Why 2026 Primetime Emmys Host Mariska Hargitay Asked to Hear This Taylor Swift Song During a Photo Shoot

When Mariska Hargitay takes the stage at the Peacock Theater at L.A. Live in Los Angeles on Monday (Sept. 14) as host of this year’s Primetime Emmy Awards, it will mark the first time in 15 years that a woman has fronted TV’s top awards show. (Jane Lynch, then starring on Glee, hosted the 2011 show.)

Asked by the Los Angeles Times‘ Yvonne Villarreal how she feels about that surprising fact, Hargitay responded: “It’s unbelievable. It’s ridiculous, especially with all the brilliant women out there. But change is hard. It takes a minute to educate people. … I’m just so honored to be handed that crown.”

Midway through the photo shoot for the Times’ story, Villarreal revealed, Hargitay made a very specific request: “Can you put on ‘The Man’ by Taylor?’

“The Man,” the fourth single from Taylor Swift’s 2019 album Lover, imagines how Swift’s experience as a person, artist and figure within the music industry would have been different had she been a man, highlighting how much harder women have to work in order to succeed. (“I’m so sick of running as fast as I can/ Wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man,” she sings in the chorus).

The song debuted and peaked at No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 in September 2019. At the MTV VMAs in August 2020, Swift won best direction for her work on the video. It was her first of a record four wins in that category.

During her cover story interview for Billboard’s Women In Music issue, which ran in December 2019, Swift discussed the song at length with Billboard’s Jason Lipshutz.  She pointed out specific double standards that exist in everyday life and explained why she wanted to turn that frustration into a pop single. Here are Swift’s thoughts in full in a separate breakout piece:

“It was a song that I wrote from my personal experience, but also from a general experience that I’ve heard from women in all parts of our industry. And I think that, the more we can talk about it in a song like that, the better off we’ll be in a place to call it out when it’s happening. So many of these things are ingrained in even women, these perceptions, and it’s really about re-training your own brain to be less critical of women when we are not criticizing men for the same things. So many things that men do, you know, can be phoned-in that cannot be phoned-in for us. We have to really — God, we have to curate and cater everything, but we have to make it look like an accident. Because if we make a mistake, that’s our fault, but if we strategize so that we won’t make a mistake, we’re calculating. 

“There is a bit of a damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don’t thing happening in music, and that’s why when I can, like, sit and talk and be like ‘Yeah, this sucks for me too,’ that feels good. When I go online and hear the stories of my fans talking about their experience in the working world, or even at school — the more we talk about it, the better off we’ll be. And I wanted to make it catchy for a reason — so that it would get stuck in people’s heads, [so] they would end up with a song about gender inequality stuck in their heads. And for me, that’s a good day.”

Swift and Hargitay are longtime friends. Swift famously named one of her beloved Scottish fold cats Olivia Benson, after the character Hargitay plays on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The actress has played the character for 27 seasons and counting, with her character rising in that time from junior detective to captain.

Hargitay will become just the fourth woman to solo-host the Primetime Emmys, following Angela Lansbury (1993), Ellen DeGeneres (2001 and 2005) and Lynch.