Voice Of Post

Mandy patinkin behaved abominably, It was the fifth take, or maybe the seventh or maybe the ninth. Down in the bowels of Langley, or at least in its reasonable facsimile in Charlotte, N.C., where Showtime’s “Homeland” is shot, Saul Berenson, currently the acting director of the C.I.A., was talking to a new hire, a young analyst, Fara Sherazi. Abu Nazir, the mastermind terrorist, was still dead. They were chasing someone else now. There’s always someone else.

Mandy Patinkin, who plays Saul, was the model of concentration. He spoke softly, thoughtfully, almost to himself. Nazanin Boniadi, who plays Fara, had blown her lines twice, two scenes in a row. She had a lot of technical information to impart and her character had been up all night, wanting to impress her boss. She was rushing. After the second time she went awry, Patinkin looked at her kindly. “You can go slower,” he said. “Remember, I’m an old man.”

At 60, that is hardly true. Though for Patinkin, getting older has actually meant getting wiser, which for most people is something like winning the lottery. And he needed to win it. If temperamental actors are referred to as “handfuls,” Mandy — as he is known in the business, not quite Cher, but close — is the motherlode. He is a man whose abilities and doubts have waged torturous battle for nearly four decades:

The Tale of Two Mandys has played as a sideshow to his actual work. Preternaturally talented as both an actor and a singer, Patinkin attended Juilliard but never graduated; he has released seven solo albums, won a Tony Award as Che Guevara in “Evita” and a Tony nomination as the pointillist artist Georges Seurat in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sunday in the Park With George” (his voice is “a gift from God,” Sondheim has said), but cannot read music. Cast in the CBS hit “Chicago Hope” in 1994, he won a best actor Emmy for playing the thorny Dr. Jeffrey Geiger.

But while working in L.A., he was so distressed at being separated from his family in New York that he quit. (During his brief run on the show, he also famously confronted Don Ohlmeyer, of NBC, about his “poor sportsmanship” in programming a rerun of the “ER” pilot opposite them for one night.) In 2005, CBS made Patinkin the lead in “Criminal Minds,” a series about F.B.I. criminal profilers, but he was so disturbed by its content that after the second season he went AWOL. As the executive producer said at the time, he was “the father who goes out for a carton of milk and then just never comes home.” (Patinkin did write personal apology notes to his cast mates, wishing them luck and actually returned to film a final scene.)

Lapine, who directed him in “Sunday” and by his account, happily several times since, told me: “Mandy was a handful on that show, but he’s not neurotic, oddly enough. He’s myopic. He would lose himself so much in the work, and he was playing an obsessive, which goes hand in hand. He doesn’t do things by halves — to prepare, he took a drawing class at the Art Students League of New York. He’s just unbelievably intense, maniacally focused. He was never mean, but that intensity may not always be to other actors’ tastes.”

When Patinkin reins himself in, he can be magnificent. The “Do Less” Mandy is who Rob Reiner directed in the classic film “The Princess Bride.” Playing a world-renowned swordsman wounded by the villainous Six Fingered Man, Patinkin’s now-iconic greeting — “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” — is a model of restraint, building in force like a symphony movement as he gains the strength to avenge his father’s death. His Georges Seurat, brilliantly talented yet so distant and driven that he couldn’t connect emotionally with the mother of his child, who leaves him, was heartbreaking. Less Mandy is best Mandy, always has been.

The other Mandy is the “Too Much” Mandy, a sight perhaps less pleasing. This Mandy doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve, he slices it up and serves it on Triscuits. During a Broadway concert, to highlight the troubles in the Middle East, he ended the show by propping Israeli and Palestinian flags on a table and singing the Israeli national anthem in Hebrew, followed by an angry version of “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from “South Pacific.” Then the flags were knocked on their sides while the pianist slammed the keys to sound like an explosion. Patinkin followed that with “Children Will Listen” from “Into the Woods.” (Post-9/11, he scrapped the flag bit and sang both songs softly, as a lullaby.) On a lighter note, he toured “Mamaloshen,” a concert all in Yiddish in which he led the audience in the hokeypokey, also in Yiddish. If you’ve ever pondered the ultimate meaning of “oy,” this is it.

