Law & Order: SVU’s Tamara Tunie Was Around Death A Lot Prior To Playing A Medical Examiner On The Show – Looper

As it turns out, Tamara Tunie spent a significant amount of time around dead bodies, just like her fictional counterpart. Tunie has talked quite a bit about her unique upbringing; as the daughter of two morticians living in a funeral parlor, her life was anything but ordinary. Talking to Fanpop, Tunie believed that it gave her a “leg up as the medical examiner on ‘SVU.'”

And while growing up in a funeral home may have prepared her for a role as a medical examiner, it was also just a normal part of her childhood. Joking about her friends’ antics, she told Pittsburgh Magazine that her friends would ask to go down into the morgue, presumably to catch a glimpse of the dead bodies down there.  

But on a more serious note, the funeral parlor was also a community hub for Tunie and those in her hometown of Homestead, Pennsylvania. As an executive producer of the documentary, “The Passing On,” Tunie shared more about what the funeral parlor meant in her small town. “Growing up in the funeral home, we had an open door policy, and the funeral home in the Black community, and in our community, was definitely a gathering place, and we always had people in and out of the funeral home,” she said.

“My father was extremely dedicated to the community,” she added.