Giddish, who plays Rollins, departed the show in 2022. 

Mariska Hargitay (Olivia Benson) gave us a hint at Giddish’s upcoming appearance when she posted a fun clip of the two dancing and hugging to “Lil Boo Thang” by Paul Russell while on set.

“Back with my lil boo thang,” Hargitay cutely captioned the post.

“This is everything to me rn,” the official NBC Instagram page commented.

Season 25 of SVU airs Thursday, January 18 at 9/8c on NBC.

Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), and Detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) appear in Law & Order: Organized Crime.

Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), and Detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) appear in a scene from Law & Order: Organized Crime, Season 3 Episode 21. Photo: Will Hart/NBC

Kelli Giddish on departing SVU

Giddish stepped away from her role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit when Rollins became a criminology professor at Fordham University. Her character is also expecting her third child with her on-screen husband, Sonny Carisi (Peter Scanavino).

In a 2022 interview with Variety, Giddish opened up about her personal choice to leave the show.

“I started playing her in my late 20s, so I’ve played her in three decades of my life, which is nuts. It’s insane. This is a show unlike any other. Shows don’t last 12 years, much less getting to play a character. With playing someone as multi-faceted as Rollins, I got to play all kinds of different things — down and out, on top, joyful, doubtful, scared, triumphant. I got to do the gambit,” she said.

 

She continued: “My side of things is just that it’s time in the Rollins storyline. I felt like where it was heading, and where it headed last night, just seemed the right place to leave it right now. I am so excited about things going on in my personal life and kind of the mirroring of what’s going on in my personal life and in Rollins’, there’s a lot of joy to be experienced.”

However, she and Hargitay still remain close. “It was very emotional. We had a ton of fun because acting with my girl is just fun. There’s so much trust there, and you can play because we know each other so well. Nothing is set in stone, and if you want to try something, the writers are right there because they trust Mariska and I to kind of fine-tune the words of the script. It’s so much fun, there’s so much laughter and there were so many tears. It was a really beautiful experience,” she said of filming her last episode.