Law & Order/Trivia

• Actor Allusion: Ed Green says he wasn't sure if Joe Fontana was "a cop or a wise guy" when they first met. This referred to Dennis Farina's having played mobsters in Miami Vice, Midnight Run and Get Shorty.
  • Fontana would also frequently mention his days as a Chicago cop. Farina played the lead character in Crime Story, who was a cop from Chicago.
    • Also, Farina was a Chicago cop in real life before he became an actor.
  • Sam Waterston is well-known for his various stage and screen portrayals of Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps as a result, Jack McCoy has at various times suspended habeus corpus and become deeply involved in cases relating to human trafficking and slavery.
  • One episode featured a bitter, paranoid, blind man who blamed his lost vision on the medical profession. The actor playing him was Dana Elcar, who lost his sight while co-starring on MacGyver.
• But I Play One on TV: Actor Fred Thompson's reputation as a "law and order candidate" (no pun intended) came more from his time on this show than on anything he'd actually said or done.
• Cast the Expert: Attorney and politician Fred Thompson payed the district attorney for several years, though it should be noted that he also had prior acting experience playing the roles of senior government officials, so this would be a cross between Cast the Expert and Typecasting.
• Executive Meddling: A strangely positive case. You know S. Epatha Merkerson's character? How about Jill Hennesey's? Both came about via NBC wanting more women on the cast.
• Fake American: Jill Hennessy and Michael Moriarty are both Canadian. Hennessy's character (Claire Kincaid) does have a slight accent, while Moriarty does an exceptional job hiding his very thick accent in his portrayal of Ben Stone.
  • Same with Linus Roache, who has a very thick English accent but pulls off a compelling Brooklyn accent in his portrayal of Mike Cutter.
• Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Detective Nick Falco was a limo driver in a Season 6 episode, and of course, Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos.
  • Hey, it's J. Jonah Jameson! Hey, it's Vern Schillinger! Hey, it's the Pope!
  • Since when did Taub from House go to law school?
  • Neil Gordon is Daniel Holtz from Angel.
  • Of course, statistically, there's a damn good chance that any New Yorker has appeared in the background of a Law and Order scene at least once. For this troper, he had a "hey it's that guy" moment for HIMSELF.
  • ADA Robinette was Jubal Early's ancestor?
  • And how the defense attorney in the Season 18 finale was played by Jeremy Sisto... who joined the series as Cyrus Lupo the next episode.
  • Dick Wolf liked to joke that if you go to a play in New York City and a cast member doesn't have a "Law & Order" credit in the Playbill, s/he either just got off the bus or isn't any good.
  • Tomoya Okazaki is a security guard in "Murder Book". Too bad he couldn't use magic to make Mickey go faster.
• Life Imitates Art: Both Jamie Ross and her actress, Carey Lowell, left for the same reasons: they wanted to spend more time with their daughters.
• McLeaned: Rumor has it that her particularly brutal death was a result of actress Annie Parisse refusing to sleep with one of the show's writers.
  • That has been debunked. Word of God says she left because she felt unfulfilled in her role and wanted to explore different acting opportunities, and the reason she was killed off was because the writers had always wanted to murder an A.D.A..
• Mean Character, Nice Actor: While Lennie Briscoe isn't as bad as most characters in this trope, the real Jerry Orbach was univerally said to be a warm, friendly guy who constantly told jokes, not at all like the dry and snarky character he made famous.
• Name's the Same:
  • The judge who is both senile and being guided by his law clerk in Season 19's "Zero" is named Malcolm Reynolds.
  • One of the victims in Season 2's "The Wages of Love" was named Edward Cullen.
• The Pete Best: The original DA was not Adam Schiff, but Alfred Wentworth, who appeared only in the pilot. Ironically, Schiff was played by Steven Hill, who was himself subject to this trope (he was the original lead on Mission: Impossible).
• Playing Against Type: Antwon Mitchell as a cop?
• Typecasting: Jerry Orbach had performed in numerous musicals and other performances prior to his role on the show, playing a detective character only once in a movie. Nevertheless, his performance in that movie impressed Dick Wolf so much that he wanted Jerry to continue with the snarky detective character; because of his immense popularity as Det. Lennie Briscoe, he remains instantly recognizable as his detective character.
  • Dennis Farina, as mentioned before, was a cop in the Chicago PD, so he played numerous police roles before and after his stint as Joe Fontana.
• What Might Have Been: A particularly tragic case of Real Life Writes the Plot: In early 2001, Dick Wolf was planning a large-scale miniseries event involving the casts of Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent teaming up to investigate a terrorist attack on New York City. Then September came along, and...