Homeland star Mandy Patinkin: ‘As a Jew I am not cancelling my tour’
Mandy Patinkin is musing on his favourite season of the year. “I love the fall, the colours, the change,” he says. But then, he adds, with his 71st birthday imminent, he’s undeniably in the autumn of his life.
He swivels his Zoom screen – he’s beaming in from his converted farmhouse in upstate New York, all stripped pine, white walls – to show me five birch trees he planted on the property’s periphery. “It’s my favourite spot, because they sort of died, but we cut them right back, and recently, they’re doing great,” he grins. “They struggled, but now they thrive.”
The same could be said of Patinkin himself. He has been dubbed “the great all-rounder”: he won a Tony for his original Che Guevara in Evita on Broadway, and an Emmy for his stint as Dr Jeffrey Geiger in TV’s Chicago Hope, while his latest concert tour – he’s a redoubtable tenor – will imminently see him touch down here in the West End.
But there’s also a nagging sense that his own struggles held him back – an impression that old headlines like “Mandy Patinkin: I Behaved Abominably”, and travails such as being sacked from the movie Heartburn and going AWOL from his lead role in a TV series on FBI profilers called Criminal Minds (claiming he was “disturbed by its content”), do nothing to dispel.
“He was unbelievably intense and maniacally focused,” said James Lapine, who directed him in the Pulitzer-winning musical Sunday in the Park with George. “He was never mean, but that intensity may not always be to other actors’ tastes.”
Today, Patinkin seems sanguine, a demeanour he credits to his identifying as a “JewBu” – “all Jew, part Buddhist” – and his recent elevation to grandfatherhood (to Jude, almost two). There’s intensity aplenty – he guffaws, cries, and rages during our allotted time together, eyes flashing, ursine frame rocking – but no meanness.
In America, his tour was called Being Alive, he says, “because it’s the greatest gift we know.” There’s of course the nod to Sondheim (who called Patinkin’s voice “a gift from God”), but early reviews suggest that, amid the Broadway placeholders he tackles New American Songbook standards from the likes of Paul Simon, Randy Newman and Tom Waits, and he throws in a few curveballs, like a Yiddish rendition of the Hokey Pokey and a crack at Bohemian Rhapsody.
“There’s no hard or fast setlist,” he says. “I may change things on the night, depending on what’s happened in my life, in my family, to the world.” Given that, it seems certain that ongoing anguish in the Middle East can’t help but factor in; Patinkin considered cancelling the tour as a consequence of the cataclysm, but ultimately decided that “at times like these, art and connection are needed most of all.”
Patinkin – who studied drama at Juilliard alongside Robin Williams and Kelsey Grammar – has always struggled with perfectionism, a struggle further complicated by concomitant battles with depression and stabs at therapy. The eureka moment came when his son Gideon, now 36 and also a performer, told him that he had “watched me suffer for so many years over things and he couldn’t understand it, because he’d seen me and he’d thought I did OK, even great. He thought all that suffering was for nothing. And I broke into tears”. A fresh set is running down Patinkin’s face now. “That was a game changer for me, and began my growth toward, well,” – with an expansive sweep of his arms – “the autumn years.”
If Patinkin placed an almost sacramental value on the pursuit of ‘Truth’ in his work, it might have something to do with the fact that when his father Lester, who ran a Chicago-based junk business founded by Patinkin’s grandfather Max, fell ill with pancreatic cancer, it was decided at a family conference to tell him he had hepatitis instead. “Cancer was a death sentence then,” says Patinkin, who survived his own bout of prostate cancer at 52 – the same age Lester was when he died. “But he knew he was being lied to. And it broke me – I was 18, and just following the rules set by the grown-ups. I wish I’d been able to sit with him and talk the truth.”
Truth came up again when Patinkin was asked to do a US TV show called Roots (an ancestry show in the vein of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are). “I said I wanted to know about the Holocaust years. Because my generation was always told that essentially no Patinkins were lost in the Holocaust, that Grandpa Max had brought them all over from Poland and Russia. And of course they uncover a mass of Patinkins that perished in the pogroms and the camps. And the cameras are rolling, and I am a f—ing basket case.”
His parents may have thought they were protecting him from the worst, he says, “but you know what? If I was to die while we’re doing this interview, and you ask me if there’s one thing I’d like people to know before I croak, I’d say yes, Stuart, yes, I would like people to know that you can’t fix everything. You need, as the Buddhists say, to sit with the discomfort of existence. To think you can run away from it is futile.”
His voice is rising. “Look at my dear friend Robin Williams, and that extraordinary actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. He shoots a ton of heroin in his arm with his three kids down the block. Robin takes his life because he’s overwhelmed with stuff that alcohol and drugs couldn’t dull. Discomfort and suffering are part of living, and if Philip and Robin and so many others could have understood that it’s OK to feel all these things, then they might well be here today.”
There’s a pause while we collect ourselves. How does he feel now about two of his most enduring big-screen roles? In Yentl, he was Barbra Streisand’s secret love Avigdor, and his memories are decidedly mixed: “I initially said I wasn’t interested, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. And she wore all the hats – writer, producer, star – and it’s an uncomfortable situation to act with someone who’s also your director – they can’t help but watch you as opposed to totally being in the moment, and you can’t help but feel you’re being critiqued.”
And one other thing: “It was heartbreaking for me because she’s the greatest singer that we’ve known, and, well, I like to sing, and she didn’t seem to be aware that I could have sung something in it.”
When it comes to The Princess Bride, however: “I couldn’t believe I was being paid to learn to be the world’s greatest sword-fighter. We flew to LA before it came out to watch a rough cut, and I fell down in my seat and started weeping. My wife said, what’s the matter, don’t you like it? And I’m like, ‘my God, I never imagined I’d get to be in something like this in my life. It’s pure bliss.’”
The same could be said of Patinkin’s late-breaking career as a boomer internet star. For the past few years, he and his wife of four decades, the writer and actress Kathryn Grody, have been filmed by their son Gideon as they futz around the house, twirl to old songs and wrestle with domestic dilemmas (there’s a particularly gripping segment detailing Patinkin’s struggles to fit dimmable bulbs in his bathroom).
“There’s no script, we just sit around kvetching. And people sit there for this!” says Patinkin wonderingly. It seems that, even as Patinkin embraces the season of mellow fruitfulness, life still has surprises in store. “Oh yeah,” he says. “One thing I know for sure about this Being Alive business – there’s always more to learn if you hang on in there.”
Mandy Patinkin in Concert comes to London on Nov 7 until 19 (except 8, 10, 13, 15, 17); nimaxtheatres.com