Ladies and gentlemen, we invite you to meet the press.

Meet the press.

Meet the press.

Meet the press.

Welcome to 1947 to Meet the Press Podcast.

My guest today is Mandy Patanken.

In almost, an over almost 40 years of acting, he's played iconic roles like Enigo Montoya

and the Princess Bride.

One at Tony for his work on Broadway and can now be seen on Showtime's Homeland.

Playing CIA Division Chief Saul Baronson, but Patanken has a life beyond acting and since

he's been advocating on behalf of refugees of the Syrian Civil War, a form of activism that he ties back to his family's own story.

But Mandy also, homeland, got you into this topic as well.

It did, it did, it did.

It was particularly the fifth season.

We do things that are happening all around us in the world, but at the end of the fifth season,

I'm sorry, at the beginning of the fifth season, the very first episode was about the Syrian refugee crisis and our lead character went into the situation.

And at that moment, 125,000 people were trying to make their way through the Balkan road into Europe in a desperate attempt to find freedom and escape a horrific war.

And to live in a fictional hell is one does when one plays in homeland and not just on camera, but you study it all day long, you work these ideas, you marry yourself to what the words are.

And then you read the newspaper that night and you're in the same world and you listen to your podcasts and you're in the same world and you never escape it.

And I just wanted to literally recover from the fictional hell of homeland by going into the real world and hold children's hands and be with families and offer them water and just sit with them.

You find that actually, you know, fiction doesn't do this justice.

No matter what you do in trying to do it, I assume that reality hits you over the head, didn't it?

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