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Mandy Patinkin on Homeland’s Cast Sing-alongs and Mooning Rupert Friend

Actor MANDY PATINKIN and his wife KATHRYN GRODY attend the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 2012 Ripple of Hope Awards Dinner held at the Marriot Marquis Hotel.
Mandy Patinkin. Photo: Nancy Kaszerman/Corbis

You may recall Homeland’s Rupert Friend (Black-Ops Quinn) telling Vulture that Mandy Patinkin once did “something really quite inappropriate” on set, with his butt. Since we could only imagine what Friend was talking about (cheek slaps?), it brought us great joy to finally hear the particulars from Patinkin himself, at last night’s Cinema Society screening of Stand Up Guys. “I mooned Rupert once,” he explained. “It was a long day, and I needed something to just get through the next few hours, and there we were. There was some reason for me to just go like, Oh God, let me just moon you.” Friend’s reaction? “I think he had a heart attack. I think he couldn’t get over it. I think he’s in therapy now. I found him a good therapist — he’s English though, I don’t think they take to therapy too quickly.”

Friend does, however, take to on-set sing-alongs. “We sing a lot,” says Patinkin (who, sidenote, told us he knows nothing of the Homeland backlash). “There’s a lot of down time on a film set where everybody is lighting things up. So I’m always learning new tunes because I have a concert career [um, yes, we know]. So I hike every day for a couple of hours and if we’re shooting a twelve, fourteen, sixteen-hour day, I say I spend about eight hours learning tunes or going over the songs I have in my head. So inevitably, Rupert or Damian come up to me and go, ‘What are you working on?’ and they want to learn the song.” What follows is a sing-along. “We made up a song in season one — Claire and myself and another guy — based on yummy yummy yummy,” he added. Would he sing us the chorus? “No, I don’t think I can,” he said. “Maybe it’s in the DVD package.” Holla.

Mandy Patinkin on Mooning Rupert Friend