With the high number of guest stars cycling through Law & Order: Special Victims Unit every season, it’s become normal to see a famous face or two make a surprise appearance. And the first season includes an actress who played a key role in an iconic series: Jessica Hecht, AKA Susan on Friends.
When you think about it, Susan is the person who sets Friends into motion. She’s the woman who made Carol (Jane Sibbett) realize that she was a lesbian, and divorce Ross (David Schwimmer), leaving him single and able to fall in love with Rachel (Jennifer Aniston). The pilot of Friends involves Ross moving into his bachelor apartment, reeling from the split. It all comes back to Susan!
Jessica Hecht played a lawyer with a difficult job on SVU
Her role in the first season of Special Victims Unit was much more serious. In Season 1, Episode 7 (“Uncivilized”), Hecht plays Miss Kreutzer, a lawyer defending the rights of a convicted sex offender, Bill Turbitt (Stephen Bogardus).
Though Turbitt served his time for his one offense and is unequivocally innocent of the crime of which he’s first suspected, lawyers from Albany try to put him back into prison due to the high rate of repeat offenses by sex offenders. Kreutzer argues that it is wrong to put someone away for a crime they may or may not commit in the future, while those who support the law that would put him away say it’s a public safety issue. At the end of the episode, it looks like Turbitt will be able to stay out of prison, but the bereaved father of an assault and murder victim takes his anger out by shooting and killing Turbitt, who dies in Kreutzer’s arms.
Jessica Hecht’s other role on SVU
Like many actors, Hecht has played more than one part in the SVU-niverse. In Season 14, Episode 7 (“Vanity’s Bonfire”), Hecht returned to the show to play a very different character, Jillian Webster, the dying wife of a powerful attorney.
Hecht is a Broadway star as well
Though she may be most recognizable for her roles on Friends and Breaking Bad, Hecht has spent much of her career on Broadway and in the theater world. She’s even been nominated for two Tonys, once for A View from the Bridge and once for Summer, 1976. She shares two children with her husband, director Adam Bernstein.
