Over the past three-and-a-half decades, the Tony and Emmy-winning actor Mandy Patinkin has made quite a mark on American culture, carving out a successful career in theatre, film, television and music. He embarked on a successful television career in the 1990s, winning an Emmy for the medical series Chicago Hope, starring in the first edition of the long-running procedural Criminal Minds and now playing troubled CIA operative Saul Berenson on Homeland. The actor shares how the hit show shaped him, his inspiration and his impactful journey to Israel
How much of a gift is Homeland at this stage in your career with so much acclaimIJ
Mandy: It’s an incredible gift. I don’t understand why I’m here, why I’ve been given this gift. literally, I’m not trying to be petty or trivial, I don’t get it how did I end up here, in this extraordinary thing. You know, I’m just minding my own business, walking around. I’ve been so blessed. I’ve had so many extraordinary opportunities and I didn’t even do anything. I was doing a play in New York and someone calls me and says they’re going to send you something. “OhIJ WhatIJ It’s a schedule problemIJ” How am I going to do itIJ
How long are your days while shooting for HomelandIJ
Mandy: We’ve had 14-16 hours sometimes. I would say the average is 12-14. The crew is here for every minute, the actors sometimes get a break. But often the way things are scheduled, I work three solid days wall-to-wall; I’m in every scene. So for me, in general, I tend to get a lot of those 3-4 day periods where it’s all Saul stuff. I kind of liked it because you stay concentrated all day. I love television for that reason, particularly this kind of television; you have to just stay focussed. And it moves so fast, they have so much to do in a day. So you don’t get bored. You don’t get lost while they take a day to light a scene where you open a car door. You just have to stay on it. I hope it keeps me from getting Alzheimer’s.
Claire Danes, Damian lewis and yourself obviously have an emotional rapport with each other. What isit like working with each other and having this level of comfort as wellIJ
Mandy: It’s the best. When you become familiar with other actors, the writers, the directors, you become a real ensemble, you start to work together in a much more comfortable and in a more profound way. The tree has been in the ground longer, it has different roots…you start to see things, feel things, it’s really a much richer, more fertile, more enjoyable playground to meet in than when you have to meet somebody on the first day and pretend you’ve been together forever. The more you’re together and you live these experiences together, you have real life stuff, so it becomes simpler. There’s a natural gift of simplicity that’s intrinsic to being together with somebody…this is a real gift, it’s a joy.
When do you think you guys became so successfulIJ
Mandy: I ask people this question all the time. Because I do my part like I do it for every job and that’s not my job to know why it is successfulIJ Very gifted smart people say to me, “I don’t watch TV but I watch this.” So, my first question is whyIJ Why do you watch thisIJ There was one guy named Jeff Greenfield, he is a very well-known reporter in America, I think Time or Newsweek and he’s a talking head on many networks, brilliant guy. He had that exact line “we don’t watch TV but we watch this.” “WhyIJ” I asked. He took a moment and said I think it’s because of its ambiguity. I loved that answer because everything in life has the possibility of this or that, you know going left or right, black or red. This thing can turn on a dime in any direction — emotionally, physically.
Another buddy of mine compares life all the time to baseball. WhyIJ Because he feels it’s an amazing game. Because it goes along and all of a sudden your team is winning and one little tiny thing happens by one player’s action or mis-action and emotionally it can affect everyone on the team and everyone on the other team. And the whole World Series can change in less than an inning and go to the other guy. So he finds that just amazing. I think that is what the world of Homeland is like; it lives on the razor’s edge.
Do you go to bat for some things with the writersIJ
Mandy: I don’t have to do very much here because they’re so good, they write my character so well. They rarely do anything that I have objection to. I’ve had a couple of objections in three and a half years so far, which they respond to immediately and we discuss it. Sometimes they agree with me, sometimes they make me see what they had intended and I go, “Oh ok, I wasn’t thinking that way.” And then on occasion they embrace something I’d improvised or a thought I had.
