With more than 40 years in the industry, Mandy Patinkin is unquestionably a jack of all trades. Debashine Thangevelo found out about Saul Berenson’s kind of state of limbo and the implications this has on his marriage in season four of Homeland.
THERE are some actors – especially those of the stage – who are so commanding when they speak that you hang on to their every word. Mandy Patinkin is one of them. He speaks with such a theatrical flair amid dramatic pauses while carefully selecting his words to describe how he feels.
He has been having a blast taking in a few local stage shows with his actress-writer wife Kathryn Grody and also taking in the Cape Town sights.
Although the stage is his first love, television has been his home.
He notes: “I love performing live on stage and singing. I was born into a theatre life so that is my first love. When you make a movie or a TV show, you do miss the interaction with the audience. The way they watch and how they react in a theatre infects and changes the performance. Television is a different animal. No matter how well the scene goes, there is no immediate applause or response. You have to create that for yourself, generate your own belief in what you are doing and learn not to need an immediate response.”
On shooting Homeland in Cape Town, Patinkin shares: “I cannot shy away from being overwhelmed by the political nature of Homeland. The heart of Homeland is a wish to bring peace and understanding to warring factions in the world. To be in a place that had a racial divide and certainly it still does – but it is a light year difference from where South Africa was 20 years ago before Mandela was released and the world changed. The echoes to this positive change effected by a man who was called a terrorist, imprisoned and tortured, then released and came out of prison without a wish for vengeance. He came out with a good heart and a healing attitude.
“All of that came together and changed the world here and I find the irony over-whelming that in Israel and in Gaza and the West Bank, the problems existing there are, in my opinion, due to a lack of leadership on both sides over a period of time. To be in a place where similar problems existed gives me hope and the world is better now. There is still a long way to go (in South Africa), but the worst is over and so it’s a powerful place to be in.”
On better understanding his character’s psyche after four seasons, he shares: “Before we did the pilot, I read five or six books on the CIA. Most of them are all from the highly recommended, The Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, to the books written by former disgruntled CIA agents. At the end of the day, they aren’t allowed to tell you everything. Occasionally, I meet people who share things that you’d never hear in public. It usually has to do with what I’m interested in, which is the pain, the agony and the torture of the human condition. Making decisions where lives are affected, the frailty of secrets that people hold within themselves.
“For me, as an actor, my fun is connecting. In the world of acting, the technical term is to ‘find your action’, literally. There’s a Buddhist phrase that I love: ‘Our actions are the ground we walk on’. I try to find in my own imagination or my own experience things that trigger me, that push buttons and connect me to what the writers write.”
Since season one, Carrie and Saul have shared a conflicted relationship. On the one hand, he is her mentor. On the other, he struggles (in a very fatherly figure way) to protect her from herself. In season three, it was even harder for him because of the decisions he had to make.
Shedding light on Saul’s protectiveness of Carrie, he shares: “I’ve said this from the beginning – Saul lives for this child (Carrie) he has never had. She is, for him, the answer to his dreams and wishes for humanity. He feels she has a savant-like ability to intuit people’s nature and what’s necessary, coupled with the struggle she has personally with her manic issues. So he has great compassion for her struggle, he has great respect for her gifts and abilities. He knows his time on Earth is finite and she will live longer and, that said, having seen all that he has, he feels she is the best possibility he’s met. He will die for her. And he will let others die instead of her. If he is faced with a situation where other lives have to be sacrificed to save her life, to make the greater good come true – he will try to manipulate the world towards saving her to hopefully have a more positive impact on the world in the long run. But it is a ruthless game. There is nothing that either of them won’t do for what they believe in. Nothing.”
In this new season, Saul struggles with not holding the power he once had.
“Within the first few minutes of season four, you will see Saul in Washington and then New York. (laughing). So, Saul’s life is really about his marriage to his work and to his surrogate child, Carrie. The rest is the complicated part of life.
“It’s not that he doesn’t have great love for Mira, but it just doesn’t take up as much physical, mental and emotional time in his cumulative life. He has made the choice to give to these other areas in his life and therein lies the problem in his marriage.”