Theater and concert audiences have always indulged his excesses — his wild range from baritone to falsetto, his eagerness to wring each lyric dry, the slightly unhinged quality he can take on when the music overcomes him — and, make no mistake, these are integral to his power as a performer. But that he is working again in television, not just working, but co-starring in a smash hit, whose character is its own smash hit, is nothing short of a miracle. For “Homeland” junkies, the synergy of Patinkin playing Saul Berenson is on a par with James Gandolfini playing Tony Soprano: 1 plus 1 equals 10. You can’t trust the brainwashed Brody to be a reliable narrator, you can’t trust brilliant, bipolar Carrie, either, but you can trust Saul, the daddy of the show, its moral center. Until, of course, he’s not. The lesson of “Homeland” is that every good guy is a bad guy and every bad guy is a good guy. It’s probably only a matter of time.

“Mandy is obviously verging on legend,” Claire Danes, who plays Carrie, told me by phone. “He has that ineffable, magical something that’s impossible to identify, so it’s a great thrill to work with him. Carrie and Saul are a surprising pair. Carrie is an erratic, amped-up, staccato person, and he is so level. Mandy is a really musical person, and he plays with that in the way he delivers the lines.”

During the eight hours I spent on the set, I never saw Patinkin without a script in his hand, running his lines repeatedly whenever he wasn’t shooting. With this level of immersion, it is not surprising that he became overwhelmed by the predominance of rape and murder in “Criminal Minds,” though he might have anticipated as much going in.

“I cannot tell you how many times I was warned about his checkered past in television,” said Alex Gansa, the co-creator of “Homeland.” “But this role was written for him. I’ve been his biggest fan since ‘Sunday in the Park’; that performance was indelible. And I was convinced that the creative environment we try to foster would allow him to thrive. Mandy is a tremendously generous, compassionate, soulful guy, and the message of ‘Criminal Minds’ was not commensurate with his worldview. You have to admire that. Look, he’s an artist, and all artists are eccentric in some way.”

There was no sign of that on the set. Patinkin was focused, utterly disciplined. Shooting began at 10:30 a.m., a three-and-a-half-page scene, and by 4:45 p.m. they were still at it. The reasons were mostly technical — sound, lights, camera angles. The repetition was mind-numbing. At the end of one excellent take, no one spoke to the actors, though I heard a voice on the headset say: “Can you see the crease in that white lampshade back there? I can’t stand it. I’m going to spin it.”

During the next take, Patinkin stopped in the middle of a line. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m blank. I don’t know what I’m saying.” They did it again. And again. The Saulness of the scene intensified as Patinkin used his exhaustion and frustration to shade the character’s words, mood and posture.

By 7:30 p.m. they were still at it, only without the air-conditioning, which was making too much noise. The director called, “Action!” Saul slumped over his desk, phone in hand. “Which circuit court in Maryland?” he asked, for maybe the 12th time. Patinkin looked up and froze. “No. Sorry.” He reached for the script, stared at it and sighed. “I was right,” he said.

The following day I met Patinkin back at the set. We had planned to talk in Saul’s office, but the lights weren’t working, so we settled into a production office instead. He wore a spanking white T-shirt, long shorts and sneakers. When he poured cold water into his hot green tea, his hand shook. The prospect of discussing his past seemed to make him nervous. He knows the damage he did to himself with “Criminal Minds”; once he left it, he didn’t work in television for four years. He has blown his shot at redemption so often, he seemed loath to do it again. (At the time of our interview, he was not yet Emmy-nominated.)

Trying to get at the root of Patinkin’s behavior is not easy. He speaks by the yard and can be hard to follow. His 33-year marriage to the actress Kathryn Grody is a happy one and he talks lovingly of his sons, Isaac, 31, and Gideon, 27. But he has been open through the years about his depression, his attempts at therapy and his bad experiences treating his symptoms with medication, which he no longer takes. (Before a Broadway concert in 2002, Patinkin ingested so many Klonopin, under a doctor’s supervision, that he went blank 20 minutes in and had to start over.) He has also spoken freely about surviving prostate cancer at 52, the same age his father was when he died of pancreatic cancer. And he is a passionate advocate for organ donation, having received two corneal transplants to combat keratoconus, a degenerative disease.

