Entertainment
Mandy Patinkin finds a way 'back to the living' in 'Death and Other Details'
After nearly 50 years in Hollywood, Mandy Patinkin still considers himself a “hired hand.”
“That’s how I like it,” the actor says over the phone from his home in upstate New York, while inviting his Great Pyrenees-yellow lab mix Becky to sit with him.
That’s the career advice a friend — a celebrity whom he doesn’t want to name-drop — gave him over dinner back in 1978. All he wanted was to be an actor and to maybe, just maybe, one day sing some songs. “That was my whole wish,” Patinkin says with a warm, gruff lilt. He hasn’t looked back since.
Over time, Patinkin, 71, built a formidable resume with originating roles in Broadway’s “Evita” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” as well as career-defining parts in Barbra Streisand’s Oscar-winning classic “Yentl” and Rob Reiner’s witty fairy tale “The Princess Bride.” Along the way, he’s also been lauded for his longtime music career.
Mandy Patinkin refers to himself as a “hired hand,” even after nearly 50 years in Hollywood. The actor, who stars in Hulu’s “Death and Other Details,” has had career-defining roles in films like “Yentl” and “The Princess Bride.”
(Paul Yem / For The Times)
On TV, he’s been a resident scene-stealer in a garden variety of sage but prickly surrogate dads-meet-advisors on TV — grim reaper foreman Rube Sofer in “Dead Like Me,” Carrie’s mentor and veteran CIA officer Saul Berenson on “Homeland” and now, the curmudgeonly Rufus Cotesworth, the so-called world’s best detective who reunites with protégé Imogene (Violett Beane) on a cruise ship among the elite, in the whodunit Hulu series “Death and Other Details,” premiering Tuesday.
“It was a real mystery they constructed and a lot of red herrings and a lot to follow,” he says. “So there would be a number of occasions where I would get so f— lost and even I knew the answers, but I couldn’t remember them, that I felt like I was in the mystery for real.”
Patinkin was approached with the Hulu series during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — a time when he wasn’t sure he’d work again. “We were sitting around, isolated, masks — you know, all that garbage. And I was just wondering when we’d ever get opportunities to go back to work or when the world would come back to the living,” he says.
When he initially received the script for the pilot in 2021, he says he thought, “This seems like fun to me.” He loved that the show was an ensemble piece and that he’d get to exercise one of his favorite acting skills — putting on an accent (a British one, at that). He also found himself back in his comfort zone, portraying a detective, a role he was familiar with thanks to “Criminal Minds” and “Homeland,” “to some degree.”
Violett Beane is Imogene Scott, and Mandy Patinkin is Rufus Cotesworth, the world’s greatest detective, in Hulu’s “Death and Other Details.”
(Hulu)
The sleuthing is admittedly not something that crosses over into his everyday life. You won’t find him on Reddit solving mysteries (“I’ve heard of it, but honestly, I don’t know what it is.”) and he doesn’t like “Clue.” “I do Wordle and I do many crosswords. That’s as much of a mystery that I can handle,” he says.
Before making any rash decisions — he sought the counsel of his family. “I don’t trust myself, so I gave it to [my wife] Kathryn [Grody], who’s 10 times smarter than me, a lot more than 10 times, a lifetime smarter than me,” Patinkin says. “And she said, ‘This is good. This is good.’ ”
Then, he gave it to his son, Gideon Grody-Patinkin, and Gideon’s writing partner Ewen Wright, who both liked it as well. Finally, Patinkin was sold. “It just became a nice, comfortable way to get back to the living,” he says of the project.
During the throes of the pandemic, Patinkin found a way to connect with audiences that was unique for him. With the help of Grody-Patinkin, Patinkin and Grody became social media stars. They had one rule for their son, however. They needed to review the content first before he posted it. “For the most part, he abides by it,” he says and laughs.
Their son recorded wildly entertaining videos of his parents answering questions about their secrets to a long marriage and pop culture terms, doing a “vote dance” to encourage people to elect Joe Biden in the 2020 election and capturing intimate moments of them eating buttered matzo and demonstrating the dance move “flossing.”
