Law & Order: SVU Honored a Beloved Crew Member with a Heartfelt Tribute
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Season 27’s action-packed January 29 episode (“Hubris”) ended with a tribute to longtime crew member John Leonidas, and viewers may be wondering who he is and the impact he had on the vast SVU universe.
For many years, Leonidas was a member of the SVU family and was involved over 200 episodes. Read on for more details about the longtime Law & Order mainstay and the “in memory” he earned at the end of SVU’s latest episode.
Who is John Leonidas from Law & Order: SVU’s “In Memory” in Season 27, Episode 12 (“Hubris”)?
Just as Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and her elite squad closed yet another gripping investigation on SVU’s “Hubris,” a title slide reading “In Memory of John Leonidas” was shown before the credits.
John Leonidas was a cherished SVU crew member who spent around 11 years in the transportation department as a Captain, managing logistics and transport for production on the streets of New York City, according to his IMDb profile. Leonidas worked on the NBC nail-biter between 2004 to 2015, managing transport for over 200 episodes of SVU.
A transport coordinator since the 1980s, Leonidas boasts many other production credits within the entertainment industry, serving as a longtime transportation captain for Sex and the City, as well as big-screen hits like Glengarry Glen Ross, The Silence of the Lambs, Vanilla Sky, Men in Black, and In Good Company, to name just a few.
SVU has maintained a chokehold on fans for nearly three decades, and as one of primetime’s longest-running series, it makes sense that the SVU cast and crew have forged a steel-tight bond over their many shared years together. Law & Order icon Mariska Hargitay opened up about this bond during a 2023 interview with NBC Insider.
“I love my job,” Hargitay said. “I love going to work every day. I love the community that I’m in. I love my cast, my crew, and I love the intimacy of it all and the fact that we work in a culture that says, ‘Let’s do the work, let’s have a fun time, and best idea wins.’ It is such a team. It is such an incredible team, and we rely so much on each other. We’re a unit. It’s so sacred to me.”