Mandy Patinkin has played many characters throughout his storied career—Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, Saul Berenson in Homeland, Georges in Sunday in the Park with George—but on one cold January morning, it feels as if he’s in the role of my rabbi. We’ve been on the phone for nearly an hour, more time than I was allotted, with the conversation ostensibly about his upcoming television show (Death and Other Details, first two episodes streaming now on Hulu, we’ll get to that). Yet, we end up discussing the very existential topic of what it means to exist, to survive, and to have hope in 2024.
“I struggle every day,” Patinkin tells me. “Every day, I’m working with every cell of my being to try to enjoy every moment and not let the challenging moments take away my precious day.”
He continues, “We’re here for a very short time on this earth, and it’s incredibly important that we do anything and everything we can to make the most of every second of every day to enjoy it and to cherish the time we have—because it’s not until you start to get in your 70s that you actually know what those fucking old people were talking about, how fast it all goes. And then your grandson’s born and in 30 seconds, he’s talking and learning every word under the sun, then he gets so big you can hardly lift him, and it goes so fast.”
Patinkin—who isn’t too far into his 70s, let’s be clear (he turned 71 this past November)—has spent a lot of time of late thinking about how to make the most of his time on this planet.
When the pandemic struck, he isolated upstate with his wife, Kathryn Grody, and on occasion, their son, Gideon. Soon after their quarantine began, Gideon began sharing clips of his parents on social media—offering the world an insight into Patinkin as a dad, husband, and most important, as a human. But if you’ve followed his career, it’s been easy to see that humanity is what shines through in all he does.
For every character he’s played, he says, “the root system of the tree is similar: I need to feed the tree with my version of being a human being.” That’s why, he’s learned, he can’t take on villainous roles. “I take the part home with me and I live it and I can’t walk away,” Patinkin says. “I’m not like some of these actors that could walk away. I have played evil people, and it didn’t go well on a daily basis for me in life, and I learned to not take those parts again.”
So, when it came time to return to work after the world shutdown, Patinkin knew he needed a joyous project. “I was specifically looking for something fun,” he says. “I had enough darkness. We all had enough darkness for quite some time.” He continues, “I wanted an escape—I needed to get away from all the garbage in the world that’s just breaking our hearts night and day, and just something to just take my mind off it. Well, this certainly did.”
“This” is Hulu’s new murder mystery, Death and Other Details. In the show, Patinkin plays Rufus Cotesworth, the so-called world’s greatest detective. The story takes place on board the SS Varuna, a luxury cruise liner in the Mediterranean, where Rufus has been hired by the wealthy Chun family to look into the Collier family (the Chuns are planning to acquire the Collier family business). When someone is murdered (I won’t spoil), Rufus’s history with the Colliers, and a young woman named Imogene Scott (Violett Beane), emerge to be a key part of the mystery.
For Mike Weiss and Heidi Cole McAdams, the co-creators of Death and Other Details, there was no greater fit for their detective than Patinkin. “What’s great about a role like this is you’re trying to catch someone at the right point in their life and the right point in their career,” Weiss says, “This was just exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to do something smart because that’s who he is, but he wanted to do something fun with bounce and energy to it.” As casting director Tiffany Little Canfield tells T&C, “When you look at the body of his work, it was crystal clear that he had all the colors needed for this incredible role.”
Working on Death and Other Details, Patinkin says, “was a great deal freer” than anything he’s done before, including Homeland. “I’m somebody who loves to do research and preparation—meaning if I’m playing a sword fighter, I learn to be the best sword fighter. If I’m playing a spy, I meet all the real spies. If you’re an artist, Georges Seurat in Sunday in the Park with George, I take art lessons at the art academy in New York,” When playing the world’s greatest detective, however, there was no research required—except getting that Brighton accent right—because “we’re all detectives, we’re all human beings.”
Along with the rest of the cast, he attempted to solve the murder mystery as they shot the season. Patinkin jokes that his time in Vancouver filming the show during autumn 2022 was two mysteries: “One was the one that we were shooting, and the other was trying to figure out what the fuck we were shooting. I really felt like I was not the brilliant detective, but more the person in the audience who couldn’t figure it out.” Patinkin tells me no one got it, though everyone tried to figure it out. (Weiss and Cole McAdams concur that no one has solved it; as does this writer. I have seen the first eight episodes provided to the press, and I have no clue. But I’m never one to guess.)
For Patinkin, the joy of filming, however, wasn’t trying to solve the mystery. Rather, it was those he worked with. “If you’re going to go to work, try to work with people younger than you, because you’re as old as the person you’re talking to. As long as you’re in the room with them and looking at them and you don’t go look in the mirror, you are their age. It’s the fountain of youth,” Patinkin says. “So that was one of the real gifts of this piece to me, that I was the second-oldest person in the company. There was one person older than me, who’s a beautiful human being, but for the most part, it was being with these beautiful, young, gifted actors and writers that were at the beginning of their journey. And I’m more toward the end of my journey.”