How was the visit to Israel, from what you rememberIJ
Mandy: We had four to five days time-off before the shoot. I made some phone calls and said, “I’m here, I’d like to go witness the conflict.” So, I went all over the West Bank, Hebron and the southern parts where these cave people live, and the checkpoint where all of these people have to suffer through these prison-like gates, these women and children. And towards the end, after we had shot everything, I went to Ramallah. I saw parts that a lot of people don’t see, that a lot of Israelis don’t see. And the irony of it all was I have family in Israel.
I met a man, an extraordinary 27-year-old, I think a Stanford graduate and a brilliant human being. He was a Palestinian named Fadhi Kurahm and I shot a 13-minute video of him in the car. I told Fadhi that I have an uncle, my father’s brother, who was a democrat and very left wing, very much just like Homeland, a left-wing democrat.
Then 9/11 happened and in my opinion, my uncle became, as many American Jews became after that time, a “singular visioned-one issue- republican-right wing- security for Israel” person. As a family, we work on my uncle all the time. Everyone from my generation and my children’s talk to him. He reads six newspapers, he engages with all of us. We just talk to him about different possibilities, different ideas so that he sees both sides. So I asked Fadhi, “What do I say to my uncleIJ How do I respond to his classic responsesIJ” and he answered for 13 minutes.
He told me at the end, “Ask your cousins.” I found out my cousin lived in Bethel, which is a settlement. And so he said, “Ask your cousin how he feels about the fact that he’s living in a place that was owned by my grandparents and I’m not allowed to go there.”
So we drove to Bethel with the Palestinian cab driver and my guide and I come to my cousin’s house in this settlement and there’s my family name in a big shingle over the front door. I went in and met my cousin; we had a beautiful family gathering and then an amazing discussion where you couldn’t hear because everyone was talking at once. Everybody had a view on the conflict. I was deeply affected by all of this exposure that I experienced there, on all sides. I even went to hear the hard right point of view at a lunch and at a brunch where I was with a number of people with you know, the opposite point of view, not the liberal but the right.
So I consider this show a gift because to have an American hero Marine who converts to Islam is extraordinary. To have an American Marine hero in a suicide tape who blames the Vice-President of the United States for war crimes is extraordinary. And then you have the other point of view calling him a terrorist and a murderer and a killer. So, if we do our job well, which I said to Alex before we began to shoot the pilot, we would be a hit. I really felt if we could show both sides of the argument by not being left wing and by not being just right wing, if we could let the left wing win at the same time the right wing was winning, we would hit bull’s eye. I don’t want either side of the political world to leave the table or to leave the TV. I want all points of view to be represented and I want questions to be seared on that TV and leave you in a haunted state of “what do we doIJ” What do we do before we walk away from our livesIJ
I actually thought that the nature of Fadhi, because he was so extraordinary, would make a wonderful character in our show.
It is sometimes very tricky to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys in the show...
Mandy: I think humanity makes for the good guys. In the first season people would always ask if Saul was the bad guy. I would say well I’m not going to tell you. And then they would say, “well wouldn’t you have to know as the actorIJ” My answer as an actor or as a person is I am more in the vein of Gandhi, Martin luther King, Mandela and others to come.
Do you think Saul is your ultimate roleIJ Do you feel like you’re serving some sort of a bigger purposeIJ
Mandy: My next role should be the ultimate because if this is it, then what do I have to live for tomorrowIJ I have been so privileged and so lucky in my life to have played different roles. But we have no idea what the future holds. Homeland is only half my year, so the other part of the year I do other things. I’m working on a new play, I work on new music…I have a new vaudeville show that I do with a performer named Taylor Mack called The last Two People on Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville. I climb Platteklip Gorge as often as I can to condition myself for this vaudeville show, because I sing and dance for an hour and fifteen, twenty minutes non-stop.