Peter Scanavino

Peter Muller Scanavino, born on February 29, 1980, is an American actor best known for his role as detective-turned-ADA Dominick "Sonny" Carisi Jr. on the NBC crime and legal drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He grew up in Evergreen, Colorado, a community situated in the foothills of the Denver metropolitan area. Of partial Italian descent through his paternal grandfather, who emigrated from Turin, Scanavino was raised by two parents who worked in the medical field but nonetheless encouraged him and his older brother to explore the arts. His interest in acting began with a high school production of Hamlet.

Scanavino enrolled at Boston University with the intention of pursuing an acting degree, but did not pass the required audition to change his major. He subsequently left the university and relocated to New York City, where he trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. In 2010, he stepped away from acting to study culinary arts, earning a certificate from The French Culinary Institute in New York and working for a period in the kitchen of Dan Barber's Michelin-starred restaurant Blue Hill in Greenwich Village.

His stage career includes a Broadway appearance in 2006 in Shining City. Since 2005, Scanavino has accumulated credits across theater, film, and television. His early television work included a 2005 guest appearance on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, in the fifth-season episode "Diamond Dogs," where he played petty criminal Johnny Feist, and a 2009 appearance on Law & Order as a graphic designer suspect in the episode "Just a Girl in the World." Additional screen credits include the film Deception (2008), as well as guest roles on The Good Wife and The Blacklist.

In 2013, Scanavino guest-starred on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in the Season 14 episode "Monster's Legacy" as Johnny Dubcek, and that same year starred in the independent romantic comedy Mutual Friends, directed by Matthew Watts. The following year, he joined SVU's sixteenth season in the recurring role of Dominick Carisi Jr., a new SVU detective, and was promoted to the main cast by the fifth episode of that season. SVU Executive Producer Warren Leight described the character as someone who would "shake things up" and who "maybe needs a little bit of refining." In 2020, Scanavino appeared in an episode of Netflix's anthology series Social Distance, playing the father of his real-life son, Leo Bai-Scanavino.

Scanavino is married to painter Lisha Bai, and the couple has three children.