To play Saul Berenson, he has drawn on all his highs and lows. He also met with a former C.I.A. agent and his two grown daughters to discuss their lives growing up. “What I’m interested in is an emotional system,” he said. “When were you afraid? Why? Did you pray? Shake? Sweat? The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I’m doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written. Saul’s heart is in his head. He dreams for the greater good of the world. Saul is now 60 years old, as I am, and he has had a full life in his business, as I have, and he doesn’t know how long he gets to be around, as I don’t. He recognizes the gift of youth personified by his child in this piece, who is Carrie. He believes that both the savantlike and intellectual qualities of Carrie’s nature are the greatest single hope for humanity. He believes so deeply in her possibilities.”

The more I spoke with Patinkin about his own father, the more it seemed he was channeling the man, whom he loved deeply. Lester Patinkin died when his son was 19. Saul’s decency, intellect, compassion and hidden demons seem to resonate with Patinkin’s memories of his father even as the characterization seems something like a wish — to create a man he never had the chance to know better.

Lester ran People’s Iron and Metal Company, a Chicago-based junk business, founded by his father, Max. The defining event in his life was a diving accident he suffered at 20, breaking his neck in Lake Michigan. “A few years later during World War II, he was in San Antonio,” Patinkin said, “and the tube that brings the spinal fluid to the brain was closing from this neck injury. He was having these tremendous headaches, and they were going to have to insert a fake tube. It was a primitive operation, and during the surgery, they touched the wrong thing, so my father was paralyzed for three years. He teaches himself how to walk and talk. He comes home, and days later the girl he was engaged to, who he was in love with, her mother said: ‘He’s damaged goods. Let him go.’ ”

Eventually, Lester married Doralee Sinton, and they had a daughter, Marsha, then Mandy. In spite of his efforts at rehabilitation, Lester was physically compromised for the rest of his life. “If you’d say, ‘What was your father’s greatest pain?’ it’s that he couldn’t play catch with me because he couldn’t control his right hand,” Patinkin recalled. “He was worried that he would throw the ball too hard and too fast and he’d hurt me. I remember when my aunts and uncles would say, ‘You don’t know your father,’ meaning before the brain accident. My little kid-ness was going, ‘What do you mean I didn’t know my father?’ He was a great man. He taught himself how to walk again, to write with his left hand. My father was a hero.”

When Lester became ill with cancer, his wife and his relatives decided to tell him he had hepatitis instead. “Cancer was a death sentence then,” Patinkin said. “I’m instructed to follow these orders, so I’m never able to talk the truth to my father at the end.” Patinkin grew teary. “He did his own research and was clearly cognizant of the fact that none of the pieces fit,” he went on. “It just destroyed me. I was forced to lie to my father by doctors and relatives. I made that choice and agreed with them, and I will never, ever get over it. If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself and wipe myself off the face of the earth.” He mopped the sweat from his face. “Never again will I subject myself to not trying my damnedest to tell the truth. That’s my gift and my curse.”

Now that Patinkin’s mother is 88, the two are able to discuss that period. “We talk about the struggles we went through, the mistakes we made as parents,” he said. “Because with all love toward my mother, I heard her being critical of my father, relatives, friends. My father was the quiet one in the family, he was passive, whether it was his nature or what happened with his injury, I will never know. But my mother was the voice, she had to run the show. I have the strength from my mother, the survivability. I have wonderful qualities from my mother — but please, Mother, forgive me — I heard judgment constantly about my father. She questioned him enjoying investing in the stock market, little investing, he wasn’t rich, buying the kids AT&T. I just heard the voice saying, ‘Not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.’ ”

Even though Patinkin stresses that his mother always supported his career choice, he still had trouble hearing direction as something other than criticism. “I struggled with letting in other people’s opinions,” he said. “During ‘Chicago Hope,’ I never let directors talk to me, because I was so spoiled. I started off with people like Milos Forman, Sidney Lumet, James Lapine, unbelievably gifted people. So there I was saying, ‘Don’t talk to me, I don’t want your opinion.’ I behaved abominably. I don’t care if my work was good or if I got an award for it. I’m not proud of how I was then, and it pained me.”

Perhaps the biggest humiliation of Patinkin’s career was being fired by Mike Nichols from the movie “Heartburn” and being replaced by Jack Nicholson as Meryl Streep’s co-star. “I didn’t listen to myself,” Patinkin said. “I listened to all the relatives who said: ‘Yes, you win Tony awards, but how’s the movie career going? Are you a big movie star yet?’ I was in ‘Sunday in the Park,’ I was having this extraordinary life with Joe Papp in the Public Theater, but nothing was O.K., because I wasn’t a big movie star yet.

