The rapper and actor has consistently joked throughout his 24 seasons on the show that his biggest fear is being killed off the popular NBC series
Ice-T was in for quite the surprise when preparations began for the finale of Law & Order: SVU’s 25th season.
For the second time in his 24 years on the beloved NBC series, Ice-T’s character, Det. Fin Tutuola, got shot.
“Did you see the last episode?” Ice-T asks over a sweetened iced tea, during a break from filming his National Iced Tea Day campaign with Raising Cane’s. It’s 48 hours before the finale (and the episode the actor proves to be referencing) airs.
“I got shot!” he says, unable to help himself.
In the episode, titled “Duty to Hope,” Fin comes face to face with the young son of a perp (Spenser Granese) outside his apartment.
“Don’t move!” yells the boy as Fin is simply trying to take out his trash.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, kid, take it easy, take it easy,” Fin says, offering to take out his wallet and give the boy money, who refuses.
“You put my dad in jail. I saw you on TV today. I found your address online,” the boy says.
“Your dad? Let me guess,” says Fin. “Your last name is Hedges.”
The boy, who adds that his first name is Toby, insistently asks why his father is in jail even though he’s innocent.
“Toby do me a favor. Please take your finger off that trigger,” Fin says.
“Why shouldn’t I just shoot you?” Toby asks.
“Because if you do, both you and your dad will be in jail, and I wont be able to help get him out,” says Fin.
“His lawyer’s stupid, you’re stupid! And if I shoot you, at least he’ll know how much I love him!” says Toby. With that, Fin lunges at the boy to try and disarm him, but the gun goes off amid the struggle.
“I didn’t mean to!” cried Toby, finally dropping the gun at Fin’s behest, horrified at what he’d done.
“Get out of here,” insists Fin, who was shot in the arm. “I won’t say anything to anyone. Go!”
Behind the scenes, Ice-T says that he hadn’t even had a chance to finish flipping through the script himself when he started hearing whisperings of his character’s fate on set.
“I was reading the pages. I didn’t know. So I’m here in the script, and everybody’s like, ‘You’re getting shot!’ I’m like, ‘What?’ That could be BAD,” he recalls, emphasizing the potential repercussions of Fin’s injury.
Thankfully, says Ice-T, “I lived through it.”
Fin was previously shot in the sixth season of the series back in 2004, when, after a stakeout with Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), he went into a bodega and got caught in the middle of an armed robbery.
While celebrating the premiere of the 25th season in January, Ice-T told Entertainment Weekly that when he “gets a script, I’m just looking at it making sure I didn’t get shot and bleed out. But I don’t know the arc of the season.”
“He just wants to make sure he doesn’t die,” Hargitay told EW at the time with a laugh.
“I want to make sure I don’t die. I got shot in this episode [in season 6], and as soon as I read it, I went like this, Mariska,” recalled Ice-T, pretending to frantically flip through an imaginary script in front of him, all the way to the end. “I was like… ‘Oh, wow… I’m alive!’
Ironically, the script for the season 25 finale seemed to be one that Ice-T couldn’t read fast enough — his costars beating him to the punch. Still, despite reassurance that his leading lady won’t let him die onscreen, the longtime actor isn’t convinced.
“This is Hollywood. You never know! There’s four stages of an actor. ‘Who is Ice-T?’ ‘Get me Ice-T.’ ‘Get me a young Ice-T.’ ‘Who the f— was Ice-T?'” he tells PEOPLE, presumably hoping he hasn’t yet moved beyond stage two.
(He hasn’t).