Those videos have evolved into what Patinkin calls the “family show” — a series of live performances with Patinkin, Grody and Grody-Patinkin, who is usually behind the camera, onstage asking his parents questions. “People must have nothing to do because they come through to see us,” he says in a self-deprecating tone. “I feel so sorry for these people.”
Recently, Patinkin spiced up his social media presence with an Instagram Reel featuring him wearing a Ricky Martin tank top, short shorts and a backward Barbie pink baseball cap — an outfit he borrowed from his daughter-in-law’s brother, who is a yoga instructor, to give his family a laugh when he was on a break from shooting “Death and Other Details” two years ago. He doesn’t want to boast, but he’s “quite pleased at how beautiful my legs looked.”
“My father had great legs and few people are aware that I’ve inherited my father’s legs,” he says. “And I do think that, say nothing else, that photograph gave justice to the genetic chain of ‘legdom’ between my father and myself.”
Since sharing the clip — to his own surprise — he’s been dubbed a fashion icon by the internet. His response? “I think without a doubt, as you can see by that photo, that I am probably the greatest fashion influencer that has ever lived,” he says. The rest of his wardrobe, he insists, is teeming with hiking shirts from REI and the same pair of pants. “I love my uniform. My kids make fun of it. It’s like camping, comfy cozy.”
The family business, one could say, has become his main focus. Patinkin and Grody were slated to star in “Seasoned,” a scripted series inspired by their real-life marriage helmed by their son and Wright until it was scrapped by Showtime in June. Patinkin says he was “overwhelmed” by the pilot — a 30-minute “poetic, funny, heartfelt, enjoyable, entertaining record” of his and Grody’s life together. Now, he’s trying to find a new home for it.
“That’s my No. 1 dream in terms of the industry,” he says. Patinkin even has one of the key selling points on hand: They made it “nice and affordable” to produce. “I love a good budget,” he says. “I don’t like wasting a lot of money. It breaks my heart.”
Beyond “Seasoned,” Patinkin’s outlook is that of a self-described “Jew-Bu” or Jewish Buddhist. He’ll take what comes, but he accepts that life is out of our control. So he’s not fretting over whether “Death and Other Details” will get a Season 2. “I’ve been in the business long enough to know, if you need to know something, you’ll know,” Patinkin says.
Though he might not be worrying about work, there’s just one thing he’s mulling over: whether he and Grody should try psilocybin mushrooms. Patinkin’s kids want them to, but he’s not entirely sure he’ll ever take the risk.
“Kathryn’s a little more interested,” he says. “I’m too terrified at the moment.” He’s not so sure he needs to expand his mind. “My mind is opened up to a little too much right now,” he says, laughing. “I need to cut it down.”
“So it’s like Avatar?” one character quips in Disney and Pixar’s “Hoppers,” bluntly translating the film’s high-concept premise for the sugar-fueled kids in the audience. And yes, the comparison is apt. The story follows a nature-obsessed teenage girl who manages to quite literally “hop” her consciousness into the body of a robotic beaver in order to spark an animal rebellion against a greedy mayor determined to bulldoze their forest for a freeway.
It’s a clever hook. The kind of big, elastic idea Pixar used to make look effortless. “Hoppers” does not reach the rarified air of “Up,” “Wall-E,” or “Inside Out,” but after a stretch of uneven originals like “Turning Red” and “Luca,” and outright misfires such as “Elemental” and “Elio,” this feels like a genuine course correction. The environmental messaging is clear without being preachy, the animals are irresistibly anthropomorphized, and the studio’s once-signature emotional sincerity is back in sturdy form.
Pixar can afford to gamble on originals when it has a guaranteed cash cow like this summer’s “Toy Story 5” waiting in the wings, but “Hoppers” earns its place in the catalogue. Director Daniel Chong crafts a warm, heartfelt film that occasionally strains under the weight of its own ambition, yet remains grounded by character and theme. Its meditation on conservation and animal displacement feels timely in a way that never tips into after-school-special territory.
We meet Mabel, voiced with bright conviction by Piper Curda, as a child liberating her classroom pets and returning them to the wild. Her moral compass is shaped by her grandmother, voiced by Karen Huie, who imparts wisdom about nature’s sanctity. True to both Pixar tradition and the broader Disney playbook, this beacon of guidance does not survive past the opening act. Loss, after all, is Pixar’s favorite inciting incident.