“I’m ambivalent about doing ‘Heartburn,’ but my agent, Sam Cohn, pushes Mike Nichols to hire me. We’re at the table read, and Mike leans in and says, ‘How do you feel about blue contact lenses?’ And I was like, ‘What?’ We got to the first shot, which was on 81st Street at Pizzeria Uno, the cameras were across the street, Meryl and I were in the window playing the scene, and I remember Mike said, ‘Just try to imagine a golf ball running down your leg,’ to try to get me to lighten up and laugh. That was right after we did a scene in bed, naked. This was the first day, a scene in bed, naked” — he looked stricken, still — – “and now a golf ball running down my leg, and the next day I was fired. I thought my life was over. They hired Jack Nicholson, who they wanted from the beginning.”

Reached by phone, Nichols said: “I loved Mandy then, and I love him now. It was awful to have to replace him, but on film I couldn’t see the chemistry I wanted. I don’t know how many days it was, but to save the damn thing, I had to move fast to get Jack. Mandy was, of course, devastated, and I’ve felt awful about it all my life.”

Patinkin’s work on “Criminal Minds” seems to echo his “Heartburn” experience, though on the TV show, he fired himself. “It wasn’t the right fit,” he said. “I made a choice I didn’t want to make. I pushed myself, thinking I needed more fame, more economic security. One of the greatest gifts that ‘Homeland’ has given me is it’s affirming on a daily basis. I’m always with the script, walking around with this stuff 24/7, so my head’s in a good place. The role is about listening, and when you don’t listen to yourself, you get in trouble. I wasn’t listening to myself in ‘Heartburn,’ I listened to the parental figure of Sam and the culture at large saying, ‘You’ve got to be in a movie, this is going to make you,’ and it wasn’t who I was. Yes, I did ‘Yentl’ and ‘Dick Tracy,’ but I felt, and I still feel a little bit today that I’m really not successful, because I didn’t become a movie star. The irony is half of those movie stars are all trying to be in television shows like this.”

He sipped his tea. “My grandpa Max the junkman would say in Yiddish, ‘The wheel is always turning.’ What he meant was how to behave toward people. The person on the bottom of the wheel, you better be nice to, because at some point you’re going to be on the bottom. When ‘Criminal Minds’ came along, I had just survived the discovery that I had prostate cancer, so I guess I had that vulnerability. I’ll never forget sitting on the bed in my cousin’s house in L.A. reading the first script, and I schmoozed myself, I brainwashed myself, thinking, It won’t be like that as it goes along. I didn’t listen to any piece of myself, and I paid the price. I never expected to work in television again.”

His words came in a rush. “If you ask me, ‘You’re 60, what’s one of the best things you’ve picked up?’ Two things I would say. One is stop trying to be Superman. Allow yourself to make mistakes and serve the team. I spent so many of my younger days thinking it had to be about me, you had to hear me, you had to see me. The other thing is, and it’s a double-edged sword because I live to work, I love it, is that all my life, no matter what happened, I wanted to capitalize on it, turn it into something to move me forward, make my career better. Where do I need to go? As opposed to ‘Are you even for one second where you are? Are you seeing anything you’re doing?’

“I don’t want this moment to end. I don’t want this day to end. I was tired yesterday, I didn’t want it to end. I want every joy of every day and every struggle of every day. I always say to Kathryn: ‘How could I not know some of these things when I was younger? I see other people who are younger, and they get certain opportunities, and they don’t struggle.’ And she goes back to a standard phrase in our family, which is ‘Comparison leads to violence.’ ”

At that point, we discovered the lights were back on in Saul’s office so we went inside. On an easy chair sat two Winnie-the-Pooh bears. The large one was meant to be Saul, he said, protecting Carrie, the smaller one. I walked around the room, looking at photographs of Saul posing with his wife, Mira. Patinkin picked up one I had missed, of him with the 88-year-old actor, Alvin Epstein, engaged in animated conversation. “I wanted you to see this,” he said, his face bright with possibility. “Just in case Saul has a father, I’m hoping he can play him.”