Before Corey Cott won over the squad on Law & Order: SVU as Detective Jake Griffin — he said with the finale, “I’ve earned my stripes” — he was on the other side of the interrogation table in the Season 18 episode, “Rape Interrupted.” In that episode, he played Ellis Griffin (no relation), son of (now) Captain Olivia Benson’s (Mariska Hargitay) former partner, Patrick Griffin (Anthony Edwards, in an ER reunion).
“I remember Ice[-T] — this is 10 years ago, we met, and he said, ‘Hey, man, you guys are the ones that carry the stakes for these episodes. You guys move the episode along. The episode is only as good as the guest star of that week. You guys bring the stakes, and we just kind of react to it,'” Cott recalls to TV Insider of playing the perp.
That’s something he’s carried with him. “Now that I’m on the other side, that’s actually really true. And I get to have this other perspective of watching these — it’s an intimidating thing watching these guest stars come in and have to carry the entire episode with the stakes of these really, really heinous situations,” he says. “And so it’s been cool to have both perspectives, but yeah, I had a great time.”
Cott shares that he’d “always” wanted to be on the series and even auditioned “a few times” before he got that episode. “Really got along well with Anthony Edwards. He was a fantastic dad and my parents grew up loving Top Gun. And so when I told them, I told my dad Goose was playing my dad, he was like, ‘What?!’ Our den in our house growing up, my parents had a signed picture of Tom Cruise, the famous picture of him in the jet signed picture that my dad got at some auction or something. So that was a pretty cool full circle moment,” he reveals.
“I remember Mariska being exactly the same as she is now. She challenged me a lot in a good way during that episode when I was the perp. And she’s just such a good leader,” Cott continues. “It became one of my favorite creative experiences I’ve had on television, was playing Ellis. And it was really, really fun.”
Law & Order: SVU, Season 28, Fall 2026, Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC
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