Homeland's Mandy Patinkin says a cancer diagnosis was one of his life's greatest gifts Mandy Patinkin, Claire Danes, Rupert Friend, and Damien Lewis in Homeland. HE'S had a stage and screen career spanning 30 years, but Homeland's Mandy Patinkin makes no mention of his acting and singing talents when you quiz him about his gifts. The love of his family and having to confront serious illness are the greatest things that ever happened to him. Under his belt he has a battle with depression, he's had corneal transplants and a 2003 fight against prostate cancer. "The greatest gift I was ever given, aside from my children and my wife, was getting cancer," Patinkin says. That just woke me up. I realised that, you know, this exhale might be my last one day. Everybody will have their last exhale, but I get to inhale again. It woke me up. Patinkin, who played FBI agent Jason Gideon in Criminal Minds, reached the point where he couldn't read another script that traded so heavily on violence against women. He stopped working on Criminal Minds because "it was destroying my heart and my soul." He doubted he could regain his passion for TV, but it came when he landed the role alongside Claire Danes in Homeland. "I have two sons in my own life," Patinkin says. I don't have a daughter and I have this pretend daughter now and this wonderful relationship with her outside of work with her husband, Hugh, and their baby. Patinkin's been around long enough to know how difficult it is to pick a winner from a pile of scripts. He never makes career decisions based on what he thinks will be commercially successful. Instead, he will pursue a project only if the script leaves him emotionally shaken, and stirred. The Homeland pilot, he explains, was "one of the greats." Part of what makes the show resonate so strongly is its attention to detail. There is a good reason, for instance, that agent Saul Berenson's (Patinkin) office contains so many books about baseball. Life, Patinkin says, is like baseball because a team can be in a winning position until a small mistake suddenly affects the mental state of every player. I think that is the world of Homeland. It lives on the razor's edge. I didn't ask for that (baseball books), but I did ask for other items. Winnie the Pooh I asked for because of my best friend Mark Harrington, who was part of the fathers' group of mine. All of our kids were in the second grade together. One day the four of us men ended up in a room having a conversation that usually women have. We really connected, talking about family and everything and I said, 'Why don't we do this once a month or once a week,' and they went, 'Yeah.' The wives got to know each other and the kids became lifelong friends. Mark had one of those little things (mole) on the back of his ear. It was parents' day at school and one of the parents was a skin doctor and he came to school and he showed slides and (Mark's son) David came home and said, 'Daddy, that looks like one of the slides.' Daddy had skin cancer. We lost him. His favourite book he read to David was Winnie the Pooh and I tried to read it once, but I couldn't understand this brilliant guy Mark and why this was his favourite book. During the first season (of Homeland) they re-released Disney's Winnie the Pooh and all of a sudden I realised that Winnie sacrificed his life, and his need for honey, so he could help his friend Eeyore. The lesson was that you sacrifice yourself to save your friends. So I came to work and asked the set decorator if they could get me a Winnie the Pooh and make the little Winnie to be Carrie (played by Danes). So it's always there, but I never hold it or anything because if you hold it then you have to pay Disney a fortune. Homeland, Channel 10, Monday, 8.30pm