John De Caux and produced by Macdonald for Plan B/KM Films and Banijay UK-owned Workerbee, along with Johnson and Ged Doherty for City Studios.

Hayden Panettiere’s most notable roles might have been in Heroes, Nashville and the Scream franchise, but her performance in one small Disney movie also had quite the lasting impact on fans.

Following the news of Panettiere’s death at age 36 on Sunday, fans have flooded TikTok to pay tribute to the actress and her many beloved roles throughout her career. But her 2005 Disney movie Ice Princess, which saw her star opposite Michelle Trachtenberg (who died last year at age 39), appears to have struck a specific chord for many.

Video compilations of Trachtenberg and Panettiere’s characters, Casey Carlyle and Gen Harwood, respectively, have been circulating on social media Monday, with many fans acknowledging the film’s comforting nostalgia amid the tragedy.

“Our ice princesses are together again,” one fan wrote, while another person shared, “RIP to our ice princesses. This is the movie that inspired me to start figure skating and will always hold a special place in my heart.” Another fan also wrote in a video, “Now they will skate together on ice for eternity. RIP queens,” while one person added, “Hayden and Michelle 4ever loved and remembered by the girls who grew up watching Ice Princess.”

Ice Princess followed Casey, a brainy high school student, who gives up her path to Harvard to pursue her newfound dream of being a professional figure skater. Panettiere played Casey’s main rival-turned- supportive ally.

While it underperformed at the box office upon its release in 2005, the recent reactions from fans highlight how the film became a childhood touchstone for many older Gen Zers and younger millennials, especially women. The film’s empowering message about self-discovery and combining academics and athleticism also contributed to its impact on young girls at the time.

Both Panettiere’s and Trachtenberg’s unexpected deaths occurring at a young age and within two years of each other have come as a shock to Ice Princess fans, as they continue to remember both women on social media. “Can’t believe both of our ice princesses are gone,” another person wrote on TikTok.

Kim Cattrall, who played Tina Harwood, the pushy figure skating coach and mom in the film, also took a moment to pay tribute to Panettiere on Instagram, writing on Monday, “Rest in peace sweet Hayden. Gone far too soon.”