Law & Order Keeps Reusing Its Actors: We've Actually Seen Officer Nick Riley Before

In fact it is the second longest-running live-action series of any genre on American TV, and the first place has been taken by its own spin-off, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Although Law & Order had seemingly ended with Season 20 in 2010, it has been revived recently, and is currently on Season 22.

Of course, sheer length of the series, plus a hiatus which lasted more than a decade, bring their own problems. The most obvious one is aging actors.

But another problem is the difficulty of finding new faces for minor roles. So over the years, quite a few actors have appeared as several different characters on Law & Order.

Thankfully, the sprawling empire of spin-offs, built up by Dick Wolf over the decades, allows to mitigate the problem, by re-using the same actor for different series.

Take, for example, Shawn Hatosy, who played Officer Nick Riley in the 2023 episode Heroes, in which he has a key part in the plot, centered around a mass shooting, which was meant to serve as an obfuscating cover for murder of a specific victim.

If Riley's face seemed vaguely familiar to dedicated fans of the series, that's because they've seen that face before.

In fact, Hatosy appeared on Law & Order befre. In season 6 he was a suspected murderer Chester Manning in the episode titled Savior.

And furthermore he had equally minor, single-episode roles in no less than three of Law & Order spin-offs. He played murderers-of-the-week on Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Los Angeles, and then appeared in Law & Order: SVU as a shifty delivery van driver, whose affair with a wealthy housewife (Chloe Sevigny) landed him in hot water, but who, for a change, was not a criminal.

As he said himself, when interviewed by Wolf Films, the above-mentioned role of a wrongfully suspected man on SVU "gave me an opportunity to play a little bit of a different kind of character and I was happy to do it."

So, while back then playing a suspect was a bit of going against the type for Hatosy, by now he managed to extend his repertoire from criminals and suspects to police officers.