Years later, Mabel is still fighting the good fight, squaring off against the smarmy Mayor Jerry, voiced with slick menace by Jon Hamm. He plans to flatten the glade where Mabel and her grandmother once found solace. Mabel’s resistance feels noble but futile. The animals have already mysteriously vanished, the machinery is coming, and her last-ditch plan involves luring a beaver back to the abandoned forest in hopes of jumpstarting the ecosystem.
That’s when the film gleefully pivots into mad-scientist territory. At Beaverton University, Mabel discovers her professor, voiced by Kathy Najimy, has developed a device that can project human consciousness into synthetic animals. The process, dubbed “hopping,” allows Mabel to inhabit a robotic beaver and infiltrate the forest from within. It’s an inspired escalation that keeps the film buoyant even when the plotting grows predictable.
Her new posse includes King George, a lovably beaver voiced by Bobby Moynihan with distinct Bing Bong energy; a sharp-tongued bear voiced by Melissa Villaseñor; a regal bird king voiced by the late Isiah Whitlock Jr.; and a fish queen voiced by Ego Nwodim. As is often the case with Pixar, even in its lesser efforts, the world-building is meticulous. The animal hierarchy, complete with titles like “paw of the king,” is layered with jokes that play for kids while slyly winking at adults.
The plot ultimately follows a familiar template. Scrappy underdog rallies community. Corporate villain twirls metaphorical mustache. Emotional third-act sacrifice looms. At times, you can feel the machinery working a little too cleanly. Pixar, and Disney at large, has grown increasingly reliant on sequels and established IP, and “Hoppers” does not radically reinvent the wheel. In an animated landscape where films like “K-Pop: Demon Hunters,” “Across the Spider-Verse,” and “Goat” are pushing stylistic and narrative boundaries, being safe and sturdy may not always be enough.
And yet, there is something refreshing about a Pixar original that remembers how to tug at the heart without squeezing it dry. “Hoppers” is playful, peppered with cheeky needle drops, and builds to a sweet emotional catharsis that may or may not have left this critic a little misty-eyed. It feels earnest and engaged.
“Hoppers” may not be top-tier Pixar. But it is a welcome return to form, a reminder that the studio still knows how to marry big ideas with a bigger heart.
HOPPERS opens in theaters Friday, March 6th.
Entertainment
How a mural of Altadena became a symbol of resilience for one small store, through fire and flood
Every time Adriana Molina drives up Lake Avenue to her retro-style women’s clothing shop Sidecca in Altadena, she sees the new outdoor mural she commissioned for the store by muralist and illustrator Annie Bolding. It gives her hope.
“I’m here to stay, and this mural solidified my decision to reopen my business,” said Molina on a recent winter day, sitting next to Bolding inside the boutique. “I grew up in Altadena. The community has motivated me this whole time, and I want them to drive by this mural and smile.”
“ALTADENA.” The word — in big white letters, set against layers of blue — appears toward the top of the mural, on the store’s brick wall facing Lake. Above are the San Gabriel Mountains, painted a deep brown, California poppies and Mariposa Street and Lake Avenue street signs. Below are green grass, a monarch butterfly and Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane. A bright blue house is on a multicolored striped path in the middle of the mural. Next to it, on a hiking trail, a sign says, “Welcome Home Altadena… With Love, Sidecca.”
For Molina and Bolding, the mural is a personal ode to the Eaton fire-ravaged community — art as a message of optimism and healing.
A car passes by the new Altadena mural on the side of Sidecca apparel shop, which commissioned the piece after fire and floods devastated the community.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
When the fire tore through Altadena in January 2025, Sidecca and a few other stores on the north side of Mariposa Street’s bustling Mariposa Junction survived, while the other half-block of businesses burned to the ground. The fire leveled Bolding’s parents’ house off Lake and the home of one of Molina’s close relatives.
Molina staged pop-ups and sold merchandise online during months of remediation, and officially reopened Sidecca’s doors in November as part of Mariposa Junction’s larger comeback. Then the store suffered another blow: flooding and damage during rainstorms in late December. While Molina prepped to temporarily close her store yet again for renovations, Bolding began work on the mural. She started painting on the one-year anniversary of the fire and finished eight days later.
