From The Interview on the NYT Daily Podcast
Mandy Patinkin, 72, and Kathryn Grody, 78, are a highly successful artistic couple. He has won Tony Awards for roles in musical-theater classics like “Evita” and “Sunday in the Park With George” and played iconic characters in film (like Inigo Montoya in “The Princess Bride”) and television (Saul Berenson in “Homeland”). She’s an award winner, too, earning Obies for her Off Broadway acting work. She’s also an accomplished author — her book about parenting, “A Mom’s Life,” is a gem of the genre — and a playwright, performing her one-woman show, “The Unexpected 3rd,” at the People’s Light theater in Malvern, Pa., this fall.
But the twosome, who have been married for 45 years, recently found a new level of acclaim simply by being themselves. During the pandemic, Gideon Grody-Patinkin, the younger of Kathryn and Mandy’s two sons, began posting zany TikTok videos of his parents bickering, joking, kibitzing, needling and being sweetly affectionate with each other. Those videos found a wide fan base online, at a time when people were hungry for a dose of familial closeness.
The trio of Grody-Patinkins is now in the early stages of creating an advice podcast. They’re also shopping a pilot for a TV show based on their relationship called “Seasoned,” on which Gideon was a co-writer.
I talked with Mandy and Kathryn about, among other things, finding viral success later in life, the ups and downs of marriage, their passionate political activism and being Jewish in this fraught moment. Gideon participated in the interview, too — thankfully. He helped wrangle things conversationally (these folks are talkers) and also offered some very useful perspective on his very lively parents.
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In the social media post where you said you were working on an advice podcast, Mandy referred to you two as “messes.” Kathryn, do you think you are?
Kathryn: Oh, definitely. We’re purposeful messes. I embrace being messy more than I ever have as a reaction against the whole A.I., chatbot, algorithm world. I want to be messy. I want to be human. I want to make mistakes. I want to apologize. I want to be tactile. So yeah, we’re messes. (continued on page 2 or here)