“I try to attach myself to individuals and material that fight the darkness.”
Mandy Patinkin, 92Y
Context
The interviewer (Thane Rosenbaum) asks Mandy about the types of roles he’s getting and how many of them have a certain “character” quality.
Rosenbaum:
Are you working this particular character? Is this who you are?Patinkin:
Not at all.I would say, who I am, is a fragile fellow whose most of his life was ruled by fear and at some point, through friends and teachers and luck, I learned to manage this fear and welcome this fear. …there’s no way I can run from it. It’s much faster and much smarter than I am, so I welcome it.
And the only way I know to counter it is to try to infuse into it hope and optimism and I practice it like a meditation and I look for songs that sing this meditation and parts that play these ideas and writers who write it like David Kelly, like Stephen Sondheim, like William Shakespeare…
You know Sondheim & Shakespeare, these are DARK souls. So you know “are you a dark soul Mandy?”
YEA!“Do you like being a dark soul?”
FUCK no!“What do you do about it?”
I try to attach myself to individuals and material that fight the darkness and everything that Sondheim and Shakespeare write is about turning darkness into light. And everything that I try to do, even when I fail, is that, so that’s what my life’s about.
