LONDON – Raising many controversies when aired, an actor in the Showtime show, Homeland, has admitted that the depiction of Muslims in the show was not helping the religious community, adding that writers were improving it in the next season.
“It’s deeply important to me,” Mandy Patinkin said in an interview this week with The Associated Press, Daily Mail reported on Thursday, March 9.
“In all kinds of entertainment — movies, television — there are always the bad guys; the cowboys and Indians, then the Russians were the bad guys, the Nazis were the bad guys. Now it seems like Muslim ‘terrorists’ are the bad guys,” he said.
“So, inadvertently, because it’s an action show, it’s an on-the-edge-of-your-seat political drama that ‘Homeland’ is, unintentionally we were not helping the Muslim community and we take responsibility for it. And I know I can speak for the writers when they want to right that error that happened because of storytelling.”
The Showtime show, which also stars Claire Danes, is highly acclaimed but has also been criticized for its depiction of Muslims as terrorists.
In the new season, the sixth, Danes’ character Carrie Mathison is back in the United States, helping American Muslims.
“We’re part of the problem, but we also desperately want to be part of the cure and we are working toward that in our story lines,” he said.
“If you watch the whole thing as a whole — when you read a novel just don’t read one chapter — if you watch the whole thing as a whole, especially this season, the sixth season, you’ll see who the bad guys really are and you may have surprises in store for you,” he said.
Praising the Muslim community for its contributions to the world’s civilization, Patinkin urged President Trump to be more welcoming to people displaced from war-torn countries.
“He wants people to like him and to like America and to make America great again. America will be made great again by nourishing and encouraging people’s moral and ethical nature. Encouraging their human-beingness, not their fear,” he said.