“On the day I started it, it was so cold and windy, and I was scared being up on the ladder,” said Bolding. “But getting to talk to community members while I was painting was very special. People were excited and honking as they drove by. That night, I drove up to the lot where my parents’ place was, and I stood there and all the feelings flooded back.”
The mural’s origin story is that of two creative women bound by strength and a desire to give back.
Molina, who has worked in the fashion industry for more than 30 years, opened Sidecca’s Altadena spot in 2023, after closing its longtime Pasadena location. Voted Pasadena’s best women’s clothing store five times by Pasadena Weekly, Sidecca sells fun vintage-inspired merchandise and clothes, from ‘50s style dresses to snazzy magnets, tote bags and sunglasses. A big rainbow zips across the top of one of the store’s walls.
A display in Sidecca in 2023, two years before the Eaton fire devastated Altadena.
(Alejandro R. Jimenez)
“A few months after Sidecca opened in Altadena, my mom walked in and saw how colorful it was, and said, ‘This reminds me of my daughter,’ ” Bolding said. “With zero hesitation, my mom said to Adriana, ‘Here’s her Instagram. This is my daughter’s stuff.’ ”
Bolding, who goes by Disco Day Designs, calls herself “a joyful creator who loves to intentionally transform spaces.” Known for the bright murals she creates for brands and shops, Bolding gained attention on social media for a trash bin she painted with palm trees and stripes. She brought it to the 2024 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival as part of a contest organized by the festival’s sustainability partner, Global Inheritance.
“I fixated on the trash can,” said Molina. “I looked at Annie’s murals and was like, ‘Oh, she has to do something in here for us.’ ”
“Game recognizes game,” added Bolding, smiling.
Molina wanted to rebrand Sidecca with a new logo, bags and art, and connected with Bolding about that and a possible mural inside the store. “I wanted ‘Sidecca’ painted across a wall as an acronym that stands for style, individuality, diversity, expression, community, culture and art,” she said. “That’s who we are.”
Then came Jan. 7, 2025.
The store was closed all day for a holiday lunch. Then the winds picked up and the flames roared. Molina, who lives with her husband and two children on the Altadena-Pasadena, evacuated with her family to Long Beach and came back days later. She knew the store was OK because she’d seen it — intact — on the news.
“As soon as we could come up to the shop, we went,” Molina said. “There were ashes all over.”
Bolding and her husband were in Palm Springs fixing up an AirBnb they cohost when Bolding got a call from her mom about the fire in Altadena. She urged her mom, dad and younger brother to evacuate. After they did, their home burned down. Her parents now live in a Pasadena apartment.
When Molina started selling Altadena-themed merch on Sidecca’s website, Bolding donated three designs, including one with lively retro daisies. In July, she wrote an email to Molina reviving the idea of a mural, but outside versus inside, as an ode to Altadena.
“It felt like anything I could do to bring joy, let’s go,” said Molina. “And I really wanted a little house in there, and for it to say, ‘Welcome home.’ ”
The mural would be Bolding’s first public piece of art on a main street.
“Lake always felt like the road going home,” she said. “That rainbow road in the mural, leading to the mountains, is so symbolic. Very ‘Wizard of Oz.’ The mountains, their silhouette, have always felt majestic, safe, and why it was so heartbreaking anytime to see them burn. To me, they feel like mother.”
Muralist Annie Bolding stands in front of her new Altadena mural on the side of the Sidecca apparel shop. The work is Bolding’s first piece of public art on a main street.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Bolding’s joyful daisies decorated the Sidecca tote bag given to customers at November’s reopening, just before December’s intense rainstorms. Water gushed through Sidecca’s ceiling. Molina and her employee Manisa Ianakiev were overwhelmed.
“We were like, ‘Is this really happening?’ ” said Molina. “Then people started bringing tools and towels. It was an example of community.”
Bolding planned to start painting the mural Jan. 4, during the Altadena Forever Run, but rain swept through. After Molina’s landlord installed a plywood base, Bolding started on the mural several days later.
Since then, the shop’s ceiling has been replaced, and Molina is working on trying to replace the floor — while continuing to stage pop-ups and sell merchandise online — before fully reopening the bricks-and-mortar boutique this spring.