For those younger folks—Weiss and Cole McAdams included—they cherished having Patinkin on set. “There were a bunch of moments along the way where we turned to Mandy—sometimes just for a word of wisdom, but sometimes it turned into advice,” Weiss recounts. “He’s been doing this longer than what we have, and his creative instincts are so excellent. There’s a lot of people that have been doing it for a long time, but not many have been doing it as well as he has been doing it, for as long as he’s been doing it.” As they wrote the show, Cole McAdams says, conversations with Patinkin influenced how they wrote Rufus. “He’s so warm and eloquent and intelligent and thinks about things deeply—we had so many conversations with him as we were writing the season that seeped into the writing of Rufus,” she says.
That warmth and depth is evident during my time speaking with Patinkin. What he’s carried with him from playing Rufus, he tells me (which I suspect has been on his mind long before he ever took this role): “It’s caring for my children, wishing everything for them. What can I do to help? What can I do to stay out of your way? How can I shut up? It’s no different than with my own kids. Learn when to say nothing. Be there if they need you. Do the best you can.”
Death and Other Details is part of the emerging trend of smart murder mysteries (think: Knives Out or Only Murders in the Building), a reaction to audiences searching for a sense of comfort in art—a comfort that can’t easily be found in daily headlines. In these shows and movies, audiences know the murderer will be caught at the end, the story will be wrapped in a bow, and for a moment, all will be okay. But leaning on our entertainment as escapism, as Patinkin wisely points out, cannot be untangled from what it is in this world we’re hoping to escape from.
“It’s a light entertainment, to have a moment of escapism from all the troubles in the world, but I’m incapable of not addressing the troubles in the world in the same breath,” Patinkin says. “So it’s a privilege for me to be able to share, and say that I want the killing to stop. It’s part of my daily prayers every day: I say, stop the killing, the hatred and the violence, and start the loving, the compassion, the forgiveness and the understanding within ourselves, to ourselves and to each other.”
That context includes, from Patinkin’s point of view: what’s happening in Ukraine, the state of democracy in the U.S., former president Donald Trump, gun control, and the situation in Israel and Gaza (“peace is the only way,” he says, “and don’t tell me you can’t find a way to find a way to create peace. If you can get to the moon, you can make peace. Say you can’t, or you won’t, or they won’t, or the other they won’t, whoever ‘they’ is won’t, then you are committing yourselves to cycles of violence.”).
He could’ve spent this whole hour speaking about the show, about his character, about light, and funny anecdotes. (And he shared plenty—including the problems of having a beard during COVID protocols.) But you should know by now that’s not who Mandy Patinkin is.
“One thing that I’ve learned in my 71 years,” he tells me, “Let’s just marry escapism to the word fear. What are you afraid of? What are you trying to get away from? You will never outrun it. You will never escape it. It’ll always win the race. So the key is: walk toward the fire. Walk toward your fear. Face it, embrace it, and treat—this is, to me, one of the most important things—treat your troubles as the greatest gift you were given that day, because that’s where you learn something.”
He continues, “You don’t learn anything if it goes great, but you think about the things that don’t go well, and that’s where you learn. And those are the real gifts in our life, and nobody thinks of them that way. They think of, ‘oh, those are cancers. That’s the trouble.’ We’re all going to leave here. Nobody gets to stay here forever. So how you deal with the obstacle course, how you deal with the mystery of life, is the real game.”
Which brings us back to Death and Other Details, a game—a murder mystery—on television. “It’s a game of life, and it’s made as an entertainment, because if you really make a real game of life, it’s too exhausting, because that’s what you’re living every day,” he says. “And we need a break from it—because nobody gets away from the game of life.” But just for a moment, or for an hour each week this winter, audiences will be able to get away to try and solve a murder mystery on a cruise. Without forgetting our troubles, or why we need escapism, as Patinkin would remind you and me.
So back to that question of existence and survival and hope in 2024. At the start of our conversation, Patinkin—or should I call him Mandy? It feels like we’ve maybe reached a point where I should call him Mandy—tells me he googled me. There’s something about being perceived by this actor, whom I greatly admire for his activism off screen and whose Jewishness feels aligned with my own, that makes me feel uncomfortably seen.
But that’s who he is—in all he does—is make you feel seen, all while he struggles with how to best exist in our complicated world. There are no easy answers, but what I do know is that though we’re only sixteen days into the new year, we could use some joy. Who better to provide that than Mandy Patinkin as the world’s greatest detective with a Brighton accent.
The first two episodes of Death and Other Details are now streaming on Hulu. Watch now
Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram.
