Mandy Patinkin on Homeland: 'I have no problem with violence' His stage CV includes roles such as Georges Seurat in the first production of Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George in 1983, and Che opposite Patti LuPone's Eva Perón in the original Broadway version of Evita in 1979, for which he won a Tony award. His best-known film role has been the Spanish swordsman Inigo Montoya in the 1987 classic The Princess Bride. "The idea, for so long - in my family and in the culture - was that to be successful, you had to be a movie star," says Patinkin. Yet in spite of appearing in hits such as Dick Tracy, Yentl and True Colours, he confesses: "Movies were a struggle for me - they didn't come easy. Life is short, and at a certain point, you have to let it go and move on. "People ask me, "Are you getting more movie offers now, because of Homeland?" ," he continues, with a broad smile. I give them the answer, from the bottom of my heart: I am hoping to get more concert offers. Because I just love being up there singing those songs. The shelves of his studio are littered with photographs, and in pride of place is a snap of the actor, in black tie, sandwiched between Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, taken at a recent Broadway benefit concert for the President. Today, he's in more casual attire, looking trim in a T-shirt. He says he walks everywhere, and admits that vanity makes him shave off Saul's beard as soon as filming is finished for the season. "I look younger without it... at least, I like to think I do," he says with a laugh. He is back in New York, briefly, thanks to a break in filming Homeland as the Democratic Party Convention takes over Charlotte, North Carolina, where the series is shot. The city stands in for Washington DC and Langley, Virginia, where the CIA has its headquarters. In researching his role, Patinkin was given rare access, in Langley, to a (supposedly) retired spook, the CIA's former Middle East bureau chief. "Most of my questions had to do with emotional reactions to situations," he says. When did you get scared? Did you pray? Did you think you were going to die? When the spy mentioned his daughters, now in their twenties, Patinkin asked to meet them, too. "That's when the dime dropped for me," he says. For all the politics and post-9/11 paranoia, the theme of family, Patinkin believes, is what has really touched a nerve with viewers of the show. "This whole piece is about a family: the Brody family, Carrie and her family, the CIA family, the family of America as a country, and the world as a family," he says. Saul's own immediate family situation finished far from happily in season one; his wife, Mira, felt sidelined in favour of his work, and left him. "I think that is his Achilles" heel, his blind spot," says Patinkin. He forgot to pay attention to what was in front of his nose. Fortunately for Patinkin, who has been married to his wife Kathryn Grody, also an actress, for 34 years, he himself had the foresight to avoid such an outcome. In 1994, he took on the role of Dr Jeffrey Geiger, a surgeon in the hospital drama Chicago Hope, for which he won an Emmy Award, before promptly leaving during the second season. "It was depriving me of precious time with my family, and I couldn't keep up that schedule," he says. I wish I could have stayed longer, but I got to spend all that time with my kids. His two sons, Gideon and Isaac, are now 30 and 26; Gideon is a singer-songwriter who sometimes performs with his father, while Isaac is a massage therapist. Patinkin also walked out of his role as Jason Gideon, an FBI profiler in Criminal Minds, after two seasons, this time over the show's sensationalised violence. "Being part of that violence - it hurt my soul," he says, rather dramatically. You cannot prove that that individual in Aurora, Colorado [where 12 people were shot dead at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in July], was not in some way influenced by some images he had seen somewhere along the line. He didn't learn it in a vacuum; he saw it," he concludes, thumping his fist on the table between us. Homeland has its share of violent torture scenes, too. "I have no problem with violence, I have no problem playing horrible people," Patinkin insists. I'd play Adolf Hitler if the larger story is giving you some understanding into what makes the Adolf Hitlers of this world. Patinkin was brought up in Chicago, in a conservative Jewish family (his full forename is Mandel). He attended religious school, and sang in synagogue choirs. And though these days he says he is "spiritual, but not religious," his upbringing influences his portrayal of Saul. One of the most talked-about scenes in Homeland, in which Saul recites a prayer in Aramaic for an al-Qaeda member who has committed suicide, was improvised, he says. It's called the Mourner's Kaddish and it's a prayer for the dead. It wasn't written in the script, but all of a sudden I thought, "What would Saul do?" I say it all the time myself, this prayer which I learnt as a kid. This moment has led to speculation that Saul is the Al-Qaeda mole who is believed to have infiltrated the CIA. But Patinkin isn't being drawn on that - in fact, he sounds as if he doesn't know one way or the other. "There has been talk that Saul is a mole, or is a bad guy," he says. I ask the writers not to tell me what is happening in the future. I don't know the future, so why should Saul? As season two opens, we find Saul back in Beirut, having resumed his position as bureau chief. Yet Patinkin is forbidden to reveal anything more. "It has been a journey for me to figure things out, too," he says (the cast is given the scripts only one by one). "But I am starting to see possibilities that I hadn't considered before, and I am very curious to see how they play out," he says, tight-lipped to the end. Saul would be impressed. Homeland returns to Channel 4 on Sunday October 7