Mandy Patinkin compares Israeli policy to ‘Princess Bride’ character

Mandy likes is calling out the parallels between his most iconic character and divisive contemporary politics.

The actor discussed how rewatching his performance as the swashbuckling Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride reminded him of Israeli’s recent military actions in a an interview published Saturday.

“The Princess Bride was on, and just as I walked in the room was that final scene in the movie,” the Broadway legend told The New York Times. “Where Inigo is sitting by the window with the Man in Black, and the Man in Black asks Inigo, would he like to be the next Dread Pirate Roberts, and Inigo Montoya said these words: ‘I have been in the revenge business so long. Now that it’s over, I do not know what to do with the rest of my life.'”

Patinkin, who is Jewish, then likened Inigo’s identity crisis after avenging his father’s death to modern-day Israeli policies in Gaza.

“I ask Jews to consider what this man Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government is doing to the Jewish people all over the world,” the Homeland star said of Israel’s prime minister. “They are endangering not only the State of Israel, which I care deeply about and want to exist, but endangering the Jewish population all over the world. To watch what is happening, for the Jewish people to allow this to happen to children and civilians of all ages in Gaza, for whatever reason, is unconscionable and unthinkable.”

He continued, “I ask you Jews, everywhere, all over the world, to spend some time alone and think, ‘Is this acceptable and sustainable? How could it be done to you and your ancestors and you turn around and you do it to someone else?'”

Elsewhere in the interview, Patinkin remembered crossing paths with several notable politicians in the early 1980s, when he was invited to sing the Israeli national anthem for a Soviet Jewry Rally.

“I was on the podium with my baby son,” he recalled. “Mario Cuomo was on my right. Ed Koch was sitting behind us and a stranger was next to me. I didn’t know who he was, but he had a distasteful vibe, and I took my son and I moved him from my left — between the stranger and me — to my right arm so my baby would be between Mario Cuomo and me, not between this man.”

Patinkin said the “distasteful” stranger, who happened to be the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations at the time, took the podium to speak. “I’d often hear my parents say this phrase on the South Side of Chicago, in the Jewish community: ‘That’s good for the Jews’ or “That’s bad for the Jews,'” he said. “And in my mind, I heard, ‘That’s the definition of what’s bad for the Jews’ — and I didn’t know this man. I just knew he was a threat to my child. Later I learned that that man was named Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Patinkin has previously criticized the Netanyahu administration, and reiterated that his political disagreements with Israeli policies are not equivalent to condemnations of the Jewish community. “I want to emphasize that criticism of the nation state of Israel is not the same as criticism of Judaism, Jewish, or Israeli people, much the same way as criticism of the American government is not the same as criticizing American people,” he wrote on X in 2021.

In 2020, like narrated a video for the New Israel Fund opposing the annexation of the West Bank. “Israel’s annexation of the West Bank is a disaster for Israelis and Palestinians,” he wrote on social media at the time. “It threatens Palestinian rights and formalizes an unjust and unequal system. We’ve got to do everything we can to stop it.”

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The Gaza Health Ministry estimated that more than 55,000 Palestinian people have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, according to a report by the Associated Press last month. The ministry also said that more than half of those casualties were women and children.