Juliana Aidén Martinez Joining Law & Order: SVU Cast for Season 26 (DETAILS)
Juliana Aidén Martinez will be a new detective on SVU after her detective role in the Emmy-nominated Griselda.
Dun-dun: The latest actress to join Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as one of Captain Olivia Benson's (Mariska Hargitay) detectives will be Juliana Aidén Martinez.
Martinez, whose casting was first announced by Deadline, is a 2020 Yale Drama School graduate. She was selected for the acting track in Emmy award-winning actor, screenwriter and producer Lena Waithe’s inaugural Hillman Grad Mentorship Lab in 2021.
Details of Martinez's character on SVU have yet to be released.
"Capt. Olivia Benson, ya girl is reporting for duty," Martinez wrote on Instagram in reaction to the news. "It’s time to rock and roll. Get ready for Season 26!🤘🏽"
In a February interview with July Magazine, Martinez explained that her father is Colombian and her mother is of Polish Jewish extraction.
"That's where I get my freckles," she said of her mother. "Kudos to my mom for giving me freckles."
Juliana Aidén Martinez Movies and TV Shows
Martinez's break-out role was as Detective June Hawkins in the recent miniseries Griselda. (The titular role in that series recently earned America's Got Talent Judge Sofia Vergara an Emmy nomination for Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. Vergara is the first Latina to ever be nominated in the category.)
The Miami-born Martinez — who, like Vergara, is Colombian-American — talked more about playing Hawkins in a version of Miami that existed mostly before she was born.
"My parents lived in Miami in the 80s and 90s," she told Rain Magazine. "They lived in that period when our show was taking place, and they worked in the banks in downtown Miami. So they remembered. I grew up with them telling me stories of what was happening. I remember my parents watching [Griselda] with me in the living room, and they were like, ‘Oh my God, I remember going to that mall Burdines, I remember going there to grab my coffee.’ So I think they did a good job capturing the hallmarks of that time."
She told July that her family spent a couple of years living in Colombia when she was a child.
"I grew up speaking Spanish, eating Colombian food, going back and forth to Colombia," she said. "I went to preschool at some point for a few months [in Colombia] when I was a kid. We were planning to live in Colombia until my family decided we were going to move back to Miami."
She most recently appeared on 9-1-1 in Season 7, Episode 8 ("Step Nine"). "I had the best time with this cast," she wrote on Instagram while promoting the episode, alongside pictures of herself with Angela Bassett and Malcolm-Jamal Warner.
She previously appeared on NBC in The Blacklist Season 8, Episode 5 ("The Fribourg Confidence (No. 140)"), playing Silvina, a nurse.
She also had a small role as a nun on Prodigal Son Season 2, Episode 2 ("Speak of the Devil").
Prior to her time at Yale, she had roles in the 2015 movie Tar Pit, on a 2014 episode of The Mysteries of Laura as a waitress named Faith, and on an episode of the sitcom The Bodega in 2014.
Watch the Season 26 premiere of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on Thursday, October 3 at 9/8c on NBC.