“People say, ‘Every time I go into your store, I just get happy. I’m in a better mood,’ ” said Molina. “I get that all the time. And what Annie has done, this mural, is beautiful. It makes me happy.”
Just when you think Pixar’s petting-zoo cute new movie “Hoppers” is flagrantly ripping off James Cameron, the characters come clean.
movie review
HOPPERS
Running time: 105 minutes. Rated PG (action/peril, some scary images and mild language). In theaters March 6.
“You guys, this is like ‘Avatar’!,” squeals 19-year-old Mabel (Piper Curda), the studio’s rare college-age heroine.
Shoots back her nutty professor, Dr. Fairfax (Kathy Kajimy): “This is nothing like ‘Avatar!’”
Sorry, Doc, it definitely is. And that’s fine. Placing the smart sci-fi story atop an animated family film feels right for Pixar, which has long fused the technological, the fantastical and the natural into a warm signature blend. Also, come on, “Avatar” is “Dances With Wolves” via “E.T.”
What separates “Hoppers” from the pack of recent Pix flix, which have been wholesome as a church bake sale, is its comic irreverence.
Director Daniel Chong’s original movie is terribly funny, and often in an unfamiliar, warped way for the cerebral and mushy studio. For example, I’ve never witnessed so many speaking characters be killed off in a Pixar movie — and laughed heartily at their offings to boot.
What’s the parallel to Pandora? Mabel, a budding environmental activist, has stumbled on a secret laboratory where her kooky teachers can beam their minds into realistic robot animals in order to study them. They call the devices “hoppers.”
Bold and fiery Mabel — PETA, but palatable — sees an opportunity.
The mayor of Beaverton, Jerry (Jon Hamm), plans to destroy her beloved local pond that’s teeming with wildlife to build an expressway. And the only thing stopping the egomaniacal pol — a more upbeat version of President Business from “The Lego Movie” — is the water’s critters, who have all mysteriously disappeared.
So, Mabel avatars into beaver-bot, and sets off in search of the lost creatures to discover why they’ve left.
From there, the movie written by Jesse Andrews (“Luca”) toys with “Toy Story.” Here’s what mischief fuzzy mammals, birds, reptiles and insects get up to when humans aren’t snooping around. Dance aerobics, it turns out.
Per the usual, “Hoppers” goes deep inside their intricate society. The beasts have a formal political system of antagonistic “Game of Thrones”-like royal houses. The most menacing are the Insect Queen (Meryl Streep — I’d call her a chameleon, but she’s playing a bug), a staunch monarch butterfly and her conniving caterpillar kid (Dave Franco). They’re scheming for power.
Perfectly content with his station is Mabel’s new best furry friend King George (Bobby Moynihan), a gullible beaver who ascended to the throne unexpectedly. He happily enforces “pond rules,” such as, “When you gotta eat, eat.”
That means predators have free rein to nosh on prey, and everybody’s cool with it. Because of bone-dry deliveries, like exhausted office drones, the four-legged cast members are hilarious as they go about their Animal Planet activities.
No surprise — talking lizards, sharks, bears, geese and frogs are the real stars here. They far outshine Mabel, even when she dons beaver attire. Much like a 19-year-old in a job interview, she doesn’t leave much of an impression.
Yes, the teen has a heartfelt motivation: The embattled pond was her late grandma’s favorite place. Mabel promised her that she’d protect it.
But in personality she doesn’t rank as one of Pixar’s most engaging leads, perhaps because she’s past voting age. Mabel is nestled in a nebulous phase between teenage rebellion and adulthood that’s pretty blasé, even if a touch of tension comes from her hiding her Homo sapien identity from her new diminutive pals. When animated, kids make better adventurers, plain and simple.
“Hoppers” continues Pixar’s run of humble, charming originals (“Luca,” “Elio”) in between billion-dollar-grossing, idea-starved sequels (“Inside Out 2,” probably “Toy Story 5”). The Disney-owned studio’s days of irrepressible innovation and unmatched imagination are well behind it. No one’s awed by anything anymore. “Coco,” almost 10 years ago, was their last new property to wow on the scale of peak Pixar.
Look, the new movie is likable and has a brain, heart and ample laughs. That’s more than I can say for most family fare. “A Minecraft Movie” made me wanna hop right out of the theater.
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