Mariska Hargitay Details Confronting Dad Mickey After Learning He Wasn't Her Biological Father

The Law & Order: SVU star joined the Call Her Daddy podcast on Wednesday, June 25, where she recalled the heartbreaking day she learned the truth about her family, and brought it directly to Mickey, who had raised her and her two brothers, Mickey Jr. and Zoltán, since the tragic 1967 death of her mother, Hollywood starlet, Jayne Mansfield.

"I went to my brother's house first and asked him if he knew, and he said he didn't and I'm very, very, very, very close with my brother and he didn't," she told host Alex Cooper. "So then that was also confusing."

"I went up to my dad's house and I was hysterically crying and in a state," Mariska continued. "And he was -- how about this metaphor -- my dad was physically building me a house. So, I drive up to the house that he is building me and confront him."

Hargitay said Mickey quickly denied everything. "He was like, 'What are you talking about? Are you crazy? That's so not true.'"

Despite her confusion and heartbreak, Mickey focused on what connected them -- not what biology claimed.

"He kept saying, 'You're a Hargitay to the end,'" she recalled, adding, "The irony is that I’m more like my dad than anyone in our whole family. I am mini-Mickey, so it was just a very extraordinarily painful moment."

"I say that this is the moment that I became an adult and it's so visceral for me because I was in so much pain. I was so overwhelmed," Mariska continued.

Even in the midst of her pain, the 61-year-old TV star remembered seeing just how much it hurt her father too, and that changed everything.

"I saw the blood drain out of his face and he sort of panicked and turned white," she said. "And that's when I knew."

And the end of the day, however, Mariska decided to choose love over confrontation.

"It doesn't matter what I feel, I love him … and we're done here, we're done here," she said. "I pretended that I believed him, and we never spoke of it again."

Hargitay had previously revealed in a Vanity Fair interview that her biological father is actually Italian comedian and singer Nelson Sardelli. She discovered the truth after visiting a collector's home filled with memorabilia from her late mother -- and hearing Sardelli's name sparked something deep in her.

"I knew in one second," she said. "I don't know [how]. I think my whole life, all the millions of moments … little fragments of a memory of a moment of things I caught that went into my subconscious. Then I said, 'Who's Nelson?'"

Seeing a photo of Sardelli confirmed what her gut had already told her.

"I just really thought my life was over," she admitted. "The one thing I did have, the one thing that I was rooted in, the one thing that was my constant, was no longer mine. My identity was just smashed."